While
organizing continues at the national level to contest state actions
on behalf of capital, mobilizations of the "global justice movement"
have served to challenge the legitimacy of global capitalist institutions
(IMF, World Bank, WTO, Davos, G-8). This is necessary when national
victories can be blind-sided by transnational capital and their political
interlocutors. The dance between challenging national capital in Southern
nations, and taking nationalist stances against the onslaught of imperialism
is a complex one-at times leading to strange bedfellows.
The
World Social Forum seeks to create a space for building alternative
strategies. It remains a critical question how NGOs, who have taken
leadership in creating that forum, might challenge the worst practices
of the "old left"-particularly around issues of gender, race and participatory
democracy-while becoming grounded in the mass-based social movements
that have the potential to contest for power.
The
additional challenge for feminists is how to integrate an analysis of
patriarchy into the critique of neo-liberal globalization. At the first
World Social Forum in 2001, feminists issued a statement calling on
WSF organizers to "practice the democratic principle of gender and regional
balance" in leadership structures. In a call to colleagues at the second
WSF (2002), DAWN, which sits on the WSF International Committee, stated,
"Since the mid-1980s we have been wrestling with problems arising from
the interconnectedness of globalization and fundamentalism and their
detrimental effects on women's lives, rights, agency and freedom.. The
World Social Forum may lose its meaning, political grip and vitality-as
a radically democratic global civil society space-if it does not directly
face and process the multilayered paradoxes of forces impacting women
in all regions."22 Women's concerns are still mostly considered an "add-on" for the "guys" in leadership
of the WSF. While there is a small group of feminist organizations on
the WSF International Council, and more on the local organizing
committees, other groups have sent few women representatives, and fewer
feminists, to represent them. However as the WSF now shifts to Asia
for the first time, Indian feminists have made considerable strides
in integrating a critique of patriarchy into some of the major events
of the 2004 WSF and balancing women's and men's leadership in these
events. They are building on three years of groundwork laid by their
Latin American sisters.
2003
marked the ten-year anniversary of the UN World Conference on Human
Rights in Vienna. That was a landmark event for global women's movements,
as the idea that women's rights are human rights was codified
in an international agreement. Human rights-as embodied in the UN Universal
Declaration of Human Rights and in Covenants (treaties) on both Political
and Civil Rights as well as Economic, Social and Cultural Rights-are
seen to encompass both political and economic rights. However, this
international law was a victim of the cold war, where the West prioritized
the former, and the East prioritized the latter.24
Despite
an affirmation of the indivisibility of all human rights, in its early
stages (1993) the women's human rights movement placed emphasis on issues
of violence against women, reproductive rights, sexual rights, and bodily
integrity-"gender justice." This is because many feminists see issues
of violence against women and women's control over their bodies as the
primordial issues on the feminist agenda. As Bina Srinivasan notes,
these are the issues other movements consistently fail to address. While
feminists who focus on violence also address the importance of global
economic issues in women's lives, they have tended to underplay this
agenda, just as women in economic development work have until recently
downplayed sexual and reproductive rights, and ignored a human rights
framework.
The
Beijing Platform for Action (1995), became the central organizing program
for women around the world over the past
decade. It was a significant achievement for global women's movements
but also has its limitations. It is strong on issues of violence, bodily
integrity, and equal access to resources, as well as micro-responses
to women's poverty in an era of globalization. It is weak in addressing
the multiple oppressions diverse women face, and in addressing systemic
causes of women's poverty-particularly the neo-liberal corporate agenda.
This is not surprising, given the power of the G-8 in UN deliberations.
In official reviews in 2000 and 2005, women activists are placed in
the awkward position of holding the line against rightwing attacks that
would undermine the Platform, while wishing to make it more far-reaching.
The consensus has been to keep it a closed document to avoid setbacks.
In
Beijing, the differential emphasis on issues around violence and macro-economic
issues among feminists was deepened by the energetic initiatives of
the Clinton White House (with Hillary as the leading "feminist") and
European women elected officials who championed anti-violence struggles
and micro-enterprise, while keeping the focus away from G-8 imperialism.
Many women's groups, particularly but not exclusively from the Global
North, enthusiastically embraced this narrowed agenda.
Gita
Sen and Sonia Correa note that this dichotomy within governments and
women's NGOs reflects a real confusion of agendas by women themselves.
In the 1980s and 1990s women entered labor markets in great numbers.
