“We try to be nuanced everywhere all the time”: Sweden’s feminist foreign policy and discursive closure in public diplomacy

This study examines how public diplomacy practitioners deal with gender dynamics as a form of ideological issue in foreign policy. Informed by the theory of discursive closure, this study focuses on understanding how Swedish public diplomacy practitioners make sense of the country’s feminist foreign policy in their daily work and what consequences this has for the communication of it. Based on semi-structured interviews and policy documents, the research finds that the practitioners discursively enact certain meanings of the feminist foreign policy. This is illustrated as downplaying and packaging feminism as entertainment, associating feminism with male practices and the terminology of “gender equality,” and subordinating feminism to an economic growth paradigm. Thus, the tension created by the issues raised in the feminist foreign policy is neutralized in Sweden's public diplomacy while a different meaning of these issues is created. The research contributes to a more practitioner-focused view on public diplomacy.