Swedish Foreign Policy Feminisms: Women, Social Democracy and Capitalism

ABSTRACT

This article outlines the historical distinctiveness of the feminist foreign policy (FFP) Sweden has pursued since 2014. To highlight the particularity of the current FFP, we make use of two methodological moves: de-framing and counterpoint. De-framing helps us highlight the importance for the current FFP of a moment in the beginning of the 1990s, when a feminism naturalising capitalist arrangements came to ascendency both transnationally and in Sweden. Counterpoint entails juxtaposing the present FFP with a decidedly different Swedish FFP project from the late 1960s and 1970s – the project of the prominent Social Democrat Birgitta Dahl to gain official Swedish support for socialist and progressive governments and national liberation movements with an eye to how such support would also serve the cause of women’s liberation. The comparative historical perspective the article brings, allows us to understand why Swedish feminist foreign policy has never been as explicitly and strongly articulated as it is today while its transformative vision of justice and equality on a global scale has become strikingly weak and narrow.

1.0 Introduction

In 2014, Sweden became the first country in the world to launch a comprehensive feminist foreign policy (FFP).¹ The aim of this article is to draw attention to the specificity of the current FFP, to highlight the political choices but also the conditioning factors that can help explain its agenda and why it has set certain priorities and goals for itself, while overlooking others. There is a relatively long history of feminist concerns impacting Sweden’s foreign policy. Because of that the article approaches the current FFP as but the most recent iteration of a Swedish FFP. To highlight the distinctiveness of the current FFP we make use of two methodological moves: de-framing and counterpoint.

Drawing on Judith Butler’s work on how frames and images shape our field of vision and understanding, we believe that a frame not only provides limits to a field of inquiry but structures the field itself.² The analysis of a field is thus, in Amin Parsa’s words, ‘inevitably bound up with the … frame in which it is made operable’.³ We see the current FFP as the consolidation and expansion of a particular version of feminism, which was infused into a wide array of transnational legal practices in the 1990s at which point it also rose to ascendancy in domestic Swedish policy contexts. This variety of feminism takes for granted wealth distribution through capitalist arrangements and treats the operation of market schemes in all spheres of life as inevitable. These presuppositions make up the frame of this type of feminism and as a consequence also those of the current Swedish FFP. In this article we will de-frame by drawing attention to the moment in the early/mid-1990s when the current frame became naturalised within international and domestic institutions around the world. We will also de-frame by looking past the frames and taking seriously possibilities other than the non-negotiables.

In our second methodological move, a decidedly different FFP project from the late 1960s and ‘70s will be juxtaposed with the present policy in a contrapuntal effort. In music, counterpoint refers to the combination of two or more melodies in a composition, but political theorist Wendy Brown has proposed it as a scholarly tactic, emanating from and promoting ‘an antihegemonic sensibility’. Here, ‘contrasting elements, featured simultaneously, do not simply war, harmonize, blend, or compete but rather bring out complexity that cannot emerge through a monolithic or single melody’.⁴ This ‘complexity does not add up to a whole but rather sets off a theme by providing it an elsewhere’.⁵

The ‘elsewhere’ to the current FFP is a project articulated in the late 1960s by the prominent Social Democratic parliamentarian Birgitta Dahl, who worked in various capacities, both inside and outside of parliament, to gain official government support for socialist and progressive governments and liberation movements with a particular eye to how such support would serve the cause not just of national, but also women’s, liberation. We will focus specifically on Dahl’s work to secure Swedish aid for the African Party for the Independence of Guinea and Cape Verde (PAIGC), at the time, a national liberation movement involved in armed struggle against Portugal. For Dahl, what stood out with the PAIGC was not the armed struggle but its social welfare mobilisation, including the efforts to rid society of the dual oppression of colonialism and patriarchy.

Both the current Swedish FFP and Dahl’s project could be presented as local translations of larger transnational currents. As Capan, dos Reis and Grasten have emphasised, translation is always also a matter of transformation.⁶ The feminism prevalent in transnational legal practices since the 1990s, was transformed in and through the Swedish FFP as the latter retained and related to some of the longer-standing items on the Swedish agendas for both gender and foreign policy. Birgitta Dahl’s project, in turn, was clearly flavoured by the Nordic social democratic welfarism of her time but also emerged in the northern periphery as a reverberation of transnational debates emphasising the nexus of national and women’s liberation. While the article will highlight the ways in which feminist policies and agendas are translated and transformed as they move from the international and transnational to the local and, occasionally, vice versa;⁷ our article adds to this Special Issue on Law and Gender in Translation primarily by offering an account about how feminism itself was translated and transformed to adapt to capitalism and neoliberal governmentalities. This article also adds onto previous studies of the current Swedish FFP by considering not only what the policy includes and what it can achieve, but also what it excludes and what it does not even attempt to achieve.⁸ In doing so, we find inspiration from feminist thinkers influenced by the Marxist tradition such as Nancy Fraser,⁹ Hester Eisenstein,¹⁰ Susanne Watkins¹¹ and Chandra Talpade Mohanty.¹²

2.0 The 2014 Feminist Foreign Policy and its Frame

In what follows we will first give an account of what the current FPP attempts to achieve. Next follows an effort to characterise and analyse the policy before briefly visiting the domestic landscape of feminist politics in the 1990s, that is, the moment when broader economic issues were decoupled from institutionalised feminism.

2.1 Feminist Foreign Policy as ‘Systematic Gender Perspective’

The most common reaction when Sweden’s FFP was announced in 2014 was puzzlement: what even is a feminist foreign policy and what will it entail in practice? The answers to these questions have since been fleshed out in Foreign Service action plans, in annual Statements of Foreign Policy, in speeches, interviews, and, most importantly, in practice. The first foreign policy action plan adopted after the launch of Sweden’s FFP established that a ‘systematic gender perspective’ would now be applied throughout the foreign policy agenda, meaning that before decisions are taken and policies are made, an investigation is to be made into how the decision will affect women and men, and boys and girls.¹³

The government’s Feminist Trade Policy can illustrate what a ‘systematic gender perspective’ might mean in a specific policy area.¹⁴ Feminist Trade Policy prescribes that gender analysis be applied to all trade agreements to ensure that ‘men and women … benefit equally from, and have access to, global markets’.¹⁵ To exemplify what inequality might mean in this context, the Foreign Ministry refers to the findings of a report from a US-based research institute showing that goods consumed disproportionately by women face higher tariffs than goods disproportionately consumed by men: tariffs on sportswear for women, for example, were three times higher than those for men.¹⁶

Sweden’s feminist trade policy is also about simplifying trade in services (because women ‘work and run businesses in the services sector more than in any other sector’), promoting gender mainstreaming in product standards development (to make sure they are not only based on ‘the average man’), to improve working conditions by pushing for the inclusion of ILO fundamental conventions in all free trade agreements (because it is often women who have the worst working conditions), and to work to achieve gender-balanced representation in business promotion activities of the Swedish government.¹⁷

Some say that the fact that Sweden’s FFP extends into all aspects of foreign policy is what sets it apart from the foreign policies of countries such as Canada and France; countries that also declare feminist ambitions in this regard.¹⁸ The feminist trade policy testifies that the ambition to cover the entire range of foreign policy is to some extent put into practice, but the fact remains that the lion’s share of the practice of FFP is concentrated to the two areas which the feminist foreign policies of other states also prioritise: international development cooperation and international peace and security.¹⁹ In fact, a feminist approach was adopted in these two areas long before the official declaration of the current feminist foreign policy in 2014.

