In 2007, India sent an all-woman police unit to a United Nations mission in Liberia, where they carried out 24-hour guard duty, public orde...
In 2007, India sent an all-woman police unit to a United Nations mission in Liberia, where they carried out 24-hour guard duty, public order management and night patrols. The example set by the Indian women led to a four-fold jump in the number of women in Liberia applying to the police, according to the United Nations Mission in Liberia.
This deployment is often touted as one of the ways in which including more women in foreign policy actions – particularly in “hard power” areas like security and military issues – can have a major impact.
Ambika Vishwanath would like to see such efforts fit into a broader structure. Vishwanath, who co-founded a public policy organisation called the Kubernein Initiative, has argued that India needs a “feminist foreign policy”, one where a “a gendered approach [is] mainstreamed into broader policy objectives”, and that goes “beyond conventional considerations of development assistance and domestic policies to include core areas of foreign policy, economics, finance, trade and security.”
I spoke to Vishwanath about what a “feminist foreign policy” for India would actually look like, the Kubernein Initiative’s research into what practitioners and observers think of the idea, why it isn’t as simple as “adding women and stirring” and how many respond...
