Neil Koenig, ideaXme board advisor interviews Kristina Lunz, Co-founder Centre for Feminist Foreign Policy.
Neil comments:
The battle of women for equality has been underway for centuries. But campaigners believe the rewards of success would be great; as Emily Venturi, a speaker at the 1878 International Congress of Women’s Rights in Paris put it, “the world would be transformed”.
Today, the push continues. One area where advocates believe progress is being made is in the field of foreign policy.
Kristina Lunz is an entrepreneur, author and activist. She is also co-founder of the Centre for Feminist Foreign Policy. I caught up with her at this year’s Symposium, an annual event organised by the students of the University of St. Gallen in Switzerland.
In this interview with me for ideaXme, Kristina Lunz talks about the long history of the struggle for women’s rights, how a feminist approach could transform the practice of foreign policy, and the reasons why she believes that a world where women had more say in how it was run would be a better place.
KRISTINA LUNZ – BIOGRAPHY
Kristina Lunz is co-founder and co-director of the Centre for Feminist Foreign Policy, an award-winning human rights activist and former advisor to the German Foreign Office. She was named one of the 30 under 30 (in Europe and DACH) by Forbes, is Handelsblatt/BCG “Thought Leader 2020”, Focus Magazine “100 Women of the Year 2020”, and was awarded “Young Elite – Top 40 under 40” by Capital Magazine, Additionally, she is an Atlantik Brücke Young Leader, Ashoka Fellow as well as a BMW Foundation Responsible Leader. Her book “The Future of Foreign Policy is Feminist” was published by Econ/Ullstein Verlag in February 2022. She holds a Bachelor’s degree in psychology, as well as a Master’s degree in global governance and ethics from University College London and another Master’s degree from the University of Oxford in Global Governance and Diplomacy. After graduation, she worked for the United Nations in Myanmar and for an NGO in Colombia, among others. Kristina Lunz has (co-)initiated several activist campaigns such as “No means No” and a campaign against sexism in the Bild newspaper.
Kristina Lunz ideaXme interview
Neil Koenig, ideaXme: [00:00:00] The ancient town of St. Gallen in Switzerland has been a centre of learning for centuries. And since 1969, the students of its university have organized an annual symposium bringing together leaders and thinkers of all ages from all over the world. This year, ideaXme joined them. One of the speakers at this year’s event was Kristina Lunz, an entrepreneur, author, activist, and founder of the Centre for Feminist Foreign Policy. I’m Neil Koenig, and I began this interview for ideaXme by asking Kristina Lunz to tell us more about feminist foreign policy.
Kristina Lunz Co-founder Centre for Feminist Foreign Policy: [00:00:44] Feminist foreign policy is the attempt and also vision to bring radical feminist thinking and analysis and demands into foreign and security policy. So that means a focus on human security and human rights instead of militarized security and the demand to prioritize those human rights, defending human rights, climate justice and a spending of annual and international budgets towards what makes our society safe, secure, and sustainable for everyone instead of contributing to the destructiveness that foreign policy has been in the past to a large extent.
Neil Koenig, ideaXme: [00:01:33] Where did this idea come from?
Kristina Lunz Co-founder Centre for Feminist Foreign Policy: [00:01:36] So feminist foreign policy and feminist activism and foreign and security policy has a long tradition. Actually, it was at least in 1915 that this idea was really translated into practical policy making when during the First World War in 1915, 1500 women feminists came together in The Hague for a conference, a women’s peace conference, to not only demand an end to the First World War, but additionally they published 20 resolutions on a new global order, and that included, for example, an end to secret diplomacy, like democratizing diplomacy, it also included an end of the industrial military complex. So, a too close interaction between the military, industry, and political decision makers. It also included peace mediation as a key tool for conflict resolution and so forth. It also included the establishment of an organization for conflict resolution and a court for arbitration. And most of the demands of those women and feminists back then, they were not listened to. But over the decades, most of them, except for disarmament, were actually put into reality.
Neil Koenig, ideaXme: [00:03:05] So this idea actually has quite a long history. I mean, maybe you can go back even further into when women were allowed to vote.
Kristina Lunz Co-founder Centre for Feminist Foreign Policy: [00:03:14] The women’s suffrage actually was one of the key demands as well at the conference in The Hague, because in 1915, most countries still did not have women’s suffrage. So, the movement towards feminist foreign policy emerged from the women’s suffrage movement. But yeah, you’re right. Potentially the origins are even earlier, but well, I’m not that aware. And most people wouldn’t be because our history books are full of the history and the stories of men and what men have achieved and kind of the silencing or the lack of visibility of women’s ideas and stories. To change that is one of the key motives of feminist activism as well.
