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Troubled Encounters: Feminist Foreign Policy and Donor-Implementer Relations in Peacebuilding

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  18 July 2025

Niklas Balbon*
Affiliation:
https://ror.org/03py58635 Global Public Policy Institute , Berlin, Germany
Younna Christiansen
Affiliation:
https://ror.org/03py58635 Global Public Policy Institute , Berlin, Germany
*
Corresponding author: Niklas Balbon; Email: nbalbon@gppi.net

Extract

As more governments commit to feminist foreign policies (FFPs), this commitment trickles down to a central foreign policy area: peacebuilding. As a field, peacebuilding has historically been dominated by western states and western-dominated institutions performing interventions along the hegemonic liberal peacebuilding paradigm (Lederach 1997; Mac Ginty 2008). This has, in turn, provoked significant feminist criticisms and interventions (Duncanson 2016; Hewitt and True 2021; McLeod 2018). When Germany, the largest peacebuilding funder globally (Rotmann, Li, and Stoffel 2021; UN Peacebuilding 2024), announced their FFP in 2023, this development opened up the prospect for substantial feminist change, but also raised questions about what such change might look like in practice.

Information

Type
Notes from the Field
Copyright
© The Author(s), 2025. Published by Cambridge University Press on behalf of the Women, Gender, and Politics Research Section of the American Political Science Association

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