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7.1 The Politics of Feminist Foreign Policy and Digital Diplomacy

This methods appendix of the book The Politics of Feminist Foreign Policy and Digital Diplomacy contains three sections that outline the data, method, ethics and implications of the research presented in the book.

7.1.1 Methodological Choices

The book investigates the intersection of feminist foreign policy and digital diplomacy in Sweden’s global positionings 2014–2022. It examines the development and trajectory of Sweden’s feminist foreign policy, asking a set of questions in regards to its relationship with digital diplomacy, not least the extent to which the latter has amplified or constrained Sweden’s feminist ambitions in global politics. The study is based on a mixed-methods design whereby a range of methods and analytical strategies were used. In the eight years that Sweden projected itself as a feminist government with an explicitly feminist foreign policy, the role and nature of its digital diplomacy changed. This is explained by the political change in Swedish domestic debate, in the international arena and by technological change that influenced the norms and practices of digital diplomacy (Aggestam et al., 2021; Bjola, 2016; Bjola & Pamment, 2019). These multiple processes of change are examined and analysed in the book. The aforementioned processes also had implications for our methodological choices and the varying character of the material and methods employed across the chapters.

In this book, we treated social media in digital diplomacy as a channel of digital public diplomacy during the 2014–2016 period (Manor, 2019). Since 2017 social media outlets became more contentious political spaces, in which gender norms were advanced through the global mobilisation of the #MeToo campaign, a campaign that also was resisted through backlash in the form of right-wing populism and disinformation (Bjola & Pamment, 2019; Clark-Parsons, 2021; Dan et al., 2021). This produced a new relationship between feminist foreign policy and digital diplomacy, which focused on social media as a space and tool for norm change and mobilisation against gender backlash, often with a focus on women’s sexual and reproductive health and rights (Aggestam et al., 2023). The final phase of our study took place during the the Covid-19 pandemic 2020–2022 which in turn lead to new ways of using social media as well as other virtual spaces, with both of them becoming replacement for political interactions. The methodological implication of this development is that the social media data served different purposes and we employed other empirical sources to provide rigour and nuance to our study. Our choices here were informed by the context in which a range of digital diplomacy practices were analysed.

Although there is variation in the empirical materials and methods used throughout the book, there is also some substantial overlap, as documents, semi-structured interviews, social media accounts and web pages are the primary sources that we draw on as a research corpus in the empirical chapters.

7.1.1.1 Documents

The empirical chapters use data arising from key documents, such as annual statements on foreign policy, reports, handbooks, speeches and press releases that forged the official narrative surrounding Sweden’s feminist foreign policy 2014–2022. This official narrative was also advanced through a series of high-profile interviews with representatives of the Swedish governments, most notably foreign minister Margot Wallström (2014–2019) and her predecessor Ann Linde (2019–2022) in international media outlets. In addition to documents produced by the government, the MFA and the Swedish embassies, we studied debates on the Swedish Feminist Foreign Policy in the Swedish Parliament (Sveriges Riksdag) and material produced by the Swedish Institute, the leading public diplomacy agency in Sweden. The genres of documents that we draw on are summarised in Table 7.1 above. All documents are cited in the reference lists provided in the book.

Table 7.1 Documents
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7.1.1.2 Social Media Data, Campaigns and Online Observations

Digital diplomacy was, during most of the time period (2014–2022), foremost equated with active use of social media channels in the communication of foreign policy. As argued in the book, we approach social media as vital discursive sites for constituting and negotiating meaning for Swedish feminist foreign policy amongst an international audience. We have, therefore, monitored the Swedish MFA’s use of social media during this time. While the favoured channels have differed slightly over time Twitter (later renamed X), Facebook and later Instagram (since November 2017) have remained the most prioritised platforms over time (e.g. the MFA has during different periods also used YouTube, Periscope, etc.). Our data collection has focused on these three platforms (and indirectly YouTube since videos are often cross-posted). Moreover, we have made a purposeful decision to only focus on English language accounts since digital diplomacy is an outward-facing activity aimed at international audiences. The Swedish MFA has multiple English-speaking social media handles aimed at different audiences (e.g. the Africa department uses the handle @AfricaSweMFATwitter to communicate with African audiences). We have focused our analyses on the accounts aimed at a general audience across all three platforms (SweMFA on Twitter and Facebook and swedishmfa on Instagram). We also monitored the Twitter and Facebook accounts of the acting minister for foreign affairs (Margot Wallström 2014–2019 and Ann Linde 2019–2022). In addition, we monitored the dedicated UN accounts during the time Sweden was a non-permanent member of the UN Security Council 2017–2018 and the OSCE accounts during its chairpersonship of the OSCE in 2021.