2.2 Comprehensive Yet Selective: Focus on Development Cooperation and International Peace and Security

2.2.1 Feminism in Development Cooperation

As early as the end of the 1980s the Swedish International Development Agency (SIDA) started adopting a gender-perspective in its policies and strategies and the Ministry of Foreign Affairs followed suit a few years later.²⁰ In 1995 the promotion of gender equality also became one of the explicit overarching goals of Swedish development cooperation. These developments did of course not occur in isolation from the outside world. Organisations such as the World Bank, the United Nations Development Program and the European Union (‘EU’) had in the late 1980s and early 1990s made gender equality an explicit priority in their development activities and countries such as Canada and the Netherlands had already made the promotion of gender equality one of the overarching goals of their international development cooperation.²¹

In terms of substance, sexual and reproductive health and rights has been an important part of Swedish development aid for a long time,²² and according to the Ministry for Foreign Affairs, Sweden has stepped up its work in this area in part as a result of the adoption of a feminist foreign policy, and in part because resistance to sexual and reproductive rights has grown in various parts of the world.²³ Another set of measures aim to prevent child and forced marriage, domestic violence, and to work towards the criminalisation of the purchase of sexual acts, while also counteracting impunity for sexual and gender-based violence. Further, Swedish development assistance aims to promote women’s representation in a variety of contexts. Sweden has for example been working to increase the number of female representatives in parliaments in Moldova and Somalia.²⁴ The economic part of the policies promotes education for girls and women as well as women’s economic rights, and ‘thus the opportunity to inherit, own, and use land and natural resources, access to remunerated employment, information and communication technology, financial services and effective markets’.²⁵ It also includes measures to promote women’s entrepreneurship and employment in Eastern Europe, on the western part of the Balkan peninsula and on other continents and to strengthen the role and rights of women in labour markets of low and middle income countries such as Cambodia, Croatia, Iran, Nigeria, Poland and Turkey.²⁶

2.2.2 Feminism in International Peace and Security

Sweden’s International Development Cooperation is in many respects intertwined with its policies on international peace and security. A strong connection had already emerged between the two fields, internationally and in Sweden, at the end of the Cold War. As a result Sweden redirected its provisions of development aid from small and medium-sized newly independent states sharing Social Democratic ideals to target states that not only suffered from poverty, but also from long-lasting conflict (Afghanistan and the Democratic Republic of Congo are cases in point).²⁷ The unanimous adoption of the United Nations Security Council’s Resolution 1325 on Women, Peace and Security in October 2000 which institutionalised attention to (sexual) violence against women in conflict settings, brought these concerns to the integrated area of international peace and security and development cooperation.²⁸ As noted by Vasuki Nesiah, Resolution 1325, and the nine follow-up resolutions supplementing it,²⁹ form the centrepiece of a transnational, governmental and non-governmental field of activity, in which the language of ‘women, peace and security’ is spoken.³⁰ Practices that had already been established in Sweden as a consequence of this transnational agenda were included into the feminist foreign policy agenda after its formal adoption in 2014.³¹

Sweden has consistently been one of the largest donors to UN Women, the organisation working to give effect to Resolution 1325, and is also a major donor to UN Action Against Sexual Violence in Conflict.³² The Swedish commitment to the Women, Peace, and Security agenda is also evidenced by the way in which it pushes for effective action against violence towards women and girls in conflict, post-conflict and emergency situations in the United Nations (‘UN’) and the EU. Another item high up on the agenda is the effort to increase the participation of women in conflict prevention and resolutions. Sweden has established a number of networks and training programs to further this goal.³³ Financial support to some states has also been made conditional upon the participation of women’s organisations in peace processes and the Ministry for Foreign Affairs boasts, to pick just one example, that Sweden’s efforts, that is, the conditioning of financial assistance, has contributed ‘to the incorporation of a clear gender perspective in Colombia’s peace agreement, which can in turn serve as a model for others’.³⁴

Another related part of Sweden’s FFP is to offer support for efforts related to the investigation and prosecution of sexual and gender-based violence in conflicts, but also outside of it, around the world.³⁵ The Foreign Ministry proudly declares that the Swedish innovation, the law prohibiting the purchase of sexual services, has been adopted by Northern Ireland, France and Ireland while ‘several other countries [are] becoming interested in this legislation and the Swedish view of prostitution as violence and exploitation of vulnerable people’.³⁶

An effect of the agenda sparked by Resolution 1325 was that the Swedish Armed Forces (SAF) became an important actor in the conduct of a feminist foreign policy.³⁷ The consistent implementation of a gender perspective in its internal organisation as well as in field operations implied a thorough reform of SAF.³⁸ One of the tangible results was the deployment of so-called Gender Field Advisors in operations in Afghanistan, Congo, Mali and Kosovo.³⁹ Even if the engagement of SAF in international conflicts might decrease in the coming years due to the reorientation back towards territorial defence in response to a perceived Russian threat to national security,⁴⁰ the armed forces continue to play a ‘feminist’ role by disseminating gender-informed military practice internationally through the activities of the Nordic Centre for Gender in Military Operations, which was established in 2012 and is educating military personnel from around the world.⁴¹

2.3 The Frame of Sweden’s Feminist Foreign Policy

2.3.1 Sweden’s FFP as ‘Human Rights Feminism’?

Swedish FFP clearly has the flavour of what Vasuki Nesiah calls ‘international conflict feminism’, a kind of feminism which speaks the transnational language of ‘women, peace and security’ and foregrounds women’s insecurity and the gendered dimensions of violence.⁴² It is, however, equally clear that the Swedish FFP is not limited to this. Not only does it include action addressing women’s vulnerability and bodily integrity beyond armed conflicts (domestic violence, trafficking, prostitution, child marriage, etc), it also includes a range of measures aimed at improving women’s reproductive freedom and health and empowering women economically and politically.

Might the overall agenda of Swedish FFP more accurately be labelled as ‘human rights feminism’? FFP documents repeatedly emphasise that the ambition of the policy is to enhance gender equality but also ‘the full employment of human rights by all women and girls’.⁴³ In addition, the centrality of violence within FFP is related to the human rights focus. In the late 1980s and 1990s, transnational feminist activism around the issue of violence against women, which had been going on for years, took a human rights turn, in the sense that violence against women was translated into a human rights violation paralleling ‘other types of human rights [violations] that the international community has condemned, such as torture, enslavement, terrorism, etc’.⁴⁴ This move enabled a feminism centred on violence against women to become part of the mainstream of international governance.⁴⁵ Karen Engle has suggested that the turn of some feminists to human rights law and discourse and the focus on violence at the time was a way of circumventing disagreements in international arenas between women from the Global North and many women from the Global South who ‘were more aligned with their governments in their commitments to a new international economic order and resistance to racism, colonialism, and apartheid than they were with women from the Global North’.⁴⁶

2.3.2 Sweden’s FFP as Feminism Adapted to Neoliberal Arrangements

The ways in which Sweden’s FFP seeks to empower women socio-economically is related to the fact that the policy is informed by the human rights framework. Although it would be misleading to label all aspects of FFP’s socio-economic programs as neoliberal,⁴⁷ much of it is about making women market actors (as employees and entrepreneurs) on equal terms with men. Notably non-market forms of obligation and redistribution do not appear on the repertoire of Sweden’s FFP, implying that it is taken for granted that the competitive market should coordinate the generation and distribution of prosperity within and between nations. Efforts aimed to fulfil the promise of human rights, including social and economic rights, bolster, or are at least compatible with, market coordination. This means that the FFP as a human rights project is in effect congenial with the spirit of neoliberalism which is characterised by its opposition to redistributive political schemes and to state interventions that are not about adapting society to the rules of the market game.⁴⁸

More broadly, many strategies of the FPP agenda elevate feminism to a ‘meta policy’ which does not entail any specific social or economic policies. Feminism as a gender perspective does for instance not prescribe a particular way of doing things, say, collectivised wage setting, but instead introduces measures to ensure that the existing policy of individualised wage-setting is non-discriminatory. Swedish FFP thus makes whatever policies are out there gender equal through mainstreaming and non-discrimination measures. The absence of any ambitions to generate structural change, at least as far as the economy goes, makes this feminism an adjunct to existing neoliberal arrangements.

