Incredibly loud and extremely silent: Feminist foreign policy on Twitter

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.