Who speaks for feminist foreign policy in wartime? Policy entrepreneurship in France and Germany after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine

Feminist foreign policy (FFP) faces increasing pressure amid rising anti-gender mobilisation, raising questions about its relevance in times of geopolitical conflict. Yet, despite structural similarities and shared commitments to FFP, France and Germany diverged markedly in articulating feminist policy issues following Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine. This article examines this variation through the lens of discursive policy entrepreneurship. It examines whether and how French and German foreign ministers acted as policy entrepreneurs in promoting a crisis-specific FFP. Drawing on a two-step discourse analysis of speeches from the war’s first year, the study first assesses the use of discursive entrepreneurial strategies and then groups recurring themes within the identified feminist problem framing. The findings show that the discursive visibility of FFP in wartime does not follow automatically from formal state adoption but varies with political leaders’ ability to connect gendered interpretations of insecurity to FFP. While former German foreign minister Baerbock engaged in such entrepreneurship, her French counterparts did so only selectively. The article contributes to debates in European security by demonstrating that FFP remains present in wartime discourse. More broadly, it shows that crises may provide opportunities for the strategic mobilisation of feminist norms, contingent on whether leaders seize them.