The Limitations of the 3Rs Framework
By Kirthi Jayakumar
Graffiti, Gore Street, Sault Ste. Marie, Ontario, Canada. Wikimedia Commons.
Sweden’s Feminist Foreign Policy adopted the “3 Rs” framework, where the focus was on rights, representation, and resources. As a follow-up, a fourth R was identified, namely reality check – to account for practicality. When asked why this framework made sense, Margot Wallstrom suggested that she had “created parameters that our embassies and diplomatic representation could use” (Vogelstein, 2019). Following this, almost every country that has adopted a feminist foreign policy, or committed to adopting one, has crystallized or made use of similar language. Civil society and academia have also adopted the 3 Rs frame, and evaluated these policies against these criteria.
However, the 3 Rs come with several inherent limitations that have its roots in colonization, white supremacy, imperialism and militarization, and tokenism. In reducing feminist foreign policies to the 3 Rs, there is a sense of templatization of the approach to feminist foreign policy. In effect, the entire exercise is reduced to State Feminism, which, as defined by Helga Hernes (1987), refers to the type of feminism that is created or approved by the government of a state. This article explores the flaws in the 3Rs framework.
Whose Rights are they Anyway?
The focus of human rights in the international security paradigm emerged with the incorporation of human security within the definition of “security” in the UNDP’s Human Development Report in 1994. Even as it situated the individual as a referent object in international relations, it also made the human the site for the enactment of global power and violence. For example, it became commonplace for states to intervene with the use of military power into other states on the grounds of protecting human rights, women’s rights (“femonationalism,” Farris, 2017), and LGBTQIA+ rights (“homonationalism,” Puar, 2018).
Within these spaces, some lives were considered more important than others, which meant that wealthy, militarily powerful states could decide which populations to save, where democracy must be implemented, and which communities would have to jump additional loopholes to migrate comfortably. In the words of Ratna Kapur (2018), in her book Gender, Alterity and Human Rights: Freedom in a Fishbowl, the rights and freedoms obtained through contemporary, neoliberal human rights practice is no more than “freedom in a fishbowl.” She explains that the neoliberal human rights regime determines a set of entitlements and identifies what people value under the influence of neoliberalism.
There is also the question of whose rights count. In developing outward facing foreign policies with a feminist tag, these states are also assuming a moral high ground to protect the interests of some while actively othering several within their own domestic practice. In Dr Toni Haastrup’s (2022) words, these efforts do not involve exploring power dynamics concerning the “Global South within the Global North.”
Add woman and stir
The second R, Representation, also presents a frame that is inherently inadequate, and equally limited in its implementation. Most feminist foreign policy documents have attested to the idea of bringing more women into positions of leadership and power, and within peace and post-conflict transitional processes. There is a significant focus on gender equality, rather than equity, justice, and dismantling of systemic and structural violence. The mere inclusion of more women in typically male-dominated spaces may not amount to transformation or the incorporation of feminist views and voices. The “patriarchal bargain” as Deniz Kandiyoti noted, will encourage women to adopt strategies to secure their positions of power and autonomy, and lead them to wittingly or unwittingly further the patriarchal agenda.
As Nicola Pratt (2013) argues of the WPS Agenda – which also rings true in the way we see feminist foreign policies being done – the participation and inclusion of women of colour elsewhere is centred as a token against the “irrational patriarchy” of men of colour, and their “protection” is racially inscribed as the goal is to protect women of colour from men of colour, without questioning the patriarchal, racist, and colonial ways of this imposed foreign policy. In determining “representation,” the notion of what “kind of woman” can be included in these spaces kicks in. Sherri Gibbings (2011) documented how a group of Iraqi women activists were invited to speak to a group of gender experts at the UN, were labelled by the latter as “angry” because they did not “speak positively about women’s efforts in the reconstruction of Iraq and the role the UN could play” but, instead, “condemned the invasion by the USA and UK as imperialist and critiqued the UN for its lack of support”.
The redundancy of the focus on equality over equity is more than evident in these dynamics. With equality, there is the idea that a one-size fits all approach works across the board. In equalityspeak, there is no room for intersectionality, or the acknowledgment of systemic and structural violence.
Resources: The Colonizer Thrives
Most feminist foreign policies have centred the provision of resources to implement the policy, of which a large part is the provision of official development assistance (ODA), which technically amounts to aid. ODA has its roots in colonial powers striving to implement "development" activities in their colonies.
The “end of colonialism” was really just the end of a previous form of colonialism (Prashad, 2017; Bennet, 2002). This era marked a significant transition in the global world order – but there was neither a mechanism nor a process to implement transitional justice. As a result, there were neither any attempts to acknowledge colonialism, nor to provide reparations. As Goldsmith (2001) noted, “formal colonialism came to an end not because the colonial powers decided to forego the economic advantages it provided, but because in the new conditions, these could now largely be obtained by more politically acceptable and, at the same time…more effective methods.”
