Since 2015, the Canadian government has made recurrent assertions that Canada has a feminist foreign policy. A policy, according to certain critics, that is hypocritical because of the government’s continuation of arms exports to countries deemed unsavory from a human rights standpoint. This context makes for a fertile exploration of the nexus between ethical foreign policy aspirations and the realities of foreign relations policy implementation and impact. By assessing these circumstances, I attempt to understand how hypocrisy functions within Canadian foreign policy. Through a method of discourse analysis, I evaluate the official discourses from the government and responses by civil society in relation to the Liberal Government’s handling of the Canada – Saudi Light Armoured Vehicle contract. In addition, by analysing Canadian foreign policy, via departmental reports, I highlight how the government attempts to infuse Canada’s foreign policy with ethical considerations. By tracing the rise of ethical considerations in Canada’s foreign policy, I argue that hypocrisy is intertwined with ethical considerations, thus systematically embedding hypocrisy within established Canadian institutions. Moreover, I show that Canada is committed to the concept of risk transfer, the doctrine of double effect and need for ‘proof grounded in evidence’ when assessing arms exports. These concepts shift the risks associated with hypocritical action away from the government and onto the people it purports to aid.

This Master's thesis deals with the emerging international norm Responsibility to Protect (R2P) in French Foreign Policy between 2008 and 2013. Responsibility to Protect was created in 2001 by the International Commission on Intervention and State Sovereignty and endorsed by the UN World Summit in 2005. It has changed the understanding of state sovereignty in international relations by emphasizing the responsibility component of sovereignty. It gives priority to the security of individuals. France has been an active agenda-setter in the field of human protection norms in the 1980s and 1990s and it has showed a supportive approach towards R2P. The thesis examines whether the conceptualization of R2P in current French foreign policy is coherent with this tradition. The research is based on the concepts of ethical foreign policy and alternative national interest. The analysis of strategic documents setting the priorities of French foreign policy between 2008 and 2013 as well as an examination of the three military interventions based on R2P (Libya, Côte d'Ivoire and Central African Republic) in which France played an active role have shown that in the France's foreign policy is based on moral principles which it upholds in strategic documents. In practice ethical foreign policy also prevails over...