Ontological Insecurity, Canada’s Feminist Foreign Policy, and Russia’s Invasion

• In Event: International Security and Canadian Politics

Abstract

Since 2017, Canada has been a leading member of countries committing to feminist-oriented foreign policies (FFP). Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine provides perhaps the most salient challenge to the effectiveness and consistency of its FFP. How has Canada made sense of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in light of its FFP? Has consistent U.S. support of Ukraine altered its considerations? Has the Trudeau government framed support of the Ukrainian military, including the supply of lethal weaponry, within feminist frameworks? Or have feminist sentiments been abandoned in the face of full-scale war in Europe?
This paper adopts an ontological security approach to examine how feminist self-narratives of Canadian foreign policy have been applied or adjusted in light of the crisis in Ukraine. This paper begins from the premise that Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine has increased global anxiety and uncertainty surrounding not just the security of territory, but security of identity. As such, Canada, despite being located thousands of miles away from the frontline, has faced ontological insecurity as it responds to Russian hostilities with policy while simultaneously seeking to reify and re-assert self-narratives of who Canada is in a world of fast-changing circumstances and actors. I first examine narratives of Canadian identity as feminist within the Canadian government’s official feminist foreign policy documents. Using narrative analysis, I establish the specific narratives describing how Canada is a feminist country. Next, I examine the Justin Trudeau government’s public response to the Russian invasion since February 2022 to investigate if / how the government has framed Canada’s support of Ukraine within extant narratives of Canada as a feminist country. Canada provides a unique example in exploring the consistency and inconsistency of feminist self-narratives among FFP countries as the Canadian government has been among the most outspoken governments against the Putin regime and a leading contributor of lethal military equipment to support Ukraine.
Recent studies of FFP have focused particularly on how foreign policy documents represent specific forms of feminism at the expense of other feminisms, yet this paper advances in a different direction. Rather than asking “What’s feminist about Canada’s feminist foreign policy?” I ask “what is Canadian about Canada’s feminist foreign policy?” shifting the focus to identity narratives within these documents.

Author

• Taylor Robertson McDonald, American University