Event Highlights: Towards a Feminist Foreign Policy with Ambassador Veronika Wand-Danielsson
This virtual discussion with Veronika Wand Danielsson, Head of the Americas Directorate at Sweden’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs and former Ambassador of Sweden to NATO and to France, took place on Monday, March 29, 2021. Julie Suk, Florence Rogatz Visiting Professor of Law and a Senior Research Scholar at Yale Law School and Professor of Sociology, Political Science, and Liberal Studies at CUNY, provided comments. Amb. Vesko Garčević, Professor of the Practice of International Relations at BU’s Pardee School and a former NATO colleague of Amb. Wand-Danielsson, moderated the event.
In her remarks, Amb. Wand-Danielsson described her own country’s leading role in advancing the rights of women, especially during the last 50 years, with breakthrough reforms that have strengthened the position of women in Swedish society and encouraged their participation in the labor market. Sweden’s parental leave policy, for example, has been reformed several times in order to encourage equal parenthood and overcome discrimination in hiring. Wand-Danielsson shared her view that government has a responsibility to integrate gender perspectives (the different needs of men and women, for example) in all policy areas, including foreign policy.
In her comments, Prof. Suk praised Sweden as an example of what is possible when democratic institutions really commit to women’s emancipation and empowerment as a project not only for women but for government generally, as something beneficial not only to women but to everyone. She described how differently the gender equality debate has played out in the US, where there has been great success in fighting gender stereotypes but without the parallel expansion of the social welfare state that supported the transformation of gender roles in Sweden.