Saving Women, Selling War: Feminist Foreign Policy as a Tool of Imperial Power
PHOTO: Dutch Panzerhaubitz fires in Afghanistan (28 February 2009), Gerben van Es/Ministerie van Defensie on Wikimedia Commons
When Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu invoked the rights of Iranian women to rally international support for military action against Tehran, it brought people a sense of deja vu. The language was familiar — the appeal to women’s dignity, the implicit promise of liberation — but so was the source: a long tradition of Western imperialism that historically used the rhetoric of saving women to legitimise war.
The cynicism was made sharper by the context. Netanyahu was calling on Iranian women to rise up against the very conditions to which he had subjected Palestinians, invoking the rights of women while his own military was killing women in Gaza. This is the use of women’s rights as a moral cover for what it really is — an invasion.
Here, “feminist foreign policy” refers not to its ideal formulation — policy designed to advance women’s rights — but to the way Western governments selectively deploy feminist language to legitimise military intervention. This co‑opted form, often described as securo‑feminism, merges gender discourse with security agendas.
PHOTO: “We Can Do It!” poster, later adopted as an icon of feminist empowerment despite its original purpose as wartime labour advertisement (circa 1942 and 1943), J Howard Miller on Wikimedia Commons
The Civilising Mission Rebranded
The association between women’s emancipation and imperial conquest is historic. British colonial occupations of Egypt were routinely justified through appeals to the liberation of local women from local men.
This logic has its roots in a broader grammar of honour. The political theorist Ute Frevert, in her analysis of the outbreak of World War I, identifies a pattern: every participant framed their entry into war as defensive. Military mobilisation was justified as a perceived affront to national honour. Because honour was understood as a “right to respect”, an affront to it demanded defence; diplomatic protest was insufficient. And because honour had been wounded, war became morally obligatory as a means to restore dignity.
The parallel to contemporary feminist foreign policy is not incidental. When Western states invoke the oppression of women in other societies, they are deploying a structurally identical grammar: our values, liberal and gender-equal, have been affronted by the mere existence of these regimes. The women being “saved” are symbols of the honour of liberalism itself, proof that Western democracy is worth projecting outward by force.
What is crucial here is that honour, in Frevert’s analysis, operates as a relational concept: to be dishonoured is to be humiliated, and humiliation demands a response that restores dignity through force. This dynamic runs directly beneath the surface of feminist foreign policy. When Western governments frame the oppression of women in Muslim-majority societies as an attack on universal values, they are not merely expressing concern, they are constructing a narrative of affront.
The honour-humiliation axis cuts both ways, and this is where the analysis becomes most uncomfortable. The humiliation of Arab men is this framework’s operative mechanism. Edward Said’s analysis in Orientalism argues that Western representations of the “East” were never neutral descriptions but part of a broader political project that cast Eastern societies as inherently inferior. Thus, within this framework, when Arab masculinity is systematically represented as savage, through media and military conduct alike, it is done so as part of a long-standing Orientalist tradition that casts Eastern societies as inherently unstable and in need of external control. The humiliation is structural because it arises from these inherited narratives of “otherness”. And when that humiliation is eventually met with violent resistance, the resistance can be used as proof of the original premise: these men are inherently violent, a pattern documented in Palestinian resistance movements.
What has changed in the 21st century is that colonial powers no longer speak in the blunt language of civilising missions. They speak in the language of human rights and gender. This public branding appears considerably more progressive and thus more palatable.
Afghanistan and the Birth of Securo-Feminism
PHOTO: US Army Staff Sgt. Guy Cooper walks by two Afghan women while performing a presence patrol (16 February 2012), Ken Scars on Wikimedia Commons
The most sustained deployment of feminist language in service of imperial war followed September 11, 2001. Within weeks, the Bush administration began framing the invasion of Afghanistan partly in feminist terms, presenting the liberation of Afghan women as one of the reasons for military intervention alongside broader security claims. America was not just bombing a weakened country; it was delivering gender equality.
“Securo-feminists were not simply invested in fighting the War on Terror; they were committed to using American military power to export American values.”
Its consequences were revealing. Millions of dollars were poured into programmes aimed at turning Afghan women into intelligence assets, premised on the belief that Brown women would align with American forces over their own families. When these initiatives failed, the blame was placed on cultural pathology rather than on the violence of occupation itself. The assumption was that Afghan women were detached from the men being imprisoned and killed.
