THE TRANSFORMATIVENESS OF SWEDEN’S FOREIGN POLICY DISCOURSE A qualitative study of Sweden’s foreign policy discourse with the adoption and renunciation of the feminist foreign policy

Sammanfattning

Feminist foreign policies (FFPs) have been said to potentially be transformative to traditional foreign policy by increasing awareness of intersectionality and postcolonial power structures. This awareness was observed in Sweden’s foreign policy discourse during the FFP period and scholars have attributed this to the FFP, but the field is lacking a comparative study over time which raises the question if the effect seen correlates with the adoption of the FFP or if Sweden’s foreign policy discourse has always been equally transformative. This thesis studies the periods before, during and after the FFP to capture if the FFP correlates with transformativeness of foreign policy discourse, and if the discourse has remained the same after the renunciation of the FFP. Using discourse analysis, official documents on gender equality are studied with postcolonial feminism applied as the theoretical framework.The analysis shows that the adoption of the FFP correlated with more transformative discourse, mainly through furthered emphasis on local context and an increased emphasis on intersectionality. However, rather than the FFP providing a total shift, a liberal understanding of feminism remained consistent. The discourse after the renunciation showed some continuity of the increased transformativeness, but a decrease was observed mainly due to lessened contextualization of regions and groups compared to the FFP period. The resultssuggest that rather than providing a shift in states’ approaches to feminism, FFPs can serve to deepen already existing values. The results also show that there is room for change within traditional frameworks of foreign policy.