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.
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, think tanks, 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.
Book project
Transforming Diplomacy from Within: Feminist institutional ethnography and the politics of practice (working title)
Currently in preparation, to be submitted by summer 2026.
Have you ever been inside a Ministry of Foreign Affairs? For most people, including most researchers, the answer is no. Despite diplomacy’s central place in international relations scholarship, the everyday practices of diplomacy inside Ministries of Foreign Affairs remain largely inaccessible. Hence, we still know remarkably little about what diplomats actually do, how their work is organised, and what political stakes shape their everyday practices. This lack of knowledge matters. Ministries of Foreign Affairs, and the diplomats who populate them, are far from marginal actors in world politics.
Diplomats work in a context marked by global contestations over feminist normative agendas, rising authoritarianism, and the erosion of multilateral norms. They are not merely observers of these struggles but are deeply implicated in them. Through their everyday practices, diplomats actively reproduce — and at times contest — global inequalities and hierarchies. What diplomats do is therefore part of the problem. At the same time, their practices also hold the potential to become part of the solution.
In this book, I develop what I call feminist institutional autoethnography. This is a novel method of inquiry that combines a feminist standpoint epistemology with auto/ethnographic attentiveness to the researcher self and the diplomatic everyday, while tracing the translocal institutional relations that shape them both. Feminist institutional autoethnography provides solutions for three persistent analytical problems in the study of diplomacy: how can researchers gain access to highly guarded state organisations such as Ministries of Foreign Affairs? How can we make sense of diplomatic practice, if all knowledge is situated and partial? And how can research produce knowledge that not only explains the social organisation of diplomacy but also contributes to transforming an institution that often remains unequal, hierarchical, and even oppressive?
This book does not engage in pure methodological advancement alone. Instead, it uses feminist institutional autoethnography to raise a set of broader questions about transformation: how do diplomats both advance and resist feminist commitments to more equality, diversity and inclusion in foreign policy? Are diplomatic civil servants actually accountable for changing the deeply unequal structures that underpin diplomacy, or are they merely cogs in a machine, implementing a politician’s orders? What social characteristics mark somebody as a member of the diplomatic corps in the first place, and how do diplomats both reproduce and contest exclusions that shape access a Ministry of Foreign Affairs? And, looking towards the future, how might we rethink and transform diplomacy in light of contemporary global challenges?
By foregrounding the everyday practices through which diplomacy is enacted, feminist institutional autoethnography helps explain why institutional and foreign policy reforms often stagnate, while also revealing where micro-resistances, incremental change, and transformative possibilities already exist. Attending to these practices — and building on the resistances embedded within them — offers a pathway for rethinking and transforming diplomacy from within.
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.