European Foreign Policy and Tuning into the Voices from the Peripheries

This chapter analyses how the European Union (EU) and its member states engage with ‘peripheries’ in their foreign policy. Taking a global international relations (IR) perspective on centres and peripheries, and how Western and Eurocentrism have been driving European foreign policy and EU studies, this chapter discusses the normative and empirical implications of pluralising and decentring European foreign policy. Drawing from the work in global IR together with that on the decentring turn, this chapter argues that if Europe wants to remain a relevant global actor of IR, it needs to pluralise and diversify its engagement with peripheral actors and peripheries more broadly. It illustrates that by discussing the case of EU and European gender and feminist foreign policies (FFP) and demonstrates that peripheries are not only a matter of being on the external borders of the EU geographically, and that even behind a progressivist EU discourse and lots of legal advancements on gender, centring gender in EU and European foreign policy still requires addressing the issue of peripheralisation of intersectionality and addressing gender in non-European contexts.