Chair: Dr Amanda Chisholm, Senior Lecturer in Security Studies / Researcher in Gender and Security

Speaker: Karoline Färber, PhD Researcher, Department of War Studies

Over the past decade, gender equality has arrived at the centre stage of foreign policymaking globally. Several states have made claims to promoting pro-gender norms in global affairs, united by their concern for centring the experiences of women as foreign policy agents. Recently, German government officials have joined in those claims, possibly most obvious in Foreign Minister Heiko Maas' argument for a ‘foreign policy for women, by women’.

In light of these iterations, Karoline Färber will take stock of the status quo of German foreign policymaking.  Honing in on the agency of women foreign policy practitioners, she will ask: Whose experiences and knowledge count in the social reality of German foreign policymaking? And, by extension, what does this mean for the possibility of a ‘foreign policy by women’?

To answer these questions, she will provide two perspectives on how the Foreign Office is gendered and classed. First, by asking ‘where are the women and how did they get here?’, offering a historicised snapshot of the current reality of German foreign policymaking. In a second step, she will critically investigates the possibilities for change by looking at how the dominant diplomatic subjectivity structures women’s experiences in the Foreign Office.

 

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