Our collection of social media data has followed two separate rationales of monitoring and extraction. We began monitoring the three social media handles in August 2019 and conducted bi-weekly observations until November 2022, when Sweden abandoned its feminist foreign policy. The bi-weekly observations served to grasp the continuity of the digital diplomacy narrative and to identify any disruptions to that storytelling. We also backtracked the feeds of the social media accounts (to the extent that they could be backtracked) to the launch of the feminist foreign policy in 2014 using Twitter Advanced Search and Facebook’s user interface. We studied the feed based on the thematic categories in our framework and analysed the role of digital diplomacy in shaping the leadership, branding and visual representation of feminist foreign policy. This material is presented and cited in the empirical chapters. All data collection was concluded before Twitter changed ownership in 2022 and was renamed X in 2023.

We also conducted analyses of the themes, topics, hashtags and timing covered in the social media handle on Twitter in three datasets. We used Twitter’s API. 20 Academic Access on three separate occasions to extract data on all tweets posted by the MFA (on the general English-speaking account), between September 2017 and November 2022, by the delegation to the UN between 2017 and 2018 and the delegation to OSCE during 2021. The total amount, including retweets, is presented in Table 7.2.

Table 7.2 Twitter data
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In addition, we attended several virtual live-streamed events organised by the MFA or the Swedish embassies during 2019–2022. These events panel talks, Q & A sessions on the topic of feminist foreign policy and several Wikipedia edit-a-thons analysed in Chapter 5.

7.1.1.3 Interviews

The book also draws on a few elite and expert interviews conducted between 2015 and 2021. We interviewed representatives of the Swedish government and the MFA. We conducted additional interviews because we believe they reveal how practitioners themselves perceive and understand feminist foreign policy and the role of digital diplomacy therein. We included this perspective to triangulate how and with what implications feminist foreign policy brought change to the implementation of Swedish foreign policy in general and in digital diplomacy in particular. Table 7.3 provides an (anonymised) overview of the interviews cited in the book. Table 7.4 provides an indicative overview of our interview guide. All interviews were conducted in Swedish; we offered the interviews the option of not recording the interviews in exchange for more frankness. When they opted for this, we engaged in extensive note-taking and transcribed the notes after the interview.

Table 7.3 Interviewees
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Table 7.4 Interview guide for semi-structured interviews with diplomats
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7.1.1.4 Practical Implications

The Covid-19 pandemic both altered and complicated the focus of our research. There were both practical and epistemological implications of the pandemic for a research project seeking to understand digitalisation within the realism of foreign policy and diplomacy. In practical terms, we became reliant on virtual tools to conduct interviews during 2020–2021 and were affected by the difficulty of limited access and transparency during the crisis situation (e.g. Maurer & Wright, 2020). These constraints could be overcome through previous experiences and connections in the field. However, digital adaptations forced by travel restrictions and social distancing measures changed the meaning and the nature of ‘digital diplomacy’ (Bjola & Manor, 2022). Digital diplomacy and digital tools quickly developed into primary sites of foreign policy and diplomatic exchange (Eggeling & Adler-Nissen, 2021; Danielson & Hedling, 2022). The epistemological implications were, therefore, more influential than the practical, forcing us to consider changes that could not have been foreseen.

7.1.1.5 Ethical Dimensions

The conduct of interviews and the collection of social media data raise ethical concerns, given that it can entail handling personal information (Townsend & Wallace, 2017). The interviews we conducted for this study did not concern sensitive information about the informants’ personal lives or private views. As the interview guide demonstrates, we only asked questions about the individuals’ professional activities in relation to other MFA’s and public audiences. In this sense, our informants represented political positions at the state level, government officials and public civil servants that are not members of political parties. Furthermore, all interviewees were given the option of not being recorded and when this was requested, we engaged in extensive note-taking during and after the interview. In these cases, approval of the exact quotes used in the analysis was obtained via e-mail after the interview.

The social media material collected for this book only concerns the official activities of state actors and to some extent their public representatives in a professional capacity. The social media users were hence not vulnerable by any definition. With digital diplomacy being an articulated strategy, this was an online context of actively seeking visibility and attention by outside parties (Williams et al., 2017). While we did include retweets (recirculated posts) in our data, the nature of the accounts entailed that they were almost entirely consistent with government representatives in Sweden or elsewhere and hence could be treated as symbolic representations of state discourse (Williams et al., 2017). We did not include interventions in comment fields generated by the accounts we monitored. This entails that we have not collected any personal information or views expressed by private individuals.