What’s in a Label? Feminist Foreign Policy from the Maldives

On 20 June 2022, the Maldives Permanent Representative to the UN, Thilmeeza Hussain, introduced a resolution at the United Nations General Assembly that would establish 24 June as the International Day of Women in Diplomacy. The resolution attracted extraordinary support, with 191 UN member states joining as co-sponsors. She described the new international day as an opportunity to reflect on the challenges faced by women diplomats and on what more needed to be done to secure their “full, equal, effective and meaningful participation in diplomacy.” A small island developing state had successfully placed the recognition and participation of women in diplomacy onto the global institutional calendar.

Women’s participation in diplomacy is, however, only one dimension of Feminist Foreign Policy. FFP also asks whose security and experiences foreign policy recognises, which forms of insecurity it prioritises, and whose voices shape the response. For the Maldives, this opens up a particularly important dimension: climate vulnerability. If the consequences of climate change are experienced differently by women and men, then the Maldives’ long-standing diplomacy on climate vulnerability and climate justice also deserves to be examined through a feminist foreign policy lens.

Yet the Maldives rarely features prominently in discussions of Feminist Foreign Policy. The familiar story usually begins with Sweden’s formal adoption of a Feminist Foreign Policy in 2014 and moves through the countries that subsequently adopted their own versions. But this raises a question: do we recognise feminist foreign policy only when a state gives it that name? The Maldives has never formally adopted a Feminist Foreign Policy. Yet it has promoted women’s representation within its diplomatic service, helped create an international norm recognising women in diplomacy, and for decades pursued a foreign policy centred on climate vulnerability and climate justice. These are not separate strands. Rather, the lived experience of a small island developing state on the front lines of climate change offers a perspective that can broaden existing FFP frameworks beyond questions of women’s representation alone, towards questions of human security, livelihood, displacement and climate justice, and the deeply gendered ways in which these are experienced. Looked at from Malé rather than from the capitals in which Feminist Foreign Policy acquired its contemporary vocabulary, its boundaries begin to look rather different.

Climate diplomacy provides perhaps the clearest example. The Maldives was drawing international attention to sea-level rise long before climate change occupied its present place in global politics. At the 1987 Commonwealth Heads of Government Meeting in Vancouver, President Maumoon Abdul Gayoom called for an expert study of sea-level rise and its implications for low-lying states, preceding the establishment of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change in 1988. Two years later, the Maldives convened the Small States Conference on Sea Level Rise, resulting in the Malé Declaration. Successive governments have since continued to use the United Nations, the Commonwealth and the COP process to highlight the existential vulnerability of small island states. Climate change has therefore not simply been one issue among many in Maldivian external relations; it has become an enduring strand of the country’s foreign policy.

The gendered dimensions of this climate vulnerability become visible when we ask who bears its consequences. Following the 2004 tsunami, women involved in fish processing in Kandholhudhoo lost an important source of income and financial autonomy, while women farmers in Vaadhoo have faced declining agricultural yields associated with changing weather patterns and tidal swells. Former Foreign Minister Abdulla Shahid captured this intersection powerfully: “Globally, the Maldives and other small islands are on the front lines of climate change; and locally, on our front lines are our women.” But women are not simply those affected by policy. Under Shahid, women at one point held 50 per cent of the Maldives’ ambassadorial and high commissioner posts, while the country subsequently appointed its first female Foreign Secretary. Together with the International Day of Women in Diplomacy, these developments return us to two interconnected questions at the heart of Feminist Foreign Policy: who gets to make foreign policy, and what should foreign policy consider important?

Perhaps, then, the more useful question is not whether the Maldives should formally adopt a Feminist Foreign Policy, but what the Maldives can contribute to its definition.

The Maldivian experience suggests that Feminist Foreign Policy might begin not with a prescribed set of policies, but with the lived experience of insecurity. For a small island developing state, the distinction between “foreign” and “domestic” policy is particularly porous when decisions taken far beyond its shores can determine the security of its territory, livelihoods and communities. Climate change makes this especially stark. A feminist approach viewed from the Maldives would therefore place climate justice alongside more established FFP concerns, asking not only how women are represented in foreign-policy institutions, but whose experiences of insecurity count, whose knowledge informs international responses, and who has the power to shape the rules under which those responses are made. In this sense, the Maldives does more than provide another national example of Feminist Foreign Policy: its experience can help shift the framework towards one that takes climate vulnerability, unequal global power and the perspectives of small states more seriously.

For SIDS, climate change threatens territory, livelihoods, economic security and potentially displacement; climate justice therefore cannot be separated from human security, and its gendered consequences cannot be separated from gender justice. Decolonising Feminist Foreign Policy means recognising that feminist principles can exist without the label and allowing the experiences of small, climate-vulnerable states to reshape the framework itself. Women from SIDS must be seen not simply as vulnerable populations or beneficiaries of policies designed elsewhere, but as diplomats, policymakers and producers of knowledge capable of shaping global norms. Otherwise, Feminist Foreign Policy risks reinforcing the very hierarchy it seeks to challenge, one in which the Global North produces the concepts and the Global South is expected to adopt them.