SOAS Research Online

Abstract

Feminist policymaking and gender equality in policy agendas have gradually integrated Western and liberal feminist approaches to maximise opportunities of interventions in traditional policy challenges. However, the framework of feminist policymaking is still a linear process that limits progress and advancement in feminist knowledge production. More importantly, the gradual progression in feminist policymaking has failed to properly engage with the strategies of institutional resistance and disruption that can be drawn from feminist contributions from the global South. Theorising feminist policymaking needs to not only look at traditional hierarchies of knowledge production, but it must also take into account conceptual tools of postcolonial feminist interventions and their relationship with decolonisation. Combining decolonial methodology, socio-legal research, and postcolonial feminist interventions offers new ways to interrogate the structures of policymaking and fundamentally challenge the dominance of white liberal feminism in foreign policy spaces.