Once the United States had extracted what it needed — securing a strong enough presence, to better leverage its control of the available oil interests in the Caspian Sea — feminist concern receded. Media attention dropped after 2004, and when conditions for women collapsed following America’s withdrawal in 2021, the outcome was framed as unexpected, rather than as the predictable result of a project that had never centred Afghan women’s interests.
Palestine: Feminism as Colonial Cover
PHOTO: IDF female soldiers during training (29 March 2006), Artur Andrychowski on Wikimedia Commons
Western media coverage has reproduced a consistent asymmetry: Palestinian women and children are occasionally mourned as victims of collateral damage, while Palestinian men, killed in their tens of thousands, are absorbed as an acceptable loss.
The comparison drawn in Western media between victimised Palestinian women and the heroic women of the IDF is instructive. In this framing, the IDF’s inclusion of women soldiers is presented as evidence of gender equality and civilisational achievement, with military force as its natural expression. As Zillah Eisenstein argues, women are permitted access to military power not as an end in itself, but conditionally, and only when that power is exercised against people even lower in the social hierarchy due to being racialised.
Iran: Rights as Geopolitical Weapon
The Iranian feminist movement has been systematically co-opted by governments, including Israel seeking leverage over the Iranian state. The women who took to the streets did so from within their own political context, on their own terms. Israel and America amplified their struggle not in solidarity but in service of their own objectives.
The cynicism of this co-optation becomes visible when considering what happens to Iranian women after they have served their rhetorical purpose. Netanyahu called on the Iranian people to rise up, and yet when there were at least 165 schoolgirls killed in Minab and many more injured by Israeli strikes in late February of this year, no corresponding speech by Netanyahu responded to those deaths.
The concern, as always, was situational. Activated when it serves geopolitical aims. Extinguished when it does not.
Visibility as Alibi: My Lai, Abu Ghraib and the Limits of Liberal Outrage
At My Lai in 1968, where US Marines killed hundreds of unarmed Vietnamese civilians, the atrocity was viewed as evidence of the true nature of war. The horror appeared systemic, generating sustained anti-war mobilisation — when American liberalism had not yet perfected its moral self-justifications. By contrast, when the Abu Ghraib photographs emerged decades later in 2004, depicting the sexualised and racialised torture of Iraqi prisoners, they entered a political landscape already saturated with language of democratic liberation. Rather than destabilising the occupation, the images were absorbed into a liberal frame that recast torture as individual deviance. The dominant question became not “what is being done to them?” but “what does this say about us”
This was crucial. Shock shifted concern toward America’s moral image rather than the structural reality that torture was a constitutive feature of occupation.
This honour–humiliation loop is self-reinforcing. Arab men are framed as inherently violent. Violence against them is rendered legitimate. Their resistance becomes further proof of their brutality. Feminist foreign policy does not interrupt this cycle; rather, it supplies the moral vocabulary that keeps it turning. It reframes domination as ethical intervention, obscuring the fact that violence is not an aberration of liberal interventionism but one of its organising principles.
Race, Gender and the Architecture of Intervention
Central to feminist foreign policy is a set of racialised assumptions about who is capable of violence, who requires rescue and whose lives are grievable. The villainisation of Arab and Muslim men is not incidental; it is the precondition for the acceptability of killing them. This inherent threat operates in tandem with the construction of Muslim femininity as passive victimhood. Within this frame, women are denied political agency: they cannot be organisers or subjects of their own liberation.
What sustains this arrangement is its emotional logic. A Western feminist’s distress, whether over the burqa or honour-based violence, operates not just as empathy but as political power. Those who question the politics of rescue risk being portrayed as indifferent to women’s suffering, allowing intervention to proceed without scrutiny.
“What does it mean… that white women can quietly control almost all of the weapons belonging to the world’s most powerful country and still claim to be oppressed in the same way as other women?”
PHOTO: Female soldiers fire rocket system, make Army history (7 October 2013), Nathan Goodall on Wikimedia Commons
These claims collapse vastly unequal positions into a universalised victimhood. When Western feminism aligns seamlessly with military power, and defends that alignment in the language of solidarity, feminism ceases to function as an analysis of power.
The War on Terror made this explicit. The Bush administration recast belief in women’s dignity as inseparable from support for war, insisting that feminism required the imposition of American liberal values abroad, by force if necessary. Within this framework, women who refused to collaborate in the surveillance, detention or killing of their own communities were deemed hostile to women’s empowerment itself.
The War on Terror solidified the absorption of feminist language into state power, transforming a movement once opposed to institutional violence into a justification for it.
