In
terms of women's issues at the UN, the growing tensions between North
and South have deepened the resistance on the part of Southern nations
to making concessions, and have strengthened the hand of moral conservative
forces. At the March 2003 Commission on the Status of Women (CSW), occurring
parallel to the Security Council debate on Iraq, delegates could not
reach consensus on a statement on violence against women. A group of
nations representing the religious right tried to roll back gains women
had made over many years, by rejecting a previously agreed-upon text.
Their unwillingness to compromise on women's rights issues was fed by
anger at US unilateralism on both political/military and economic fronts.
While the US empire may be weaker than it imagines, with enormous external
debt, internal deficits, an unstable Iraqi occupation, and the growing
economic power of both the EU and China, it continues to have the upper
hand at the current moment.
This
CSW stalemate merely drove home a reality already confronting UN activists:
the success in shaping the language of national and international development
commitments did not transfer to real accountability by national governments.
The UN's ability to shape development policy was eclipsed by the power
of the IMF, World Bank and WTO (the first multi-lateral institution
with the power to police treaty compliance with sanctions), representing
capitalist interests within the G-8 industrialized nations, while gender
justice agendas were undermined by the conservative Right. Thus, increasingly,
women's groups are reflecting on the most strategic venues for their
activism-from the UN to the trade arena to the WSF to regional and national
work. This is one of the key debates among global feminists at the current
time, reflected in a heated discussion about whether a Fifth World Conference
on Women should even take place.
In
meetings and on list-serves, global women's movements that came of age
in these UN processes are reflecting on the wisdom of a continued focus
on the UN, and on another world conference on women:
-- Those in favor want to maintain
momentum on a global women's agenda and to involve young women in the
process, continuing to see the UN as the primary site for action. They
note successes women have had in influencing the international agenda
and the empowerment this has offered women vis-ŕ-vis their national
governments. Many argue that the UN needs to be strengthened and transformed
to be more responsive to equality demands, while maintaining pressure
at both the national and international levels.
-- Those opposed
note "conference fatigue, the lack of implementa- tion resources, the
geo-political climate and backlash which pose a danger of losing ground"
on feminist issues.47 Some feel that the focus has shifted to the
WTO and regional trade pacts, and that women have little to gain from
UN processes.
Vanessa
Griffen (Malaysia) argues that global negotiations have not improved
women's lives at the local level, and thus major emphasis on the UN
arena misplaces women's energies and lessens their political impact.
She maintains that some women are needed to monitor government implementation
of agreements, retain language of past commitments and hold back the
conservative backlash, but that this should not be the central focus
of global women's movements.48
Of
growing concern to some women's organizations is the reduction of the extensive commitments made
by governments in the UN conferences of the 1990s to eight Millennium
Development Goals (MDGs) which have become the chief organizing framework
for all UN and World Bank development work. These goals reduce gender
concerns to only one of the eight points, and seek technocratic
mechanisms for halving poverty, guaranteeing basic health and primary
education and other lofty goals by 2015, without challenging the neo-liberal
framework that is directly undermining fulfillment of these goals. Commitments
to reproductive rights made in Cairo (UN International Conference on
Population and Develop- ment, 1994) and Beijing have been dropped. Ewa
Charkiewicz says the MDGs mark a shift from a focus on citizens with
rights to consumers of privatized commodities.49 Peggy Antrobus
calls them "Major Distraction Gimmicks" and says they divert women's
focus from the more far-reaching Beijing Platform for Action.50
A
March 2003 gathering of some international women's NGO leaders attending
the UN Commission on the Status of Women in NY did not represent global
consensus, but suggested (a) a fifth world conference to be held before
2010 but not in 2005; (b) a ten-year review of implementation of the
Beijing Platform for Action only within the regular meetings of the
UN and at national levels in 2005, with no negotiations on text;
and (c) the potential for autonomous women's events in such venues as the AWID
Forum and the World Social Forum or an alternate world meeting of women
apart from the UN.