The meta-policy devices of non-discrimination and gender mainstreaming had their breakthrough moments as feminist tools at the 1995 Fourth World Conference on Women in Beijing. In the words of Susan Watkins, the Beijing agenda marked the end of attempts at international women’s conferences of achieving women’s emancipation through a more egalitarian socio-economic order and instead focused upon ‘women’s integration into the existing global-capitalist order’.⁴⁹

Political scientist Annika Bergman Rosamond has suggested that the ‘ideological dominance’ of Social Democracy in Swedish politics is the backdrop against which Sweden’s ‘gender-sensitive identity’ and feminist foreign policy have emerged.⁵⁰ She argues that a key expression of Sweden’s Social Democratic model is the ‘dual commitment to redistributive justice domestically and globally’ and suggests that Sweden’s FFP could be seen as an extension of domestic welfare policies and state feminism.⁵¹ Even if Bergman Rosamond recognises that ‘Sweden is not free from neoliberal influences’, and that the conditions for state feminism have changed in the last few decades due to processes of ‘globalization, regionalization, welfare state restructuring, privatization and the rise of multilevel governance’ associated with the emergence of neoliberal economic ideas, she downplays the dramatic change of direction in Swedish Social Democracy as well as in Sweden’s feminist foreign policy efforts.⁵²

Different from Bergman, we suggest that there is an elective affinity between Sweden’s current FFP and neoliberalism and that the backdrop against which Sweden’s FFP has emerged is the separation of Swedish Social Democracy from traditional Social Democratic policies and the transformation of the nature of Swedish state feminism. We turn to Katharina Tollin’s genealogy of Swedish gender equality policy to substantiate this.

2.3.3. Domestic Developments in the 1990s: Separating Feminism from Inequalities Inherent to the Capitalist System

Tollin has mapped how policy disagreements on gender equality issues played out between the Swedish Social Democrats and the opponent non-socialist and right-of-centre block in the early 1970s.⁵³ For the former, gender equality policy was one element of a wider social equalisation policy where worker’s unions played a prominent role. In contrast, the latter wished to isolate gender equality from broader issues of social justice and make it into a component of a new Swedish society where legal, individual, rights were pivotal. The gender equality measure favoured by the non-socialist block was non-discrimination and courts were cast as the primary agents of gender equality. By the end of the 1970s, the Social Democratic party, and its gender equality agenda, was defeated and non-discrimination legislation was introduced by a right-of-centre government.

Tollin argues that during the decade that followed, Social Democrats gradually gave up on the idea that traditional left policies are the best way to promote gender equality and instead embraced their opponents’ view that injustices stemming from gender should be separated from the inequalities that are inherent to the capitalist system. Agreeing to the dissociation of gender justice from general economic, labour market and welfare policies, the Social Democrats were now in agreement with a majority of the centre-right parties that the overarching goals of gender equality policy were about women and men being paid equally for equal work, that leadership positions in politics, business and academia should be divided equally between men and women and that sexualised violence must be stopped.

This broad agreement made possible the breakthrough of a host of feminist concerns at the governmental level in the early 1990s. Gender equality goals were now not to be achieved through any specific set of economic or social policies. Instead all public institutions were to consistently analyse how men and women were affected by different policies and measures and use the analysis to introduce adjustments bringing about more gender equal outcomes. In other words, gender equality became a ‘meta policy’ at this point. Tollin emphasises one significant effect of this change: the gender equality agenda came to be seen as compatible with policies across the political spectrum, including the downsizing of the public sector and austerity policies more generally.

The story Tollin tells is about the price of institutionalising a women’s rights agenda that could be supported by many sides in the 1990s. Feminism’s significant increase in governmental influence in the 1990s thus came at the cost of giving up what had been traditional Social Democratic policies: feminist agendas were detached from broader issues of socio-economic justice. Roland Burke has pointed out a strikingly similar development at the 1993 World Conference on Human Rights in Vienna – the moment when feminism centring violence against women became part of the mainstream of international governance:

After the transnational ‘Breakthrough’ of human rights NGOs in the 1970s, almost everyone had begun to transliterate their cause to the language of human rights – but it had become a language which required the excision of economic radicalism as a prerequisite for drawing on its newly inflated moral currency.⁵⁴

The parallelism between how feminist policies developed at the level of international institutions and in the Swedish domestic setting can to some extent be explained by the strong Swedish belief in UN multilateralism that was there from the beginning and is still present today. Much of Sweden’s current FFP is implementing policies adopted or promoted by the UN. Two additional circumstances must, however, be pointed out. First, national actors, including Swedish ones, contribute to shaping the agenda of international institutions. To pick one example which is relevant in this context: Swedish feminist NGOs played a role in the formation of the UN ‘women, peace and security’ agenda.⁵⁵ Second, the rise of neoliberalism and the loss or surrender of the capacity to pursue equalising socioeconomic policies at the level of the nation state was a conditioning factor at both the domestic and international levels.⁵⁶ As we will see in the next section, the capacity of states to plan economy and society was the centre of feminist progressive and internationalist visions of the 1960s and 1970s.

3.0 Swedish Development Support for the PAIGC: Mobilising for National and Women’s Liberation in the 1960s and ‘70s

Starting in the early 1960s, Swedish solidarity groups connected with PAIGC, a national liberation movement that was deeply involved in a revolutionary war with Portugal, a country with which Sweden had important commercial ties.⁵⁷ The leader of the PAIGC – Amilcar Cabral – visited Sweden in the winter of 1968 at the invitation of the Social Democratic Party. A few months later, in May 1969, the standing Committee on Appropriations of the Swedish parliament decided to endorse a policy of direct official humanitarian assistance to Southern African liberation movements and to the PAIGC of Guinea-Bissau and Cape Verde.⁵⁸ Reversing a previous position privileging the ‘domestic jurisdiction’ of Portugal and other colonial powers, the committee argued that the decision was not violating the principle of non-intervention in the internal affairs of another state because

with regard to liberation movements in Africa, humanitarian assistance and educational support should not be in conflict with the said rule in cases where the United Nations unequivocally has taken a stand against oppression of peoples striving for national freedom. This [is] deemed to be the case [with regard to] South West Africa, Rhodesia and the African territories under Portuguese suzerainty.⁵⁹

PAIGC was the first liberation movement to receive ‘humanitarian’ funding and to have a comprehensive cooperative programme established with the Swedish government. At PAIGC’s request, official Swedish assistance would primarily be extended in the form of commodity support.⁶⁰ Cabral himself became actively involved in the selection of items to be ordered, paid and delivered by the Swedish government directly to liberated areas of Guinea-Bissau and would lead annual visits to Sweden to make the necessary arrangements.⁶¹

The aim of this part of the article is to analyse a feminist Social Democratic sensibility contrasting to the one prevailing today by looking at Birgitta Dahl’s efforts to secure funding for the PAIGC in the late 1960s. This previous iteration of feminist foreign policy feminism was influenced by anti-colonial solidarity and the question of gender equality was an integrated aspect of comprehensive societal transformation, including economic systems. First we will describe Dahl’s broader critique of Swedish development cooperation at the time. This critique was an attempt at aligning development support with Social Democratic ideology. Second we will turn more specifically to the question of funding the PAIGC, in particular Dahl’s attention to how the PAIGC was a partner in the mobilisation of its people for a comprehensive economic and social liberation, including against the double oppression affecting women: that of the Portuguese and that of patriarchal structures in their own society.

3.1 Birgitta Dahl’s Plea for ‘Democratic Socialist International Solidarity’ in Swedish Development Cooperation

In 1968, a year before the May 1969 decision to offer support to the PAIGC, a young Social Democratic feminist parliamentarian, Birgitta Dahl, wrote an article about Swedish development support in the influential Social Democratic magazine Tiden rhetorically entitled ‘Charity or the Transformation of Society?’⁶² The article followed the extra-party congress of 1967 at which several radical motions had voiced dissatisfaction with Swedish aid policy and demanded a more radical distribution of aid.⁶³ In the piece Dahl lamented the ‘charity mentality’ of Swedish development cooperation and asked for ‘democratic socialist international solidarity’. She suggested that the allocation of country-specific development support was irrational, often related to a history of Swedish Christian church missions or related to Swedish business interests. What Dahl wanted instead was to offer bilateral development assistance to states and liberation movements that were struggling for independence and democracy and showed a willingness and ability to plan and execute growth but also to reassure social distribution and equality. She suggested that such countries would mostly be socialist in orientation and allow a strong state to lead society in a new direction.

