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Abstract

This essay critically engages with two important works on feminist foreign policy— Kristina Lunz’s The Future of Foreign Policy is Feminist and Cynthia Enloe’s Twelve Feminist Lessons of War—both of which offer useful insights for the evolving field of critical security studies. The authors of this essay have divergent backgrounds—a professor of women’s, gender, and sexuality studies and a defense scholar—which reflect a central tension in feminist foreign policy between feminist principles and the paradigms and exigencies of defense policy makers. Through a constructed conversation between its authors, this essay engages the arguments of Lunz and Enloe to ask how we can apply the ideas of feminist foreign policy to the immediate challenges that government officials and defense thinkers face on a daily basis. When confronted with immediate problems of violence and insecurity, we wonder whether, and in what ways, policymakers can learn from Enloe’s “feminist lessons of war,” and what they need on the ground to actually enact some of the key policy directives that are foundational to Lunz’s vision for feminist foreign policy. By discussing the ability of these texts to speak across audiences with competing interests, values, and worldviews, we emphasize the role of dialogue across difference in the balance between the ideal and the practical.

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