Diplomacies of Small States: Women’s Representation in the Baltic States’ Foreign Services

We invite you to Professor Aušra Park lecture on “Diplomacies of Small States: Women’s Representation in the Baltic States’ Foreign Services (1991-2021)”, which will take place on the 18th of May at 1:15 PM in room 402.

Empirical scholarly work on women in diplomacy, which tracked their descriptive representation, has confirmed a visible pattern of women’s exclusion from foreign services worldwide (Aggestam and Towns 2018, 2019; Chehab 2023). Furthermore, through the application of various feminist theories, studies have recently uncovered the gendered nature of, and tenacious gendered informal institutional practices in, the Ministries of Foreign Affairs and ambassadorial appointments that tend to persist over time even when women attain overrepresentation in diplomacy. However, most academic research still focuses on globally powerful and regionally influential states despite a call to move beyond Western Europe, the U.S., and other single-country case studies (i.e., Brazil, Japan, Turkey, and Australia). Scholarly exploration of contemporary, post-Cold War diplomacies of small, weak states, and the role that gender plays in these states’ foreign policymaking, thus far, has been insufficient and scant. To overcome such dual limitations — absence of studies that focus on small and weak states’ diplomacies in contemporary international affairs and a lack of comparative research on the foreign services of small states from gender in diplomacy perspective — this empirical study applies comparative and historical approaches and gender in diplomacy perspective to explore trends and changes in women’s representation at the highest ranks of the Baltic States’ foreign services.

Aušra Park is a professor at Siena College (Loudonville, NY), Department of Political Science and International Relations.