The idea of “development” in the colonial era involved imposing a template for society, infrastructure, and a range of public institutions without necessarily centring the agency of the colonized. The systems they created were deliberately devised to establish and entrench dominance and dynamics of inequality (Feminist Astropolitics with Tana Joseph, 2023), where the colonial participants in these institutions were set up to remain inscribed in systemic mediocrity. As Jones (2013) noted, the system is not broken – it was built in this very precise way, to execute this very aim. In contemporary times, aid and ODA continue to be made in pursuit of the same idea of “development” (Escobar et al., 2019), widening the chasm between the “Global North” and “Global South.”
The Creation of Universalisms
The biggest limitation of a rights, representation, and resources framework is that it inherently limits the idea of what a “feminist” foreign policy could look like, and reduces the feminist engagement with foreign policy to a mere checklist. In doing so, it ignores intersectionality and produces a universalist approach. As María Paulina Rivera Chávez (2022) noted, the Feminist Foreign Policies we know today “maintain global hierarchies, due to their colonial underpinnings and universalisms.” In doing so, intersectionality, multiple feminisms, and contextual factors such as colonization, power dynamics, and historical oppression are not accounted for. We see this play out in the way Sweden’s approach has formed something of a foundation for other states to follow – and is likely, in Maria Paulina Rivera Chavez’s (2022) words, borrowing from Ann Towns’ scholarship, to produce “a new standard of civilization.” Future foreign policies can add the label of “feminism” without doing anything more to transform the institution of foreign policy in itself. The majority world has constantly been placed as passive recipients of foreign policies etched by the Global North – and this dynamic will continue undisrupted. With this, aside from a new brand of state feminism taking birth, precious little will shift.
The development of a feminist foreign policy should strive to push for transformation, and an overhauling of the colonial systems that are deeply entrenched in contemporary international relations dynamics. Without centering a decolonial approach, this opportunity to make transformative change possible will be lost.
References
Associated Press (2023). Germany offers Israel military help and promises to crack down at home on support for Hamas. https://economictimes.indiatimes.com/news/defence/germany-offers-israel-military-help-and-promises-to-crack-down-at-home-on-support-for-hamas/articleshow/104366960.cms?from=mdr
Bennett, E. M. (2002). "Colonialism and Neo-colonialism". In DeConde, Alexander; Burns, Richard Dean; Logevall, Fredrik (eds.). Encyclopedia of American Foreign Policy. Simon & Schuster. pp. 285–291.
Chávez, M. P. R. (2022). "Feminist Foreign Policy: Coloniality in new clothes?" https://www.kcl.ac.uk/feminist-foreign-policy-coloniality-in-new-clothes
Escobar, A., Kothari, A., Salleh, A., Demaria, F., and Acosta, A. (2019). "'Development' is colonialism in disguise." https://www.opendemocracy.net/en/oureconomy/development-colonialism-disguise/
Farris, S. R. (2017). In the name of women's rights: The rise of femonationalism. Duke University Press.
Haastrup, T. (2002). Understanding Feminist Foreign Policy: An Interview with Toni Haastrup. https://www.gendersecurityproject.com/understanding-feminist-foreign-policy
Hernes, H. (1987). Welfare State and Woman Power: Essays in state feminism, Norwegian University Press.
Gibbings, Sheri. (2011) No Angry Women at the United Nations: Political Dreams and the Cultural Politics of United Nations Security Council Resolution 1325. International Feminist Journal of Politics 13 (4): 522–538.
Goldsmith, E. (2001). Development as Colonialism' in Edward Goldsmith and Jerry Mander. The Case against the Global Economy, And for a Turn Towards Localisation, Earthscan.
Jones, C. A. (2013). "The system isn't broken, it was designed this way: A critical analysis of historical racial disadvantage in the criminal justice system." https://www.hamptonthink.org/read/the-system-isnt-broken-it-was-designed-this-way-a-critical-analysis-of-historical-racial-disadvantage-in-the-criminal-justice-system
Kapur, R. (2018). Gender, alterity and human rights: Freedom in a fishbowl. Edward Elgar Publishing.
Nordberg, J. (2015). Who's afraid of a Feminist Foreign Policy? https://www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/swedens-feminist-foreign-minister
Prashad, Vijay (2007). The Darker Nations: A People's History of the Third World. New York: The New Press.
Pratt, N. (2013). Reconceptualizing gender, reinscribing racial–sexual boundaries in international security: the case of UN Security Council Resolution 1325 on “Women, Peace and Security”. International Studies Quarterly, 57(4), 772-783.
Puar, J. K. (2018). Terrorist assemblages: Homonationalism in queer times. Duke University Press.
Feminist Astropolitics with Tana Joseph (GSP, 2023)
Vogelstein, R. B. (2019). "Five Questions on Feminist Foreign Policy: Margot Wallström." https://www.cfr.org/blog/five-questions-feminist-foreign-policy-margot-wallstrom
