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Article
Swedish Foreign Policy Feminisms: Women, Social Democracy and Capitalism
Australian Feminist Law Journal (2022)
  • Markus Gunneflo
  • Leila Brännström, Lund University
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.
Keywords
  • Women,
  • Social Democracy,
  • Capitalism,
  • Foreign policy,
  • Sweden
Disciplines
Publication Date
Fall July 18, 2022
DOI
https://doi.org/10.1080/13200968.2022.2088189
Citation Information
Markus Gunneflo and Leila Brännström. "Swedish Foreign Policy Feminisms: Women, Social Democracy and Capitalism" Australian Feminist Law Journal Vol. 47 (2022) p. 207 - 227
Available at: http://works.bepress.com/markus_gunneflo/18/