Ian R Barnes has highlighted that Dahl’s intervention in Tiden ‘appeared to alter the whole direction of Swedish aid and its ideological underpinnings’.⁶⁴ In the next few years, the Swedish government articulated guiding principles for the selection of countries to receive development aid: Sweden would continue to focus on countries with the greatest needs, that is, the poorest and the least developed, but it would also prioritise countries which had a potential for democratic and economic development and whose governments pursued redistributive policies. States inaugurating economic and social changes, including structural transformations, and working towards social development in a democratic direction, were to be supported.⁶⁵ Development aid had become radicalised and politicised, as envisioned by Dahl.

The weight of Dahl’s intervention came from her being solidly anchored in a number of movements and organisations working for Third World liberation. Dahl had studied history and political science in Uppsala in the 1950s, focusing on issues related to colonialism and decolonisation, particularly in Southern Africa.⁶⁶ She had been engaged in the anti-Apartheid movement and the movement against the US involvement in the war in Vietnam.⁶⁷ She was also a member of student organisations with strong relations with students and representatives for liberation movements in Africa, Asia, and Latin America.⁶⁸ Uppsala was home to the Nordic Africa Institute where Dahl started working in 1964 before moving to the newly established Dag Hammarskjöld Foundation that organised seminars about international law, diplomacy and economy for government officials from newly independent states. Her work took her to Uganda, Tanzania, Ethiopia and Sudan in 1967–68.⁶⁹ Beside her interest in issues of Third World liberation, Dahl was involved in gender equality issues. In her memoirs, she reminisces that young Social Democrats at that time were committed to two issues: international solidarity and gender equality (including child care provision).⁷⁰

3.2 Securing Official Swedish Support for the PAIGC

Invited by Cabral, Dahl was the first foreign parliamentarian to visit the liberated areas in Guinea Bissau in 1970. She travelled with the Norwegian photographer Knut Andreassen and after coming back, they published a book emphasising the interrelatedness of military struggle, social and economic development and a new role for women in Guinea Bissau.⁷¹ Later, in her memoirs, Dahl says that she undertook the visit to lend legitimacy to Guinea Bissau's struggle for self-determination.⁷²

In the book, but also in an article published in the feminist magazine Hertha at the time, Dahl highlights that even as the military struggle was ongoing, an extensive social program was in operation in the liberated areas including the expansion of schools, healthcare and democratic communal self-governance. Dahl and Andreassen point out that the party program from 1962 committed the PAIGC to include women on equal terms as men in all parts of society including family, work and public duties and attest that the efforts of PAIGC had had a very significant impact on the situation for women in all areas of life.⁷³ Dahl and Andreassen describe the imperative of standing in solidarity with the national liberation movement’s fight against subjugation, racism and economic exploitation. The book emphasises in particular how the PAIGC as a national liberation movement should not be reduced to an insurrectionary force or appraised in military strategic terms alone.⁷⁴ This, according to Dahl and Andreassen, would be to accommodate the enemy.⁷⁵ Equally significant is the social mobilisation of the PAIGC, a social mobilisation that in many ways has been more thoroughgoing and successful than in already independent states and that in crucial ways involves the role of women in society.

At this moment, independence was still two years in the making but Dahl notes how the effort of overcoming the dual oppression – by the Portuguese and by men – had already progressed significantly, not just in terms of policy but in organisation as well. During the seven years since part of the territory was liberated, the PAIGC had built a new society with schools, hospitals, public health brigades that visited villages, and cooperative stores for trading consumer goods with farming produce.⁷⁶ Moreover, as part of these changes there had been a revolution in habits and mindsets for giving men and women equal standing in relation to family, work and social organisation. Both the men and the women of the villages assumed the tasks of political organisers, judges, nurses, teachers, instructors in farming, and soldiers. New rules concerning, for example, marriage and divorce were in place, but also rules concerning social organisation that guaranteed female suffrage for village and sector committees and courts.⁷⁷ In democratically elected organs at least two out of five members had to be women, a practice, Dahl comments, that cannot be underestimated as a way to give women the self-confidence and experience to take on official capacities in politics but also of getting people used to seeing women in such roles.⁷⁸

3.3 The Frame of 1960s Feminist Social Democratic Development Policy and Projects

In this section we set out the frame that informed Dahl’s efforts to secure official Swedish development assistance to the PAIGC and made possible the official adoption of the changes in the recipient countries that she promoted. This leads us to consider first how Swedish development cooperation of that time steered a path between Western market capitalism and the Soviet planned economy, a position that found support in transnational currents at the time but that was also rooted in Swedish welfare state ideology. Second, we will consider the planning state as a critical component of the feminist socialist imaginary of Birgitta Dahl and other Social Democratic feminists of her generation.

3.3.1 Swedish Social Democratic Welfare Ideology

Elsewhere we have analysed Swedish development cooperation as it emerged in the 1960s and ‘70s in terms of a contradictory duality.⁷⁹ On the one hand Sweden was a small country on the northern periphery of Europe that saw some national liberation movements and newly independent states as natural non-aligned allies in the Cold War. All were relatively small territorial units, struggling in order to steer an independent path amidst great power tensions, engaged in a shared welfare state endeavour to benefit their peoples. On the other hand Sweden was a rich industrialised country that ‘hitchhiked’ its way to the boons of empire and supported a system of free trade that undoubtedly benefited its own welfare state project while exploiting the Third World for profit.⁸⁰

At roughly the same time that Sweden offered support for the PAIGC, giving clear expression to the first side of the duality, the G-77 group’s project for women’s emancipation through socio-economic development had an important impact on the 1975 World Conference of the International Women's Year in Mexico City, including support for Black South African women suffering under Apartheid and Palestinian women under Israeli Occupation. The concrete policy measure in the Mexico Plan of Action was an international ‘decade for women and development’ designed along the lines of the New International Economic Order (NIEO), including questions of health, education and childcare provision.⁸¹ While all of this undoubtedly forms part of a transnational frame for Dahl’s actions, we want to highlight how domestic Swedish Social Democratic welfare ideology also formed a significant part of that frame.

The Swedish Social Democratic party emerged from the interwar period as a proponent of welfare capitalism: an expansive and universal welfare state was simultaneously tasked with economic and social planning with a view to increase productivity.⁸² At the time when the country became seriously involved in international development aid in the early 1960s, the Swedish mixed economy

embodied the idea that economic and social advances drew on each other and that a modern economy needed a high degree of planning to create gains in efficiency for social welfare purposes. The continued expansion of the welfare state was a crucial part of such a strategy. The underlying theory of the Swedish model of organised capitalism can be seen as a careful balance between social and economic objectives. Economic policy had social welfare ends. The objectives and means of social policy were formulated in a close interaction with active labour market policies and contributed to what has been described as a supply-side orientation that focused on the labour market’s need for labour.⁸³

For a coming generation of Social Democratic feminists like Birgitta Dahl, the planning state was an integrated aspect of their socialist feminist imaginary. In the domestic setting they had been attuned to the radical programs of Alva Myrdal that saw motherhood and children as a societal good that was used to improve the conditions for women in society. If a society wanted children who, as adults, would develop its technology and contribute to its economy, then it had no other choice but to give children an expert upbringing and education through public childcare and quality public education. The purchasing of childcare and education more generally made its availability class specific. The public provision of childcare contributes to class equalisation of childbearing and improving the welfare of children through intervention of professional services. This, together with other social welfare reforms, would free women from some of the constraints of childrearing in the sense of improving the opportunities to participate in wider society and develop as human beings. The ‘social handicap’ of maternity would be eliminated.⁸⁴

