Many states and non-governmental organisations are increasingly invested in ‘feminist policymaking’ at the domestic and international levels. Yet, this liberal (feminist) agenda is also vastly disputed by critical, intersectional, and decolonial voices on the one hand, and by anti-gender movements around the world on the other hand. Indeed, while opposition to ‘gender ideology’ is mounting from reactionary, religious, and secular forces, feminist policymaking is also being challenged in important ways from within. Thus, this book situates feminist policymaking in a challenging and ‘turbulent’ global context. This book explores feminist policymaking in multiple areas of policy, examining various gender-focused programmes that states and international organisations have undertaken in the last decade, offering critical interventions and rethinking the relationship between feminism and policy.
This book not only reflects on the advances of feminist policymaking globally but also critically assesses the intersectional challenges embedded within it and lying ahead. It moves the field forward by creating opportunities, based on lived experiences, for re-imagining the transformative potential of the nexus between feminism and policymaking. Interdisciplinary in scope and bringing to the fore the voices of both academics and practitioners, this book is the product of an international collaboration, forging links and dialogue that are increasingly necessary to question some of the exclusionary, militaristic, and hierarchical assumptions of policymaking which is labelled as feminist.
MPS co-founders Aditi Gupta and Mélina Villeneuve have contributed the chapter, 'A view into the fray : lived testimony of minorities in the UK peace, security and foreign policymaking fields'. Utilising feminist methodology, this chapter aims to provide a critical review of the peace and security policy landscape in the UK and examine minorities’ experience of peace and policymaking in the margins. In documenting how policy spaces are lived and felt by minorities who do policymaking labour in environments of structural inequity and intersectional oppressions, this chapter aims to illuminate the blockages to change, providing vital testimony and evidence on what impedes us from truly representative and sustainable policy that is in all our interests.
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