In 2014 Sweden proclaimed that it was the first country in the world to purse a feminist foreign policy in response to the discrimination and systemic subordination of women and girls, which continued to mark their lives around the world. This policy entailed applying a systematic gender equality perspective throughout foreign policy. As a provocation, it also implied an impact to security policy as well. Since then, the policy perspective has worked hand in hand with visions of development politics and is an increasingly interesting concept in the current decade during which Europe focuses on bettering its foreign relations with Africa.

The panel describes and discusses the launch, context and content of the feminist foreign policy led by Margot Wallström in Sweden as well as the dialogue with Africa and other continents it implied. Already decades before, the Cold War government of Olof Palme sought to represent a significantly visible alternative choice in its foreign policy by championing the rights of the global south together with campaigns for disarmament on an ideological and an internationalist intellectual level. This panel discusses this Cold War past from the perspective of the feminist foreign policy that followed the era as a conversation.

This is the second of two public events which are part of a conference 'Influence of Choice: Alternative histories of non-hegemonic foreign policy in the Cold War', co-hosted by the Cold War Studies Project and the Peace and Security Project based at LSE IDEAS. The first event is Empirical Cases, Directions and Choices of Foreign Policy in the Cold War on Thursday 3 December.

Click here to view the full conference programme.

Event hashtag: #LSEColdWar

Katja Ahlfors is the Director of the Unit for Development Policy of the Foreign Ministry of Finland. She was posted in Stockholm in 2014 and reported on the launch of the policy.

Peter Stadius is a Professor of Nordic Studies and the Director of the Nordic Studies Institute at the University of Helsinki. He is a regular commentator on Sweden in the Swedish and Finnish Swedish language press.