Neil Koenig, ideaXme: [00:04:02] This idea seems to be having a bit of a moment just now. Why is that?
Kristina Lunz Co-founder Centre for Feminist Foreign Policy: [00:04:08] Yeah, indeed. So, by now we have 11 countries that officially have a feminist foreign policy and even more so that are currently developing one or are interested in the concept. There’s a group at the United Nations called Feminist Foreign Policy Plus Group and around 25/30 countries are engaging around that topic. Germany, for example, one of the leading industrialized countries, and published and presented their feminist foreign policy strategy in on the 1st of March this year. So, there’s a lot happening there more and more civil society organizations think tanks engaged in feminist foreign policy as well. And there’s this you know, I think because we live in this this time where the amount of crises is just so overwhelming and additionally statistics show that over the past ten years, between 2010 and 2020, the number of international conflicts and wars has doubled from roughly 30 to 60. So has the number of people killed in conflicts and wars. So has the number of people of refugees from around 40 million to 80 million. And by now it’s around 100 million people fleeing. So, there’s this desire for new solutions because traditional policy making not only for foreign policy, but policy making in general, has not contributed to a sustainable, safe, just environment for everyone where everyone’s needs and ideas and lived realities actually turned into policy making that will then serve everyone. But policy making traditionally has served this very limited group in society that has been in positions of power, and it’s just not working. It’s destroyed our environment, kind of the very conditions that we’re living on. And it has produced an environment where the latest figures last week have shown that more than 2 trillion US 2 trillion USD annually is spent on military budgets worldwide, when at the same time around 6.5 billion spent by the UN on peacekeeping. That is less than 0.4% of the annual global budgets on military spending. And with these decisions and these priorities, there’s no way that we can create a world that is safe in peace and secure for everyone.
Neil Koenig, ideaXme: [00:06:57] This notion seems to chime with other movements or processes going on at the moment of looking back at the past and questioning existing structures. I’m thinking, for example, of the way that colonialism is being given a fresh look.
Kristina Lunz Co-founder Centre for Feminist Foreign Policy: [00:07:16] Yeah, that is that is very true. I have a team, my organization, we are a team of 17 people in Berlin and we’re working on, on feminism and foreign policy in different areas from climate justice and defending human rights, disarmament, feminist international assistance policy. And in all these areas, how we approach the work is always from an intersectional perspective. So really trying to understand at the same time not only the different forms of oppression and discrimination and different groups of people experience, which leads to a very diverse range of lived experiences, but also making the connections between different dynamics such as colonialism or neo colonialism. That is unfair power structures and dependencies between global North and global South countries that still exist. So especially when you talk to feminist grassroots organizations in the Global South, the feminist movement for them has always been very strongly connected with the Decolonial movement. So, we are trying to bring in Decolonial perspectives into our work as well.
Neil Koenig, ideaXme: [00:08:38] How can you go about implementing something like this when men seem to have still such a firm grip on power in many countries, including many of the largest countries?
Kristina Lunz Co-founder Centre for Feminist Foreign Policy: [00:08:53] It’s tough. So how we work is mainly through advocacy. So, we’ve been advocating towards the German government to implement a feminist foreign policy for the past five years. Germany just implemented a feminist foreign policy. We are advising other governments on their strategies on feminist foreign policy, but we also producing knowledge because you know, what you focus on gets bigger. And if foreign ministries around the world are packed with strategies on militarization and like the procurement of weapons and the and, and, and economic strategies. But there are no strategies on how to support civil society in autocratic regimes. Then there’s a problem. So, what we are doing is we are realizing we’re implementing projects. We’re currently implementing around 11/12 projects funded by different entities, for example, on producing knowledge, like guidelines on how countries can support feminist civil society in autocratic regimes. We also producing knowledge working with the Ukrainian civil society. On what would a feminist approach towards Russia’s war in Ukraine look like. We’re working with leading Afghan women human rights defenders to bring their demands on how the international community should deal with the Taliban into [00:10:25] foreign policy fora. [00:10:27] So this is how we are trying to implement feminist thinking into concrete policy making.
Neil Koenig, ideaXme: [00:10:35] It doesn’t necessarily have to be grand strategies. I remember listening to a podcast where you were talking about the issue raised by what sounds like a very good idea: turning off streetlights at night in order to save power. But that can have unforeseen consequences.