What
has not been as explicit is the fact that a shift from the focus on
UN advocacy and UN conferences to local/national organizing, or WTO
and regional trade agreement organizing or World Social Forum organizing
means a potential shift in the style, culture, leadership or even the
class base of global women's movements. This challenges the modus operandi,
careers, funding and power bases within women's networks-including that
of my own coalition. It will be an important challenge to separate these
factors from an assessment of the most strategic way forward.
To
a great extent, women's endorsement of a Fifth World Conference will
depend upon their assessment of the state of geo-political dynamics
as well as the role of UN advocacy at this time; and the outcome of
regional Cairo+10 and Beijing+10 reviews.
Ultimately,
it's not a question of either/or, but of how to combine work at different
levels and in different venues most strategically. While it would not
be wise to walk away from the UN as an advocacy target, the payoff is
currently quite limited. The goals there become holding the line and
pushing for a more credible institution, while seeking specific UN niches
where feminists might advance their agenda, such as some of the human
rights treaty bodies. The global justice movement and the World Social
Forum process provide spaces to link women to mass-based social movements
at the global level. This, and local/national movement-building can
contribute to building a power base to demand real accountability from
the state and private interests at every level.
It
has seemed, at times, that there are nothing but setbacks to the women's
rights agenda, particularly in the lives of poor women around the world.
Loss of livelihoods, increased economic and physical exploitation, the
rise of women's migration for economic survival, and increased control
over women's autonomy are coming from many interlinking forces. The
significant gains made conceptually and through government commitments
have not been realized in terms of most women's lived experience, as
corporate globalization, militarism
and fundamentalisms intensify.
We cannot minimize these gains, however. The shift in discourse and
some actions on the part of governments, however co-opted, represent
a response to the strength of women's organizing over the past three decades. Despite huge setbacks, thousands
of women have also felt the right and the space to claim their rights
on many levels as a result of local and global feminism. There are also
encouraging signs, including:
-- the further development of a feminist economic analysis
linking a critique of patriarchy and capitalism;
-- the new wave of women addressing macro-economic issues
and mobilizing for redistributive economic justice-not just economic
"development";
-- the growing integration of gender justice and economic
justice theoretically and politically;
-- the incipient efforts-though
still limited-to assess global women's movements' political strategies,
venues, impacts and internal power dynamics, including race/ethnic,
class and geographic issues; and
-- feminists' efforts to be heard by movement colleagues
in arenas such as the WTO protests and the World Social Forum as well
as regional settings, with a goal of building a broader mass-based social
movement that can challenge power, be it located in the family, with
religious or national patriarchs, transnational corporations; or the
US empire.
This article, although written in a personal capacity,
draws on my work as Coordinator of the Women's International Coalition
for Economic Justice (WICEJ), a coalition of 40 organizations-both NGO
and Labor-from all regions of the globe focused on macro-economic policy
from the perspective of gender, race, class and national origin. The
coalition has been active in numerous UN world conferences as well as
the recent WTO ministerial in Cancún, Mexico. My thoughts here were
developed in dialogue with Bina Srinivasan. We began our discussion
of these issues through the Rockefeller Humanities Fellowship Program,
"Facing Global Capital, Finding Human Security: A Gendered Critique," based at the National Council for Research on Women and the City
University of New York.
Notes
1. Our thanks to the DAWN network for this articulation of the linkage
of struggles against patriarchy and capitalism. See "Gender Justice
and Economic Justice: Reflections on the Five Year Reviews of the UN
Conferences of the 1990s" (www.dawn.org.fj). See also WICEJ Beijing+5
statement, www.wiceg.org.
2. This emerged as a "movement" at the Seattle WTO ministerial in 1999,
and has been present at key events of the G-8 and international financial
institutions in Washington DC, Prague, Genoa, Evian and elsewhere, and
consolidated in 2001 at the first World Social Forum in Porto Alegre,
Brazil, held parallel to the Davos World Economic Forum.
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