Incredibly loud and extremely silent: Feminist foreign policy on Twitter

AuthorKatarzyna Jezierska
Published date01 March 2022
Date01 March 2022
DOIhttp://doi.org/10.1177/00108367211000793
Subject MatterArticles
https://doi.org/10.1177/00108367211000793
Cooperation and Conflict
2022, Vol. 57(1) 84 –107
© The Author(s) 2021
Article reuse guidelines:
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DOI: 10.1177/00108367211000793
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Incredibly loud and extremely
silent: Feminist foreign policy
on Twitter
Katarzyna Jezierska
Abstract
In 2014, Sweden’s Feminist Foreign Policy (FFP) was announced with a fanfare. This article
critically interrogates how Sweden implements the FFP through digital diplomacy by investigating
the extent of Sweden’s gender equality activities on Twitter since the introduction of the FFP
and by tracing gendered online abuse in digital diplomacy. I focus on Swedish embassy tweets
towards two countries where feminism is highly contested – Poland and Hungary. The theoretical
inspiration comes from discursive approaches to the spoken and unspoken, enriched by feminist
observations about the non-binary character of voice/silence. The method applied is gender-
driven quantitative and qualitative content analysis. The findings demonstrate that the FFP has
not set any significant mark on digital diplomacy in the analyzed cases. The launching of the FFP
went completely unnoticed and posts related to gender equality have actually decreased since
2014. There are no traces of ambassadors being subjected to gendered online abuse, but heavily
xenophobic and paternalistic language is directed at Sweden as a representative of liberal policies.
The article contributes to the literature on digital diplomacy by highlighting the (lack of) links
between foreign policy and digital diplomacy and it addresses a gap by focusing on gender in
digital diplomacy.
Keywords
Central Europe, digital diplomacy, feminist foreign policy, gender, signalling, Twitter
Introduction
In 2014, the first country in the world to do so, Sweden launched its Feminist Foreign
Policy (FFP). The FFP is officially summarized by three Rs – rights, representation and
resources – indicating the areas on which the foreign office should focus in its work
toward gender equality in international relations. The three Rs practically encompass all
spheres of foreign policy, such as aid, trade and diplomacy and, as the foreign ministry
claims, the FFP is implemented ‘throughout’ and ‘at all levels’ (Government Offices of
Sweden, 2019a). Even though the FFP was promoted as a new quality, it can also be seen
Corresponding author:
Katarzyna Jezierska, Division of Law, Politics and Economics, University West, Gustava Melins gata 2, 461
32 Trollhättan, Sweden.
Email: katarzyna.jezierska@hv.se
1000793CAC0010.1177/00108367211000793Cooperation and ConflictJezierska
research-article2021
Article
Jezierska 85
as yet another move in the direction already practised by the Swedish state (Egnell, 2016;
Towns, 2002), an externalization of Sweden’s state feminism (Bergman Rosamond,
2020). Nonetheless, the FFP clearly raised the ambition of Sweden’s leadership in gender
equality around the world. So far, three more countries have followed suit, declaring their
foreign policies feminist: Canada in 2017, France in 2019 and Mexico in 2020. As the
then Minister for Foreign Affairs Margot Wallström proudly announced in 2019, ‘Today
all colleagues relate to this policy. Civil servants in Stockholm, diplomats, local staff,
administrators. We don’t have one ambassador for our feminist foreign policy – we have
hundreds. . . our four years of a feminist foreign policy tell us that it is possible to do a lot
if we aim high and integrate a gender perspective into everything we do’ (Government
Offices of Sweden, 2019b). Sweden indeed aimed high and thus entered the spotlight as
an international norm entrepreneur in gender issues, attracting a lot of attention and scru-
tiny, from the academic community too (Aggestam and Bergman Rosamond, 2016;
Aggestam et al., 2019; Aggestam and True, 2020; Bergman Rosamond, 2020; Egnell,
2016; Robinson, 2019; Rosén Sundström and Elgström, 2020; Thomson, 2020).
The introduction of the FFP coincided with the emergence of a new arena for diplo-
macy, digital diplomacy. Digital diplomacy refers to the use of digital technology and
social media platforms by states communicating with foreign and domestic publics (Cull,
2013). It is most often presented as a special form of public diplomacy and, as such,
neatly intertwined with the construction and communication of national identity
(Duncombe, 2017). Through social media and digital technology, states gain yet another
forum to signal their image and identity (Jönsson, 2019), making their values and priori-
ties known to a broader audience. In contrast to classic tools of diplomacy, digital diplo-
macy deliberately reaches out to wider publics, not only highly selected elite circles. It
facilitates bypassing the host country’s government in establishing direct contact with
the host society (Pouliot and Cornut, 2018), thus communicating without intermediaries
and gaining increased possibility of ‘owning’ the message. If a country’s foreign policy
is a declaration of its values and priorities (see Carlsnaes, 2002), and digital diplomacy
is one of the venues where foreign policy is signalled, we should see an increased activity
related to gender equality and changed (feminist) content of the Swedish digital diplo-
macy since the launching of the FFP.
The aim of this article is to critically interrogate how Sweden implements the FFP
through digital diplomacy. More specifically, I ask: (a) What is the extent of Sweden’s gen-
der equality activities on Twitter and how has it changed after the introduction of the FFP –
has the content of Sweden’s digital diplomacy become more feminist? (b) Given the
proliferation of gendered online abuse (Ging and Siapera, 2018; Levey, 2018), does it also
appear there and if so, what forms does it take in digital diplomacy? The article thus makes
two distinct contributions to the rapidly growing literature on digital diplomacy. First,
instead of treating digital diplomacy as an isolated field of study, the article explicitly inves-
tigates the link between foreign policy and digital diplomacy. Second, it addresses a gap in
the extant digital diplomacy literature, which is surprisingly silent on the issue of gender.
To answer these questions, the article focuses on the Swedish FFP on Twitter towards
two countries where feminism and even the concept of gender are highly contested –
Poland and Hungary. In these two countries the need for an FFP is obvious from a
Swedish perspective, with a lot of room for promotion of gender equality. Recognizing

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