In the 1960s, in conjunction with the rising transnational second-wave feminism, Birgitta Dahl and other young female Social Democratic party members started debating gender equality issues in journals such as Tiden and Hertha.⁸⁵ What they demanded was radically changed roles for the family and for women and they called for the planning state to step in and initiate changes in this direction. At the centre of it all was women’s entry into the labour market. Paid work was to emancipate women and liberate them from male dependency, which in turn necessitated an expansion of child care provision. And indeed by the early 1970s Swedish women entered the labour market en masse. They came to perform mostly traditional female (care) work in jobs that were created as the welfare state expanded and encompassed these tasks. The working Swedish woman was now set on the track of becoming an independent and equal citizen who would enjoy the backing of the welfare state.⁸⁶

3.3.2 But Where is the Feminism? The Planning State as Socialist Feminist Imaginary

The outlook that informed Birgitta Dahl’s feminist foreign policy interventions in the 1960s and 1970s reflected a position in transnational feminist debates of the time. Nancy Fraser has pointed out that even if early second-wave feminists ‘were committed to taming markets and promoting equality’ and took for granted ‘the welfare state’s solidaristic ethos and prosperity-securing steering capacities’, they were skeptical of the state orientation of Social Democracy and of the way in which Social Democracy pushed feminist concerns into the background and tended to marginalise social divisions other than class and social injustices as ‘maldistribution’.⁸⁷ Other feminists, among them many Swedish Social Democrats, assumed key features of the socialist imaginary as a basis for a more radical feminist orientation for the entire society, including the economy, and fully embraced the state orientation. It is not difficult to see that the feminist agenda of the PAIGC, integrated as it was in a broader project of national, economic and social transformation, would appeal to the latter group. For those believing that women’s liberation was intrinsically linked to the project of social and economic justice that was a key dimension of many struggles for national liberation, the national liberation struggles in Mozambique and Angola were also seen as particularly promising and worthy of support.⁸⁸

The legacy of the PAIGC as concerns the role of women in social transformation is, unquestionably, a troubled one.⁸⁹ Like many other instances of revolutionary processes in which women played an important role, the cause of women’s liberation would later give in to other forces.⁹⁰ This does not detract from the efforts made to combine anti-colonial and feminist politics through a ‘total revolution’ on the level of both ideology and practice, and in particular ‘the way it emphasizes the need for women to play an equal political, economic, and social role in both the armed struggle and the construction of the new society’.⁹¹

4.0 Conclusion: The Changing Terms of North–South Feminist Solidarity

Our intent in this article was not to reveal the current Swedish FFP as a kind of feminism of bad faith. Without denying that Sweden’s current FFP might be part of a ‘national branding effort’,⁹² we have approached it on its own terms: as a policy that is comprehensive, ambitious and honestly geared towards righting wrongs and alleviating suffering. And yet, when the current FFP is placed next to an earlier project of feminist foreign policy, a paradox emerges: while Swedish FFP has never been as explicitly and strongly articulated as it is today, its transformative vision of justice and equality on a global scale is strikingly weak and narrow.

As announced in the introduction, this article has been structured around the contrast between two frames informing the two FFP agendas: one in which feminist concerns are integrated into a broader agenda of socio-economic justice and another in which feminist foreign policy is detached from such concerns. Our exercise in counterpointing has however brought another, though in many ways related, contrast into view, with significant implications for North–South feminist solidarity – that between a political ally and a protector of individuals.

Swedish development aid doctrine at the time of Dahl’s feminist proposal rested on a conviction against imposing (allegedly) Western values or donor conditionalities on Third World countries. This was possible through the idea of partnership and ‘recipient ownership’. Dahl’s ambition was to use development aid to create partnerships with like-minded socialists around the world. In the 1990s, however, ‘recipient ownership’ was replaced in Swedish development aid with stricter control and evaluations in line with the shift of focus in the international aid discourse to human rights, democracy and good governance and conditionality that had emerged during the 1980s.⁹³ Around the same time, the recipients of Swedish aid were no longer identified as ‘peoples,’ (in practice meaning states or liberation movements) but as individuals.⁹⁴ The idea of a political ally or partner in development support was no longer feasible.

These displacements were both a cause and an effect of the marginalisation of the historical fact of colonialism in how the Global North imagines its relationship with the Global South. There is a significant difference between building partnerships which acknowledge historical structures of inequality and oppression and policy that is articulated in a universal fashion and ready for export on the side of the donor. Accordingly, Foreign Minister Margot Wallström, the main promotor of the current Feminist Foreign Policy, responded to an Al Jazeera reporter suggesting that ‘Western feminism is often used to inform a saviour mentality towards people of colour’ in the following way: ‘It has nothing to do with colour or race or anything like that. It’s important to say the yardstick that we use: We look at rights, representation and resources.’⁹⁵

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 Sveriges Radio, ‘Vi ska ha en feministisk utrikespolitik’ [Wallström: Our Foreign Policy Will Be a Feminist One], 3 October 2014 (Lova Olsson) <sverigesradio.se/sida/artikel.aspx?programid=83&artikel=5982258> (last accessed 18 March 2022).

2 Judith Butler, Frames of War: When is Life Grievable? (Verso 2009).

3 Amin Parsa, Knowing and Seeing the Combatant: War, Counterinsurgency and Targeting in International Law (Doctoral Thesis, Lund University, 2017) 33.

4 Wendy Brown, ‘The Future of Political Theory’ in Wendy Brown (ed) Edgework: Critical Essays on Knowledge and Politics (Princeton University Press 2005) 60 at 74.

5 As above.

6 Zeynep Gulsah Capen, Felipe dos Reis and Maj Grasten, ‘The Politics of Translation in International Relations’ in Zeynep Gulsah Capan, Filipe dos Reis and Maj Grasten (eds) The Politics of Translation in International Relations (Palgrave McMillan 2021) 1 at 2–3.

7 For this line of work see, eg, Kathy Davis, The Making of Our Bodies, Ourselves: How Feminism Travels across Borders (Duke University Press 2007) and Claudia de Lima Costa ‘Lost (and Found?) in Translation: Feminisms in Hemispheric Dialogue’ (2006) 4(1–2) Latino Studies 62.

8 Sari Kuovo has provided a detailed description focusing on the difficulties the policy faces in a moment of conservative and anti-feminist resurgence. See Sari Kuovo, ‘A Challenging Agenda for Troubled Times: The Swedish Feminist Foreign Policy’ (2019) 4 Retfærd 65. The description of the policy by the political scientist Annika Bergman Rosamund focuses on its discursive framing and on the efforts to eradicate gender-based and sexual violence within the framework of FFP. See Annika Bergman Rosamond, ‘Swedish Feminist Foreign Policy and “Gender Cosmopolitanism”’ (2020) 16(2) Foreign Policy Analysis 217. Other works describing or analysing the policy, or aspects of it, include: Karin Aggestam and Annika Bergman-Rosamond, ‘Swedish Feminist Foreign Policy in the Making: Ethics, Politics, and Gender’ (2016) 30(3) Ethics & International Affairs 323; Robert Egnell, ‘Feministisk utrikespolitik i teori och praktik’ [Feminist Foreign Policy in Theory and Practice] (2016) 118(4) Statsvetenskaplig tidskrift [Journal of Political Science] 563; Karin Aggestam and Annika Bergman Rosamond, ‘Re-politicising the Gender-Security Nexus: Sweden’s Feminist Foreign Policy’ (2018) 5(3) European Review of International Studies 30; Karin Aggestam and Annika Bergman Rosamond, ‘Feminist Foreign Policy 3.0: Advancing Ethics and Gender Equality in Global Politics’ (2019) 39(1) SAIS Review of International Affairs 37; Malena Rosén Sundström and Ole Elgström, ‘Praise or Critique? Sweden’s Feminist Foreign Policy in the Eyes of its Fellow EU Members’ (2020) 21(4) European Politics and Society 418; Malena Rosén Sundström and others, ‘Spreading a Norm-Based Policy? Sweden’s Feminist Foreign Policy in International Media’ (2021) 27(4) Contemporary Politics 439; Katarzyna Jezierska, ‘Incredibly Loud and Extremely Silent: Feminist Foreign Policy on Twitter’ (2022) 57(1) Cooperation and Conflict 84.