Kristina Lunz Co-founder Centre for Feminist Foreign Policy: [00:10:55] Yeah, and those unforeseen consequences are that the lived experiences of men and women and non-binary people they’re different when we walk home at night because some of us are a lot more targeted by male violence than others. And the safety, the feeling for security is so different for different groups of society, which is why feminist foreign policy focuses on human security. Human security is this understanding that everyone should be safe and secure when it comes to basic needs, such as having a roof over the head, education, access to health. And the concept tries to recognize that depending on how we’re socialized, depending on factors such as our gender, race, religion, sexuality, we experience society very differently because society reacts differently to different groups because of those characteristics. And human security tries to take this into account and knows that only because a country spends millions and billions on weaponry and arms does by no means mean that the people within this country are safe. It’s quite the opposite, for example, for people who are racialized a securitization of the police, for example, can have very negative implications for men of colour and the concept of human security challenges, the idea that militarized security means security for everyone.
Neil Koenig, ideaXme: [00:12:36] There have been throughout history female leaders, female political leaders, and they’re not always the most diplomatic of folk, are they? As indeed can be said, of many men.
Kristina Lunz Co-founder Centre for Feminist Foreign Policy: [00:12:52] Yeah, there have been female leaders that that were great. And then others were just as destructive as the society by which they were socialized by. And first of all, I think it’s important that we recognize that just because someone might be a woman, it doesn’t mean that they are feminist. If someone is a man doesn’t mean they can’t be feminist. And then at the same time, so the current figures are that roughly, I think 10/12% of leaders like heads of governments, heads of states worldwide are women. Historically that has been even less at any given point in history. So those very few instances where we had women as leaders, I think it might be even more kind of standing out if they were like particularly bad leaders. But I think we will only have really reached equity at some point if we allow, for example, for women to be just as bad leaders as for men. Of course, ideally, they wouldn’t be because we need great leaders from all genders for the sake of a good and healthy future. But just speaking of equity, women should have the chance to be just as under average as some of the male leaders.
Neil Koenig, ideaXme: [00:14:32] What are the sort of timescales you’re thinking about?
Kristina Lunz Co-founder Centre for Feminist Foreign Policy: [00:14:35] So I think feminist foreign policy practitioners and thinkers, are really good at distinguishing between short, medium and long term, knowing that in the short term sometimes we need reactions or solutions, while in the short term it’s mainly reactions that try to mitigate violence and the destructiveness that is out there in patriarchal societies that can include the delivery of weapons, for example, in a concrete situation of war. But in the medium and long term, we need better. Solutions that start building societies that do not have such a high potential for violence to then turn into real violence. So, speaking of a timeline, when it comes to like transforming foreign and security policy making, well, I hope that in the short term, maybe the next 1 to 5 years, we will see to handful of other countries adopting a feminist foreign policy and in the medium to long term. So, speaking of decades and maybe even centuries that we as a society, start to recognize that there cannot be foreign policy making without putting human rights at the very centre. And we you know, if we if we look at concrete examples, for example, Iran and Germany’s response towards Iran, the support by our current foreign minister, Annalena Baerbock, with regards to the women protesters and all protesters on the street, that is unprecedented. And in the past, there were protests in Iran as well. But heads of state in Germany preferred congratulating the leaders of Iran on kind of on the anniversary of the Islamic revolution in 1979, instead of questioning how women are treated in the country. So, individuals and Nobel laureates such as Shirin Ebadi, (the first female Peace Laureate from the Islamic World) would say that it has been because of economic interests, because they overshadowed the urge to challenge regimes and for their treatment of women’s rights and human rights and a feminist foreign policy. In the medium to long term, there can be no question that human rights always have to be at the core and that economic interests will never, would never be allowed to take precedence over human rights.
Neil Koenig, ideaXme: [00:17:15] Can you think of any examples where this kind of thing has worked in the sense that, say, a developed country has taken a stand on some issue and there’s been a positive response that something has changed in another country.
Kristina Lunz Co-founder Centre for Feminist Foreign Policy: [00:17:33] So, when Donald Trump became president, he enacted the Global Gag Rule, again, the Mexico City Policy, meaning that there was no US American funding to any NGOs, organizations that work on abortion, sexual reproductive health, and rights, including abortion. So, the many organizations around the world all of a sudden lacked millions of funds and necessary funds to provide health care and health support to girls and women around the world. And what we saw then is countries, I think, at the forefront there was where the Netherlands, who stepped in and set up a big fund to compensate for that lack of money, for example. That is a beautiful example.
