The gendered coloniality of current development policies : A critical discourse analysis of the Swedish feminist foreign policy

Sammanfattning: In 2014, Sweden became the first country in the world to explicitly adopt a feminist foreign policy. Since then many countries have followed their example by putting gender equality, feminism and the rights of women on their agenda for foreign policy. The application of a Westernised perception of feminism on states within a culturally different context has however faced some critique. Taking into account the troubled relationship that Western First world feminism has had with colonialism, alongside the criticism that contemporary international development has faced, there is an academic relevance to the contribution and exploration of the nascent field of feminist foreign policy. This study takes a critical approach towards the Eurocentric Westernized perception of development and feminism, with the objective to see how current development policies could potentially reinforce and reproduce colonial structures through the discourse of Western feminism. By taking a feminist postcolonial approach to deconstructive discourse analysis, this study unveils the reproduction of unequal power structures through the development discourse, Western feminist discourse and neoliberal discourse.