Beyond the Epistemological Vagaries of Gender in Critical Geopolitics: Navigating the Feminist Foreign Policy Odyssey

The feminist scholarship in international relations, despite its subversive quest-driven methodological innovation, deconstruction of gender, investigation of power relations, and epistemological adventurism with time has been criticised for overlooking its axiological dimension. The normative commitment of the feminist project has stood for inclusivity, gender justice, equity, and sensitivity towards marginalisation and gendered discrimination while upholding strong self-reflexive credentials. On the other hand, the omnipresence of gender has extended beyond the realm of a mere analytical variable and a research tool to the decision-making establishment of nation-states while shaping the international political agenda. In the course of its disciplinary trajectory, critical geopolitics as an offshoot of geopolitics has embodied gender and feminism in its theoretical dynamics, and its shortcomings were subsequently bridged by the emergence of the feminist geopolitics perspective. While critical geopolitics from the very beginning exuded postmodern and poststructuralist assertions by categorically refuting traditional essentialist assumptions, feminist geopolitics stood for re-envisioning gender and the point of intersection between the narratives of political geography and feminist geography. However, the chronic lacuna in the concretisation of feminist foreign-policy-making approaches in international relations demonstrated the epistemological nebulousness and tokenism associated with the global feminist project, which needed to be mitigated to ensure gender parity and social justice. The research paper aims to advance the case of feminist foreign policy-making in international relations as a novel political framework by establishing its advantages vis-à-vis the emerging dynamics of world affairs. It navigates the journey toward feminist foreign policy-making while introducing the concepts of gender, feminism, geopolitics, critical geopolitics, feminist geopolitics, and feminist scholarship within the disciplinary ambit of international relations by following a qualitative research methodology using secondary sources.