Neil Koenig, ideaXme: [00:18:25] So this works, then.
Kristina Lunz Co-founder Centre for Feminist Foreign Policy: [00:18:28] It can work. If political leaders, if governments that are formed by political leaders dare to question old conventions and dare to take new paths.
Neil Koenig, ideaXme: [00:18:44] So what do you see as the biggest challenges you face at the moment?
Kristina Lunz Co-founder Centre for Feminist Foreign Policy: [00:18:50] The biggest challenge is always conventions and the forces that try to keep the status quo. So too many people have an interest in keeping the status quo. So, this is one problem. And then even more so for a couple of years, for the past 5 to 10 years, we have seen an ever increasing and antifeminist movement, which is very closely linked to the autocratic movement. And it’s a movement that is well organized, extremely well-funded. Between 2009 and 2018, more than 700 million USD were invested into Europe, mainly from the US and Russia to um, to eradicate especially women’s and LGBTQ rights kind to attack the human rights system by supporting countries to challenge the Istanbul Convention, an important convention against male violence against women by challenging same sex marriage and so forth. So, this entire feminist, anti-democratic, autocratic international movement, is getting stronger and stronger.
Kristina Lunz Co-founder Centre for Feminist Foreign Policy: [00:20:13] We are seeing the percentage of democracies around the world at one of its lowest since, of course, we had the peak and the development to more democratic countries. But since then, there has been this decline. And authors such as Gideon Rachman in his book On The Age of the Strongman: How the Cult of the Leader Threatens, he argues that we currently seeing the most severe attack on liberal democratic rights since the 1930’s. So, this is one of the biggest challenges.
Neil Koenig, ideaXme: [00:20:48] Who are your allies? Can the business world help you? Because they’ve been grappling with the issue of diversity for some time now.
Kristina Lunz Co-founder Centre for Feminist Foreign Policy: [00:20:57] Well, they have the money, so of course, they can help us. You know, in our society, one of the big, big problems is that profits are being privatized and externalities and costs are being put on communities as a whole. And then you have activists, human rights defenders, climate defenders, non-profit organizations that come in and try to clean up the mess. Those costs and externalities that are very often caused by those who at the same time have the privilege of privatizing the profits. And that is such a huge injustice. So, it is the private sectors. It’s the companies that are in a position to privatize profits in a way that is completely out of proportion and unfair and unjust. So, I would expect that companies that the corporate world invests heavily into fighting the climate crisis, supporting human rights defenders and those who are cleaning up the mess.
Neil Koenig, ideaXme: [00:22:06] Do you get any help from female business leaders?
Kristina Lunz Co-founder Centre for Feminist Foreign Policy: [00:22:10] We do here and there, especially a couple of really cool Berlin based female founded start-ups. But there’s lots of scope for improvement.
Neil Koenig, ideaXme: [00:22:23] What would be your advice to younger people who are thinking of working in the area that you work in now?
Kristina Lunz Co-founder Centre for Feminist Foreign Policy: [00:22:32] Question conventions all the time. The very ideas for success, for how our society should work, for how power is being distributed, that it’s outdated and it has never it will never lead to a fair society. So please question conventions around, you know, when there’s this game when, you know, when we all close our eyes and we have to imagine, okay, so everything is back to square zero and you wake up tomorrow and you have no control over where in the world you would be reborn. What would you prefer? That we have a world with like equal opportunities everywhere? Or would we keep the world where we have most opportunities and most wealth in a couple of countries and huge parts of the world would not enjoy many basic human rights because most of us would say, oh please, let’s have like equally distributed and fair world. If I have no control over where I would be reborn. So, for younger people, please question and conventions around why you deserve to have a certain career path. Why, why the world is built this way, why it is certain companies that should be able to make so much profit and why it is that. Human rights defenders in many countries in the world live under so much personal risk and in unsafe conditions and question how opportunities are distributed and question who’s making decisions for whom and whose stories and lived experiences are not included in the decision-making processes. Yeah. Question conventions.
Neil Koenig, ideaXme: [00:24:37] Kristina Lunz, thank you very much.
Kristina Lunz Co-founder Centre for Feminist Foreign Policy: [00:24:39] Thank you.
Watch the interview on ideaXme’s YouTube channel.
IMAGE CREDITS
Portraits of Kristina Lunz: courtesy of the Centre for Feminist Foreign Policy.
Interview credits: Neil Koenig.
Neil Koenig: LinkedIn https://www.linkedin.com/in/neilkoenig/
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