Critical Approaches to Security Studies: Imaging Peace and Feminist Foreign Policy

In this New Voices in Global Security Studies seminar, Tiffany Fairey explores how photography plays a potent role in it's contribution to peace and how images and image-making are used to build peace and dialogue. Karoline Fäerber examines how diplomats and Foreign Office staff in Germany, following the adoption of a feminist foreign policy in 2021 engage in knowledge production, by exploring the meaning and practice of feminism in their everyday work.

Dr Tiffany Fairey - Participatory peace photography

Tiffany will talk about her project, Imaging Peace which is a multi-country study of participatory peace photography that examines the role of images and image-making in the building of peace and dialogue. Tiffany is working with practitioners in Colombia, BiH, Northern Ireland, Rwanda, Nepal and Mexico building case studies of different examples of visual peace building initiatives to better understand methods, strategies and impact in diverse post conflict settings.

Dr Tiffany Fairey is Leverhulme Early Career Fellow at Department of War Studies at King's College London. Her research interests include peacebuilding, conflict transformation, reconciliation and the relationship between photography and peace. In particular, she is interested in visual, arts-based and participatory peacebuilding methods that work with communities affected by mass violence and conflict.

Karoline Fäerber - Making foreign policy feminist: The everyday knowledge production of German foreign policy practitioners

In December 2021, Germany adopted a feminist foreign policy (FFP), joining other states with similar goals. The development of this policy involved diplomats and Foreign Office (FO) staff, who now play a key role in producing and implementing FFP. Karoline reflects on how staff shape and reproduce institutional and international relations while contributing their own understanding of feminism in foreign policy. She explores what feminism means in this context, how it is practiced by diplomats and FO staff in their daily work, and the broader social relations influencing these practices. The study, using institutional ethnography, draws on 373 hours of participant observation and practitioner interviews in the Foreign Office. This approach aims to reveal power dynamics that influence how FO staff engage with and understand feminism, providing insights into how feminist foreign policy is shaped and whether it reinforces existing ways of making foreign policy.

Ms Karoline Fäerber is a PhD researcher at the Department of War Studies at King’s College London. Her research interests include feminist foreign policy, gender and diplomacy, everyday knowledge production, and (in)security. She currently studies the everyday production of German feminist foreign policy.

New Voices in Global Security is an event series, organised by the School of Security Studies EDI committee, which seeks to promote new research within the field of Security Studies, as well as new and innovative approaches to teaching the discipline.

The series showcases the work of PhD students and Early Career Academics working both within and beyond the School of Security Studies.