Feminist Foreign Policy: Is Switzerland’s foreign policy a secretly feminist foreign policy?

Abstract: Recently, a new IR movement called Feminist Foreign Policy (FFP) has become more influential and achieved certain success when states like Sweden, Canada and France adopted these theories. This study will analyse Switzerland’s foreign policy to understand to what extent it is a FFP. Feminist Foreign Policy Analysis has developed new frameworks to answer this research question. Such as Aggestam and True’s four commitments, which is adapted in this thesis. Through a qualitative content analysis, policy documents of the Swiss government are analysed for gender mainstreaming, international development assistance, Women, Peace and Security (WPS) and gender equality mechanisms. The findings are that the implementation of WPS policies is at an advanced stage, and the international development assistance includes clearly defined budget goals and many pro-gender objectives. On the other hand, there is a lack of gender mainstreaming throughout Switzerland’s core foreign policy papers and gender equality mechanisms are rather sparse. The research concludes that, although Swiss FP contains feminist elements, it cannot be defined as feminist.