Research
Research areas
Feminist foreign policy
Feminist foreign policy has increasingly gained political salience worldwide: to date, 16 states have adopted — and five later dropped – the ‘feminist’ label for their foreign policies. But what does feminist foreign policy mean? Does it change how we understand and practice foreign policy? Or does it reproduce existing inequalities, hierarchies, and power relations?
My research explores these questions, with a particular focus on the German feminist foreign policy.
Diplomacy and gender, race, and class
Diplomacy doesn’t operate in a vacuum — it is shaped by gender, race, and class. These social structures influence who gets access to diplomatic spaces, the roles people play within them, and the trajectories of diplomatic careers. They also affect how diplomacy is practiced and who is recognised as a legitimate diplomat.
My research explores how diplomatic institutions such as the German Federal Foreign Office are gendered, classed, and raced, and how this has changed over time.
Everyday knowledge production in foreign policy
Who makes foreign policy, and how? While attention often centres on high-profile state representatives, foreign policy is crafted by a wide range of actors: diplomats, civil servants, academics, civil society organisations, and others.
My research explores how different actors engage in knowledge production on and in foreign policy, and how they do so in and through their everyday professional practices.
Empirical focus
My research centres on German foreign policy, with a particular focus on the German Federal Foreign Office (FFO). Over the past eight years, I have developed deep, sustained engagement with the FFO, both as a researcher and as a civil society representative. I am one of the very few ethnographers to have conducted participant observation within this institution, providing me with unique, in-depth insight into its inner workings.
This long-term engagement has positioned me as an expert on the FFO and its role in shaping Germany’s foreign policy. I have begun publishing on this work, drawing on rich empirical data to analyse how foreign policy is produced, practised, and contested within this key institution.
Methodological focus
I mainly work with (and write about) feminist and critical methodologies that draw on the following approaches:
institutional ethnography,
ethnography and auto-ethnography,
practice analysis, and
discourse-theoretical analysis.
Dissertation project
Producing feminist foreign policy in the everyday: An institutional ethnography of the German Federal Foreign Office
King’s College London, submitted October 2024, defended January 2025.
Germany adopted a feminist foreign policy in 2021, positioning the Federal Foreign Office (FFO) at the centre of its development and implementation. My research offers the first ethnographic study of this process, investigating how diplomats and other policy practitioners within the FFO produce and negotiate the meaning of feminist foreign policy in their everyday work.
Using feminist institutional ethnography, I trace how dominant understandings of feminism — particularly white and (neo)liberal strands — shape policy practices. I then ask: how is German feminist foreign policy produced as it is? In other words, how is it that it emerges as a white and (neo)liberal project? I identify three key dynamics: the reproduction of a white, masculine German sense of Self and related diplomatic subjectivities; the framing of feminism as having to be accessible to white men; and the institutional capture of external feminist knowledge. While these dynamics often limit transformative potential, they are also continually contested. This reveals both the constraints and possibilities for change within foreign policy institutions.
This project contributes to feminist research on foreign policy and institutional power, offering insights relevant to scholars, civil society actors, and policy practitioners engaged in feminist politics and institutional change.