Sometimes they gained more autonomy in the home and community as a result,
and sometimes they lost autonomy, with greater work burdens and workplace
controls. Sen and Correa observe:
These
contradictions mean that women's struggles for greater personal autonomy.may
not mesh simply or easily with their concerns and demands for a more
just and equal economic order. The irony for women is that, on the one
hand, the supporters and promoters of a globalized world economy are
often also the ones who support the breaking of traditional patriarchal
orders. On the other hand, some of those who oppose globalization do
so in the name of values and control systems that strongly oppress women.25
The
impact of the neo-liberal agenda in the '80s and '90s had deepened the
North-South divide and weakened the bargaining position of the global
South. "In this climate moral conservative groups that oppose an agenda
for women's rights have systematically attempted to emerge as champions
of the South," including the Vatican and a small group of Southern nations.26 This has created a sharp divide in UN negotiations between Northern
nations arguing for a certain limited definition of "women's rights"
while strengthening the neo-liberal stranglehold on the South,
and some Southern nations undermining those "women's rights" while leading
the battle against Northern economic control. Women's rights were again obscured in this battle.
Sen
and Correa say that feminists of North and South attempted to bridge
the divide between gender justice and economic justice at these UN conferences.
While some did, including WICEJ, many others were easily boxed into
different tracks, as well as divergences between North and South.27 Unfortunately, too many women's NGOs with a focus solely on "gender
justice" allied with US and EU governments on this agenda, obscuring
the broader economic issues that also undermine women's rights, and
the complex dynamics at work.
There
are encouraging signs that these two organized elements of the feminist
agenda are coming together, both analytically and in activism. As US
imperialism intensifies, and as the Washington Consensus begins to show
some cracks, feminist activists are developing a more integrated analysis.
This analysis links the neo-liberal agenda, the rise of religious fundamentalisms,
the intensification of civil wars and religions/ethnic communal violence,
the rise of militarism and decline of democratic space, to both patriarchal
social structures and the current crisis of global capitalism.28
Signs of integrated analysis and action include:
the emergence of the "Campaign Against Fundamentalisms"
launched at the 2002 World Social Forum by the Feminist Marcosur Coalition, a network of Latin American Southern Cone feminist
organizations. With giant lips to "open your mouth against fundamentalisms,"
hot air balloons, stilt-walkers, dancers and drummers, as well as testimonials
from around the world, the on-going campaign links the "fundamentalism"
of neo-liberal dogma to religious fundamentalisms, in their undermining
of women's rights.29 In 2003 this campaign broadened into an international
coalition, including such groups as Women Living Under Muslim Law, Association
for Women's Rights in Development/AWID, the Center for Women's Global
Leadership, DAWN and WICEJ.
Women involved in planning
for the 2004 World Social Forum are shaping panels that will
integrate sexual and reproductive rights with economic rights in a critique
of neo-liberalism and funda- mentalisms, and planning a feminist strategy
meeting to better integrate these themes and coordinate action.
The Women's International
Coalition for Economic Justice, which emerged during the UN five-year
review of Beijing, also connects groups in the "women's human rights"
community and in the "gender & development" community, as well as
racial justice and immigrant rights activists. This has strengthened
a trend towards reclaiming economic rights as part of the women's human
rights agenda, with demands for jobs, food, housing, water and basic
services as part of women's rights, and an understanding of systemic
economic violence as one aspect of violence against women. WICEJ, collaborating
with other feminist groups in the World Social Forum and the Campaign
Against Fundamentalisms, is increasingly linking analysis of neo-liberal
globalization with fundamentalisms, militarism and patriarchy.30
In 2001 the Association
for Women in Development formally changed its name to Association
for Women's Rights in Development (AWID). Originally a trade association
for development professionals, AWID was transformed into a gathering
place for global women's movements and their ideas and has worked to
integrate a rights perspective into the feminist development agenda.
Their Forum of some 2000 women, Women Reinventing Globalisation,
in Guadalajara, Mexico in October 2002, brought together these many
streams of global feminisms under one roof for debate and analysis.
Two speakers dubbed Forum participants the "Guadalajara Woman," in response
to the "Davos Man"31 with a "complex identity and activist agenda,"
who "struggles for institutional accountability and demands
gender, racial and class justice from the state," while "building alliances
with a broad cross-section of social justice advocates" in the global
justice movement.32
