I, like many others from RESURJ and beyond, have spent the last few months reflecting on the “season of advocacy” upon us this year from the regional and global gatherings including CSW, CPD and HLPF to the largely opaque but impossible-to-avoid Summit of the Future in September to the Beijing+30 processes that will culminate in 2025. And what it means for South-based feminists to show up in these spaces in general and what it means specifically in a time of genocide, ongoing and looming financial crises, a mockery of multilateralism and whatever multistakeholderism is supposed to be, deeply entrenched corporate capture, and a well oiled opposition machinery that is arguably more well resourced and well positioned than ever. Is this a new context? Not necessarily. Is it important to acknowledge the current political moment, sit/stew in it and address it as a moment of reckoning? Absolutely. Please consider this my own attempt to get to some personal/political clarity from a few months of stewing and doing so before boarding a plane to attend CSW. Which means a lot of messy writing and thoughts so do bear with me if you decide to read any further. And with the caveat that I quote many others in the paragraphs that follow but I’m writing this as myself and not to represent any collectives and formations of belonging.
Rise of neoliberalism and the gradual depoliticization of feminist movements
Recently Farah Daibes eloquently traced the parallel and interlinking dynamics between the rise of neoliberalism and the gradual depoliticization of feminist movements, with a focus on the case of Palestine. Even as the Beijing Conference in 1995 (the Fourth UN World Conference on Women) remains an epoch in our feminist histories and those amazing stories and photographs (including the photo that accompanies this piece) that make your heart race (or skip a beat depending on how your heart gets excited!), Farah reminds us that by 1995 fierce feminist politics, particularly around Palestine, were already starting to disappear from the conference proceedings. Compared to the inaugural conference in 1975 in Mexico where conference discussions and report had direct, forthright and unequivocal positions in support of Palestine. I highly recommend reading Farah’s article for more insights (as well as Anita Gurumurthy’s “history of feminist engagement with development and digital technologies” that is one of my go-to readings too) but in short, it is a reminder of how we got here and what we lost along the way trying to hold lines that presented human rights in vacuums.
Hand in hand with the rise of neoliberal economic policies were the rise of development agendas and development aid, frameworks that — at the risk of oversimplifying — tried to address the vast inequalities, injustices and chasms caused by colonialism…..by not addressing colonialism or if at all, treating it as history rather than as living, renewing and reinforcing. The lack of political will by developed countries to meet their minimum commitments around Official Development Aid (ODA), to pay their climate change reparations, to hold private corporations accountable, etc. have had devastating effects. For one, a dominant narrative that private financing for development is a silver bullet and thus bringing the private sector — and particularly multinational corporations — into the fold of multistakeholderism — even as all that private financing is yet to make an appearance and public-private partnerships continue to further enable corporate capture and the erosion of public goods and services. For another, “neoliberal development aid and funding became an intrinsic component of Palestinian civil society” as Farah puts it, a phenomenon many of us have experienced in our various contexts too over the years.
Feminist engagements with/in UN advocacy
The first time I attended CSW was a little over ten years ago and I remember so clearly going for the briefing of the Women’s Rights Caucus on the Sunday before the sessions began and it consisted of a couple of people standing near a whiteboard (or maybe a flip chart) and telling the room — a lot of us coming to CSW for the first time, to the US for the first time, traveling overseas for the first time — that these are our priorities for the next two weeks and to get with the programme. I didn’t know who these (mostly white) feminists from (mostly) the global north were, many of whom had worked hard to ensure feminist engagement with CSW over the years but I remember feeling disoriented and confused about why I was there, what I was supposed to do and how all this connected with what I was doing at home (and not that I was doing anything radical at home either, as a middle class Sinhala young woman who was organizing in my own misguided ways and not engaging critically with what was fast becoming my day job as an NGO worker). And while the Women’s Rights Caucus as well as other informal and formal feminist and women’s rights engagement mechanisms in UN advocacy spaces have continued to evolve, they haven’t escaped the logic of neoliberal feminism that calls on us to hold the line on the bare minimum, become more and more reductive in what we mean by gender equality and women’s human rights, and cut our losses every year.
Recently Cai Yiping reflected on “Why CSW remains an important space for feminists to engage” and her points around norm setting and advocacy resonate and are in fact points I myself raise when I’m asked for the nth time why CSW is worth engaging with. And points discussed in the recently published political analysis by RESURJ and friends. A few years after my first CSW I attended CSW once again, this time representing a regional organization (and vigorously making my way through the NGO worker lifecycle lolcry), and I remember being temporarily adopted at that CSW by RESURJ, a transnational collective of younger South feminists that I will later go on to join as a member. With RESURJ I discovered the potential of South feminist organizing and leadership in advocacy spaces for movement building, something I believe in more than ever given the continued tight grip and the visible and hidden powers that white supremacist feminisms and upper class, upper caste, elite feminisms continue to consolidate and exercise in these spaces.