9 Nancy Fraser, ‘Feminism, Capitalism, and the Cunning of History: An Introduction’ (Working Paper 17, FMSH-WP-August 2012).

10 Hester Eisenstein, Feminism Seduced: How the Global Elites Use Women’s Labor and Ideas to Exploit the World (Routledge 2009).

11 Susan Watkins, ‘Which Feminisms?’ (2018) 109 New Left Review 5.

12 Chandra Talpade Mohanty, Feminism Without Borders: Decolonizing Theory, Practicing Solidarity (Duke University Press 2003). For a study similar to ours on Latin America, although focusing on domestic rather than foreign policy, see Verónica Schild, ‘Feminism and Neoliberalism in Latin America’ (2015) 96 New Left Review 59.

13 Swedish Ministry of Foreign Affairs, ‘Swedish Foreign Service Action Plan for Feminist Foreign Policy 2015–2018 Including Focus Areas for 2016’ (2015) at 2 and 16.

14 The most well-publicised effect of Sweden’s FFP so far has been the cancellation of an arms deal with Saudi Arabia in early 2015. The cancellation was a response to domestic criticism suggesting that the provision of arms to a country that oppresses women and has a particularly bad human rights record is hardly fitting for a state pursuing a FFP. Sweden does, however, not have a policy of choosing trade partners based on their women’s rights credentials and this is the reason why the ‘Saudi affair’ is not discussed further in this article. The ‘Saudi affair’ is best described as an unintended and non-representative result of Sweden’s FFP. On the affair, see Jenny Nordberg, ‘Who’s Afraid of a Feminist Foreign Policy?’ The New Yorker (online) 15 April 2015 <https://www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/swedens-feminist-foreign-minister> (last accessed 16 May 2022) and Kuovo, above note 8.

15 Swedish Ministry of Foreign Affairs, ‘Feminist Trade Policy’ (2019) <https://www.government.se/4af8f8/contentassets/34acefd857de4032ad103f932866e7bb/feminist-trade-policy.pdf>.

16 As above, citing Lori L Taylor and Jawad Dar, ‘Fairer Trade, Removing Gender Bias in US Import Taxes’, Mosbacher Institute for Trade Economics & Public Policy (2015).

17 Swedish Ministry of Foreign Affairs, ‘Feminist Trade Policy’, above note 15.

18 See, eg, Lyric Thompson and Rachel Clement, ‘Defining Feminist Foreign Policy’, International Center for Research on Women (2019) 2.

19 This observation is made on the basis of a number of FFP documents, including the Swedish 2018 handbook on FFP (Swedish Ministry of Foreign Affairs, ‘Handbook: Sweden’s Feminist Foreign Policy’ (2018)), four national action plans intended to facilitate the application of FFP (Swedish Ministry of Foreign Affairs, above note 13; Swedish Ministry of Foreign Affairs, ‘Swedish Foreign Service Action Plan for Feminist Foreign Policy 2015–2018 Including Focus Areas for 2017’ (2016), Swedish Ministry of Foreign Affairs, ‘Swedish Foreign Service Action Plan for Feminist Foreign Policy 2015–2018, Including Indicative Measures for 2018’ (2017); Swedish Ministry of Foreign Affairs, ‘Swedish Foreign Service Action Plan for Feminist Foreign Policy 2019–2022, Including Direction and Measures for 2019 (2018)), a text documenting Sweden’s FFP achievements until 2017 (Swedish Ministry of Foreign Affairs, ‘Sweden’s Feminist Foreign Policy: Examples from Three Years of Implementation’ (2017)), and a government communication regarding FFP to the Swedish parliament (Swedish Ministry for Foreign Affairs, ‘Sveriges feministiska utrikespolitik’ [Sweden’s Feminist Foreign Policy] Government Communication 2019/20:17, 19 September 2019). It is important to note that there is no particular budget category for the FFP. The activities within FFP are to be funded by the general budget for Foreign Affairs. This state of affairs makes it difficult to find out the economic weight of the two areas of international development cooperation and international peace and security within FFP.

20 Swedish Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Jämställdhet: ett mål för utvecklingssamarbetet [Equality: A Goal for Development Cooperation], Official Reports of the Swedish Government No 116 (1995) 23.

21 As above at 13–19.

22 Reproductive health issues have a difficult historical entanglement with population control and racism both in domestic Swedish policy and in Swedish development aid. On family planning and population policy in Sweden and in Swedish development policy, see Annika Berg, Den gränslösa hälsan: Signe och Axel Höjer, folkhälsan och expertisen [Boundless Health: On Signe and Axel Höjer, Public Health and Expertise] (Doctoral Thesis, Uppsala University, 2009). The historian Mattias Tydén suggests that Swedish development assistance was an arena in which the racial thinking of the pre-WWII era, which permeated Swedish society in the same way as in colonial societies, could live on through new means of expression – the focus on family planning as an essential part of international development policy was just one part of it. See Mattias Tydén, ‘Rasismen, utvecklingstanken och det svenska biståndet’ [Racism, Development and Swedish Aid] (2016) 3–4 Tidskriften Ikaros [Magazine Ikaros] 41.

23 Swedish Ministry of Foreign Affairs, ‘Sweden’s Feminist Foreign Policy: Examples from Three Years of Implemention’, above note 19 at 14. ‘Resistance’ refers among other things to the 2017 US decision to withdraw US aid from organisations working with reproductive health and abortions. In a well-publicised initiative, Sweden, Belgium, the Netherlands and Denmark, raised funds to replace what the US had withdrawn. See SheDecides, ‘The Story’ (online) <https://www.shedecides.com/our-story/> (last accessed 17 May 2022).

24 Swedish Ministry of Foreign Affairs, ‘Handbook: Sweden’s Feminist Foreign Policy’, above note 19 at 24, 99.

25 As above at 27–8.

26 Swedish Ministry for Foreign Affairs, ‘Sweden’s Feminist Foreign Policy: Examples from Three Years of Implemention’, above note 19 at 12.

27 Annika Bergman Rosamond, ‘Swedish Internationalism and Development Aid’ in Jon Pierre (ed) The Oxford Handbook of Swedish Politics (Oxford University Press 2015) 462 at 473–4.

28 SC Res 1325, UNSCOR, 4213rd mtg, UN Doc S/RES/1325 (31 October 2000); United Nations Security Council, ‘Security Council, Unanimously Adopting Resolution 1325 (2000), Calls for Broad Participation of Women in Peace-Building, Post-Conflict Reconstruction’ (Press Release, SC/6942, 31 October 2000) <https://web.archive.org/web/20060929013821/http://www.un.org/News/Press/docs/2000/20001031.sc6942.doc.html> (last accessed 27 May 2022).

29 SC Res 1820, UNSCOR, 5196th mtg, UN Doc S/RES/1820 (19 June 2008); SC Res 1888, UNSCOR, 6195th mtg, UN Doc S/RES/1888 (30 September 2009); SC Res 1889, UNSCOR, 6196th mtg, UN Doc S/RES/1889 (5 October 2009); SC Res 1960, UNSCOR, 6453rd mtg, UN Doc S/RES/1960 (16 December 2010); SC Res 2106, UNSCOR, 6984th mtg, UN Doc S/RES/2106 (24 June 2013); SC Res 2122, UNSCOR, 7044th mtg, UN Doc S/RES/2122 (18 October 2013), SC Res 2242, UNSCOR, 7533rd mtg, UN Doc S/RES/2242 (13 October 2015); SC Res 2467, UNSCOR, 8514th mtg, UN Doc S/RES/2467 (23 April 2019) and SC Res 2493, UNSCOR, 8649th mtg, UN Doc S/RES/2493 (29 October 2019).

