Racial and migratory silences in EU feminist foreign policy: A comparative theoretical reflection with India

This paper critically examines how race and migration are largely sidelined in the European Union’s (EU) feminist foreign policy (FFP) discourse, and compares these dynamics to India’s foreign policy practices. Drawing on feminist international relations (IR) and postcolonial theory, it highlights how the EU constructs a form of “Feminist Power Europe” (FPE) that often upholds gender equality in principle while overlooking colonial legacies, racial hierarchies, and migration issues. Analysing recent scholarship—including Guerrina et al. (2023) and Achilleos-Sarll et al. (2023)—we find that EU FFP tends to frame gender narrowly (often as women’s equality) and treats migration superficially, reproducing “gendered, racialized, and colonial” logics. By contrast, India’s foreign policy, though lacking an explicit FFP, reflects its anticolonial history and emerging feminist aspirations in different ways. India often advances gender equality rhetorically on global stages but faces domestic patriarchal barriers and does not foreground race in its policy. We compare institutional and historical contexts: the EU’s supranational framework and colonial past versus India’s postcolonial statehood and Global South identity. This theoretical paper uses feminist content analysis of policy texts and secondary literature, supplemented by comparative case insights, to argue that both EU and India must more fully integrate intersectional and postcolonial perspectives into foreign policy. The study concludes that a genuinely transformative FFP would require reflexivity about power hierarchies and centering marginalized voices in policy-making.