“They are constructing a feminism that uses the lives of Black and Brown people as arenas in which they can prove their credentials to white men.”
Rafia Zakaria, Against White Feminism
The Map of Concern: Selective Feminism and Global Inequality
If feminist foreign policy were genuinely about women’s welfare, its application would not follow the distribution of power.
In the context of the Russian invasion of Ukraine, headlines such as “Women are Moving Into Ukraine’s Frontline Roles” frame Ukrainian women as agents of resistance and symbols of liberal values under threat, generating political attention and diplomatic mobilisation.
By contrast, reporting on conflicts such as the Sudanese Civil War often appears through stark humanitarian headlines like“Women and girls ‘not safe anywhere’ as Darfur suffers surge in sexual violence”. Although such headlines attempt to convey the gravity of the atrocities occurring in Sudan, they can also sensationalise suffering by portraying women primarily through extreme vulnerability. Yet even this heightened language rarely translates into sustained political attention or comparable international mobilisation.
As a result, the women of states such as Sudan remain caught in a paradox: their suffering is dramatized in humanitarian reporting, but it still receives only a fraction of the political urgency directed toward conflicts that hold greater geopolitical significance for Western states. The difference is not in the severity of the harm, but in whether powerful governments have something to gain from recognition.
Institutions like NATO and the United Nations have adopted the language of “Gender, Women, Peace and Security“, but this language coexists comfortably with permanent occupation. It focuses on the inclusion of women in security forces rather than on demilitarisation. It treats gender equality as compatible with endless war, because in this framework, war leads to gender equality. The feminist foreign policy apparatus does not challenge the structures that sustain women’s oppression — it reinforces them.
Feminist foreign policy thus operates less as a project of solidarity or justice and more as a rebranding of imperial power, where women’s rights function as a moral alibi for war rather than an end in themselves.
Toward a Feminism That Does Not Serve Empire
PHOTO: Demonstrations and protests against the United States in Iran with signs that write ‘Death to America’ (4 November 2018), Masoud Fardi Anvar on Wikimedia Commons
There is a particular cruelty in this ideology that becomes visible only when considering what it claims to be. Feminism is fundamentally a challenge to unequal power, yet feminist foreign policy inverts this purpose, redeploying the language of equality to consolidate domination. The inequality it performs is no longer between men and women, but between the West and those it oversees: between those who speak and those who are spoken for, between the woman behind the weapons and the woman buried beneath them.
This inversion is not innocent. Feminist language is repurposed to legitimise imperial power. The Afghan woman and the Western woman are cast as parallel feminist figures: one awaiting rescue, and the other liberated, obscuring the fact that the conditions shaping the former’s life are produced by interventions carried out in the latter’s name. Securo-feminism does not create solidarity. It assigns roles within a narrative neither woman authored. This is not equality, but another iteration of patriarchal wars.
Thus, if liberation were truly the aim, it would look like education: the slow, locally-rooted process that allows women to speak for themselves. But the Afghan case shows that education under occupation is not empowerment. It was built on corruption and uneven access; it expanded quickly in cities while rural communities remained caught between weak governance and foreign military priorities. An educated, politically empowered woman would not endorse the occupation of her country. She would challenge the conditions that made her schooling so fragile in the first place.
None of this is intended to suggest that women’s rights are not at stake in the regions discussed here. Authoritarian patriarchy in Iran, structural misogyny across conflict zones, sexual violence as a weapon of war: these are real and serious. The critique is not of the claim that women suffer, but rather who gets to speak about that suffering, and for what purpose.
The feminist tradition that has advanced women’s lives is one that refuses imperial justification. A decolonial feminism recognises that wars do not liberate women, and that when feminist language is taken up by power without any commitment to material resources, political participation, or the end of foreign domination, it becomes a tool of harm rather than emancipation.
Decolonial feminism insists that women speak for themselves, that questions of representation are central feminist concerns, and that colonialism and power cannot be separated from gender politics. When women’s suffering is weaponised for geopolitical ends, feminism is not being enacted; it is being stripped of its substance.
Aarmish is a second-year Law student at Monash University with a strong commitment to social justice. She cares deeply about addressing inequality and supporting vulnerable communities, and is driven by a genuine desire to help people as best as she can. Alongside her studies, she works at the Australian Taxation Office, where she has gained valuable experience in public service. Outside of university and work, she enjoys reading, crocheting, and listening to music, which helps her unwind and stay creative.