30 Vasuki Nesiah, ‘Feminism As Counter-Terrorism: The Seduction of Power’ in Margaret L Satterthwaite and Jayne C Huckerby (eds) Gender, National Security, and Counter-Terrorism: Human Rights Perspectives (Routledge 2013) 127.

31 Aggestam and Bergman-Rosamond, ‘Swedish Feminist Foreign Policy in the Making: Ethics, Politics, and Gender’, above note 8 at 324.

32 Helene Lackenbauer, ‘Med feminism som ledstjärna: svensk utrikespolitik i ny tappning’ [With Feminism As a Polestar: New Directions in Swedish Foreign Policy] (World Politics Daily Issues No 2 2016, Swedish Institute of International Affairs, 2016) 11. In 2018 Sweden was the top donor to UN Women. Almost 20 percent of the organisation’s budget came from Sweden. See UN Women, Core Resources (online) <https://web.archive.org/web/20191219100636/https://www.unwomen.org/en/partnerships/donor-countries/core-resources> (last accessed 17 December 2019). See also UN Action Against Sexual Violence in Conflict, UN Action against Sexual Violence in Conflict: Multi-Partner Trust Fund 2009–2019 Consolidated Annual Progress Report No 11 (2020). Relevant in this context is that Margot Wallström, the Social Democrat occupying the office of Foreign Minister between 2014 and 2019 and the initiator of FFP, had served as the UN’s first ever Special Representative of the Secretary-General on Sexual Violence in Conflict from 2010 to 2012.

33 Karin Aggestam, ‘Genus, medling och fredsdiplomati’ [Gender, Mediation and Peace Diplomacy] in Jenny Björkman and Arne Jarrick (eds) Krig, Fred: RJ:s Årsbok 2016/2017 (Makadam Förlag 2016) 217.

34 Swedish Ministry of Foreign Affairs, ‘Sweden’s Feminist Foreign Policy: Examples from Three Years of Implementation’, above note 19 at 9.

35 See, eg, Swedish Ministry of Foreign Affairs, ‘Handbook: Sweden’s Feminist Foreign Policy’, above note 19 at 69.

36 Swedish Ministry of Foreign Affairs, ‘Sweden’s Feminist Foreign Policy: Examples from Three Years of Implementation’, above note 19 at 5.

37 Cf eg Lackenbauer, above note 32.

38 See Robert Egnell and others, Gender, Military Effectiveness and Organizational Change: The Swedish Model (Palgrave Macmillan 2014); Egnell, above note 8 at 577–8; Lackenbauer, above note 32.

39 Military activism has been a prominent feature of Swedish foreign policy since after the Cold War, distinguishing the country not only from other nonaligned or neutral states in Europe, but from many other European Union member states. Sweden’s consistent participation in major North Atlantic Treaty Organization (‘NATO’) operations, for example, not only makes it one of NATO’s most active and engaged partners, but in actual fact more active than some NATO members. The liberation of women in other places has been an important part of the justification of the military operations. See Lisbeth Aggestam and Adrian Hyde Price, ‘“A Force for Good”? Paradoxes of Swedish Military Activism’ in Jon Pierre (ed) The Oxford Handbook of Swedish Politics (Oxford University Press 2015) 479; Annika Bergman Rosamond, ‘Protection beyond Borders: Gender Cosmopolitanism and Co-constitutive Obligation’ (2013) 27(3) Global Society 319; Annika Bergman Rosamond and Christine Agius, ‘Sweden, Military Intervention and the Loss of Memory’ in Christine Agius and Dean Keep (eds) The Politics of Identity: Space, Place and Discourse (Manchester University Press 2018) 159.

40 Regarding Swedish-Russian security tensions, see, eg, Christine Agius and Emil Edenborg, ‘Gendered Bordering Practices in Swedish and Russian Foreign and Security Policy’ (2019) 71 Political Geography 56.

41 Since 2013 the Centre has been used by NATO as a Centre of Excellence. From 2018 on, the Centre supports the UN with military ‘gender competence’. See Government Offices of Sweden, ‘The Government of Sweden Tasks the Armed Forces to Support the United Nations with Gender Competence’ (Press Release, 25 January 2018) <www.government.se/press-releases/2018/01/the-government-of-sweden-tasks-the-armed-forces-to-support-the-united-nations-with-gender-competence/>.

42 Nesiah, above note 30. Karen Engle highlights that the attention paid by national and international institutions since the early 1990s to the issue of violence against women, and in particular sexual violence in conflict settings, has been accompanied with criminal law responses to this violence. See Karen Engle, ‘Feminist Governance and International Law: From Liberal to Carceral Feminism’ in Janet Halley and others (eds) Governance Feminism: Notes from the Field (University of Minnesota Press 2018) 3. As we have seen, criminal law responses feature in Swedish FFP too.

43 See, eg, Swedish Foreign Service, ‘Utrikesförvaltningens handlingsplan för feministisk utrikespolitik 2015–2018 med indikativa åtgärder för år 2018’ [The 2015–2018 Feminist Foreign Policy Action Plan of the Foreign Office, with Indicative Measures for 2018], above note 19 at 1, 3.

44 Charlotte Bunch and Niamh Reilly, Demanding Accountability: The Global Campaign and Vienna Tribunal for Women’s Human Rights (Center for Women’s Global Leadership 1994) 109. Charlotte Bunch was the main organiser of an internationally coordinated lobbying effort at the 1993 UN World Conference on Human Rights in Vienna, which arguably marks the moment of feminism’s inclusion into the agendas of international institutions. For the background to, details of, and the implications of the women’s-rights-as-human-rights-move, see Engle, above note 42.

45 Engle explains the particular industriousness of international institutions in relation to violence against women in the context of armed conflicts by the focus of the media and NGOs on the sexual violence committed against women in the armed conflict in former Yugoslavia which was raging as the womens-rights-as-human-rights-move took off (Engle, above note 42 at 13–17). In addition, Engle adds, it was easy to reach agreements about the importance of preventing violence against women in conflicts: ‘No one argued that rape in conflict was culturally defensible and, given the conflict in the former Yugoslavia, it would have been difficult to argue that it should not be a priority’. See Engle, above note 42 at 17.

46 Engle, above note 42 at 8.

47 Education for girls would be one example.

48 This confirms Jessica Whyte’s (among others) suggestion that the human rights project, since its ‘breakthrough’ in the 1970s, has not only operated as a ‘powerless companion’ to neoliberalism (Samuel Moyn, ‘A Powerless Companion: Human Rights in the Age of Neoliberalism’ (2014) 77(4) Law & Contemporary Problems 147). It has also been an ‘active, enthusiastic and influential’ fellow traveller. (Jessica Whyte, The Morals of the Market: Human Rights and the Rise of Neoliberalism (Verso 2019)). The discussion on whether the human rights framework could in the future become something quite different from what it has been in terms of its impact on socioeconomic distribution is beyond the scope of this article. On that discussion, see, eg, Daniel Brinks and others, ‘Introduction: Human Rights and Economic Inequality’ (2019) 10(3) Humanity 363. For analyses of the nature of and the core tenets of neoliberalism see, eg, Wendy Brown, In the Ruins of Neoliberalism: The Rise of Antidemocratic Politics in the West (Columbia University Press 2019); Quinn Slobodian, Globalists: The End of Empire and the Birth of Neoliberalism (Harvard University Press 2018); Whyte, above note 48.

49 Watkins, above note 11 at 43.

50 Bergman Rosamond, ‘Swedish Feminist Foreign Policy and “Gender Cosmopolitanism”’, above note 8 at 223.

51 As above at 224.

52 As above. One could also add that she downplays the international factors shaping Sweden’s external engagements, including its FFP.