The way white feminists (and use that in its most expansive forms to including every feminist refusing to interact with their power, privilege and positionality) have been “both siding” the genocide in Palestine the last few months and lecturing others about the universality of human rights has been absolutely deplorable and shining examples of the depoliticizing and deradicalizing that Farah, Anita and others have explored in their writing. The way white feminists have been weaponizing conditional allyship, cautioning against rocking the boat too much at the UN, tone policing in the most colonial ways, constantly centering themselves in discussions where most of us just need to listen deeply and intentionally, and demanding emotional labour, particularly from feminists from SWANA (South West Asia and North Africa) has been shameful. I try not to give into dichotomies too often and yet we’re seeing that Angela Davis’ words that “Palestine is a moral litmus test for the world” is proving true for feminist movements and transnational solidarity. Circling back to Yiping’s point, yes these spaces remain relevant for feminists to engage in and connect transnationally, more so than ever to save them from other feminists.
Even as feminist engagement in UN advocacy spaces claims to (and aspires to) be movement-led and movement-centered, multilateral processes and spaces are designed around the premise of how civil society was imagined from the time of colonialism onwards, from the politics of ECOSOC accreditation to as Nira Wickramasingha puts it, “civil society (is) becoming a means to an end — democratization, economic growth or sustainable development — rather than an end in itself”. So even as we have more and more South feminists from diverse contexts and feminist and social justice movements trying to engage with spaces like CSW, it is (I)NGOs from the North and the South — whose entire mandate is to be the aforementioned means to an end — who decide how we engage and show solidarity, what we prioritize, who are allies or not and which politics are palatable or not in these spaces.
Moment of reckoning
In our recent political analysis, RESURJ and friends made a number of recommendations aimed at member states, WRC and ISRRC, UN Women, donors and feminists and while I won’t repeat them here, they are worth your time if you wear one or more of those hats. There is indeed a number of big and small reforms each of us can make to revitalize feminist engagements in UN advocacy spaces such as (I)NGOs clarifying their role to themselves and donors as facilitators rather than arbiters of these processes and practicing their accountability to movements through transparent policies, processes and structures. More autonomous feminist formations being co-created, nurtured and resourced to show up in our full, messy and authentic selves and politics in these spaces and make trouble.
However the thought that constantly haunts me is that none of this is enough and that the only way to make these spaces count is to center struggles instead of technicalities, to be more expansive and critical in how we think about advocacy, norm setting, etc. and to rethink the spaces we need to create, infiltrate and subvert. In 2022 Mena Souilem from Western Sahara wrote one of my favorite reflective pieces about CSW which she concludes by saying “We hope for a future with self-determination instead of being determined by western organisations with a history of support for the fascist, militaristic, colonialist systems responsible for our oppressive realities. We hope for truly inclusive, non-hegemonic spaces created by us for us.” I don’t know if we’re doing enough to be on our way to this vision that is shared by many others who are questioning the point of these spaces while also staying on to see what we can do and create together.
So going back to where I started this collection of thoughts, is this a moment of reckoning to repoliticize how feminists engage and advocate with the UN? And what are we (and this “we” encompasses individuals, movements, institutions that form the ecosystems we’re embedded in) willing to lose — temporarily and/or permanently — by taking bold, unapologetic, disruptive and internationalist stances whether it’s about Palestine, Sudan, Iran, Congo, Kashmir, West Papua, Western Sahara? Or to make it clear to champions of gender equality among member states that their allyship, support and purple/pinkwashing can no longer be used as bargaining chips to pick and choose which of our interconnected struggles they will take onboard? What are we willing to lose? Funding? Allies? Talking about human rights in vacuums? “Access” to these spaces that is usually granted on the basis of how we toe the line? Agreed language? What are we willing to lose and in the process what new possibilities can we invite in? While these should not be individual decisions, we can start with individual introspection around our own contributions to and complicities with the shit show we find ourselves in, the various contexts and circumstances that shaped those contributions and complicities, what kind of choices or lack of choices we have ahead of us, what is within our control or not, and how we can bring these into collective conversations, strategizing and decisions.
Nearly fifty years ago, the first UN conference on women appealed, among other things, “to all women of the world to proclaim their solidarity with and support for the Palestinian women and people in their drive to put an end to flagrant violations of fundamental human rights committed by Israel in the occupied territories”. And called for such solidarity to be both moral and material. To mix up metaphors and grammar in conclusion, a North Star and a point of anchor, if ever there was one.
Sachini Perera 