53 Katharina Tollin, Sida vid sida: en studie av jämställdhetspolitikens genealogi 1971–2006 [Side by Side: A Study of the Genealogy of Gender Equality Policy 1971–2006] (Atlas 2011).

54 Roland Burke, ‘The 1993 World Conference on Human Rights and the Retreat of a Redistributive Rights Vision’ (2020) 8(2) London Review of International Law 233 at 233.

55 The prominent role of feminist NGOs in the formation of this agenda is well understood and documented. The focus has however mostly been on US-based feminist organisations. The Swedish NGO Kvinna-till-kvinna [Woman to Woman], which was formed in response to the war in Yugoslavia, arguably had a ‘women, peace and security’ agenda before the UN adoption of that agenda. The organisation claims that its 2000 report ‘Engendering the Peace Process: A Gender Approach to Dayton and Beyond’ was the first time ever a gender analysis of a peace agreement was published and suggests that this report was ‘one of the foundations of … resolution [1325]’: See Kvinna till Kvinna, Our History (online) <https://kvinnatillkvinna.org/our-history/> (last accessed 3 March 2022).

56 It is a matter of debate whether Social Democrats around the world lost this capacity due to forces of globalisation or if they abandoned it by embracing neoliberal ideas. For an interesting contribution to this discussion taking aim at the Swedish context, see Jenny Andersson, ‘Neoliberalism against Social Democracy’ (2020) 41(2) The Tocqueville Review 87.

57 Tor Sellström, Sweden and National Liberation in Southern Africa (Nordic Africa Institute 1999) vol 1 at 17 (‘Volume 1’).

58 Swedish Parliament, Statement No 82/1969 by the Appropriations Committee (1969) 23–4.

59 As above as translated in Sellström, Volume 1, above note 57 at 17. Swedish support for movements and parties fighting racial and colonial oppression in Africa and on other continents would last all the way to the end of Apartheid in South Africa in the 1990s. See Sellström, Volume 1, above note 57 and Tor Sellström, Sweden and National Liberation in Southern Africa (Nordic Africa Institute 2002) vol 2 (‘Volume 2’).

60 Sellström, Volume 2, above note 59 at 59.

61 The ‘humanitarian’ assistance to national liberation movements such as the PAIGC was criticised from different sides of the political spectrum – on the one hand from those demanding unconditional cash support and on the other from those condemning the alignment of Swedish policy with that of the Soviet Union. Sweden and the Soviet Union were the largest donors to PAIGC at the time: Sellström, Volume 2, above note 59 at 64–5.

62 Birgitta Dahl, ‘Välgörenhet eller samhällsomdaning?’ [Charity or the Transformation of Society?] (1968) 40(10) Tiden 607.

63 Ian R Barnes, ‘The Changing Nature of the Swedish Aid Relationship during the Social Democratic Period of Government’ (1980) 15(3) Cooperation and Conflict 141 at 146.

64 As above at 146.

65 As above.

66 Birgitta Dahl, I rörelse: Minnen från ett innehållsrikt liv [In Movement: Memories from a Meaningful Life] (Premiss förlag 2016) 41–3.

67 In 1971 Dahl would replace Gunnar Myrdal as the chairperson of the Swedish Committee for Vietnam 1971–77, one of the three large Vietnam Solidarity organisations in Sweden.

68 Dahl, I rörelse: Minnen från ett innehållsrikt liv [In Movement: Memories from a Meaningful Life], above note 66 at 107.

69 As above at 111.

70 As above at 54, 117. See also as above at 67–77.

71 Birgitta Dahl and Knut Andreassen, Guinea-Bissau: Rapport om ett land och en befrielserörelse [Guinea-Bissau: Report from a Country and a National Liberation Movement] (Prisma 1971).

72 Dahl, I rörelse: Minnen från ett innehållsrikt liv [In Movement: Memories from a Meaningful Life], above note 66 at 113. Images from her visit are available at the homepage of the Nordic Africa Institute: The Nordic Africa Institute, Photos from Guinea Bissau (online) <https://nai.uu.se/library/resources/liberation-africa/audio-and-visual-material/photos/photos-from-guinea-bissau.html> (last accessed 20 March 2022).

73 Dahl and Andreassen, above note 71 at 123.

74 As above at 166.

75 Birgitta Dahl, ‘Nu för tiden är många mammor medlemmar i partiet’ [These Days, Plenty of Mothers Are Members of the Party] (1971) 58(6) Hertha 20.

76 As above at 21.

77 As above at 23.

78 As above.

79 Leila Brännström and Markus Gunneflo, ‘Images of the North: The Nordic Promise of Development’ in Ruth Buchanan, Luis Eslava and Sundhya Pahuja (eds) Oxford Handbook of International Law & Development (Oxford University Press, forthcoming).

80 Miles Macallister, ‘The Scandinavians “Hitchhiked” Their Way to the Boons of Empire’ Aeon (online) (31 January 2018) <https://aeon.co/ideas/the-hitchhiking-scandinavian-way-to-the-imperial-riches> (last accessed 31 March 2022).

81 Watkins, above note 11 at 3.

82 On the Swedish Social Democratic party and its project during its ‘golden age’, see, eg, Tim Tilton, The Political Theory of Swedish Social Democracy: Through the Welfare State to Socialism (Clarendon Press 1990); Gøsta Esping-Andersen, Politics against Markets: The Social Democratic Road to Power (Princeton University Press 1985); Klaus Misgeld, Karl Molin and Klas Åmark (eds), Creating Social Democracy: A Century of the Social Democratic Labor Party in Sweden (Pennsylvania State University Press 1992).

83 Jenny Andersson, Between Growth and Security: Swedish Social Democracy from a Strong Society to a Third Way (Mireille L Key trans, Manchester University Press 2006) 9.

84 Yvonne Hirdman, ‘Social Engineering and the Woman Question: Sweden in the Thirties’ (1994) 44(1) Studies in Political Economy 73 at 82.

85 Christina Florin and Bengt Nilsson, “Något som liknar en oblodig revolution”: jämställdhetens politisering under 1960- och 70-talen [Something Resembling a Bloodless Revolution: The Politicisation of Gender Equality in the 1960s and ’70s] (Umeå University 2000).

86 As above.

87 Fraser, above note 9 at 5.

88 Stephanie Urdang, Fighting Two Colonialisms (Monthly Review Press 1979).

89 See Aliou Ly, ‘Revisiting the Guinea-Bissau Liberation War: PAIGC, UDEMU and the Question of Women’s Emancipation 1963–74’ (2015) 14(3) Portuguese Journal of Social Science 361.

90 Kumari Jayawardena, Feminism and Nationalism in the Third World (Verso 2016 edn, first published 1986).

91 Urdang, above note 88 at 15.

92 Johan Karlsson Schaffer ‘How Democracy Promotion Became a Key Aim of Sweden’s Development Aid Policy’ in Antoine de Bengy-Puyvallée and Kristian Bjørkdahl (eds) Do-Gooders at the End of Aid: Scandinavian Humanitarianism in the Twenty-First Century (Cambridge University Press 2021) 143 at 167.

93 See, eg, Om styrnings- och samarbetsformer i biståndet [Forms of Governance and Cooperation in Development] (Sweden) Gov Bill 1992/93:244 (Swedish Ministry of Foreign Affairs, 1993).

94 Gemensamt ansvar: Sveriges politik för global utveckling [Shared Responsibility: Swedish Policy for Global Development] (Sweden) Gov Bill 2002/03:122 (Swedish Ministry of Foreign Affairs, May 2003).

95 Khadija Patel, ‘Q&A: Exploring Sweden’s “Feminist” Foreign Policy’, Al Jazeera (online) 15 June 2015 <www.aljazeera.com/features/2015/6/15/qa-exploring-swedens-feminist-foreign-policy> (last accessed 20 February 2022).