The Feminist Movement at a Crossroads: Reclaiming Our Politics in an Age of Paradox

The General Assembly Hall was only half full at the commemoration of the Beijing Declaration’s 30th anniversary last year. As leaders spoke of progress and renewed commitment to gender equality, the emptiness in the room felt symbolic—a mirror of the widening gap between promises and reality. This was meant to be a moment of collective reflection on how far we have come and how much remains undone. Instead, it revealed a deeper unease within the global feminist movement itself.

After a year marked by geopolitical upheaval, relentless intergovernmental negotiations, and a proliferation of gender equality commitments, a troubling pattern has emerged. Feminist advocates are navigating a landscape defined by paradox. Political declarations multiply while action stalls. Evidence accumulates while accountability remains elusive. Inequality is acknowledged rhetorically yet treated as discretionary in practice. These contradictions are not incidental. They point to the limits of feminist strategies that have increasingly been professionalized and technocratized—often at the expense of their political edge.

At their core, these tensions reflect a deeper challenge: the feminist movement has become adept at naming external resistance but far less comfortable with interrogating the assumptions shaping its own approaches.

That challenge is inseparable from one of the movement’s greatest moments of success—the Beijing Declaration and Platform for Action. Beijing marked an extraordinary political triumph, centering feminist demands for equality, rights, and dignity in global policymaking. Yet it also anchored those demands within the logic of its time. Adopted at the height of post–Cold War optimism, it helped entrench the conviction that prevailing political and economic models would naturally deliver justice, if only their processes were made more inclusive.

Over time, that belief reshaped feminist advocacy. A vibrant movement that named racism, apartheid, Zionism, colonialism, capitalism, and extractivism as interconnected systems of oppression was steadily channeled into highly technocratic siloes. Political demands gave way to programs; programs to toolkits; toolkits to acronyms—GBV, WEE, WPS, and most recently FFP. What was once a transformative political project has been absorbed into a procedural architecture, shaped largely by donor priorities and co-opted by governments.

This recalibration narrowed the horizon of feminist ambition. It produced the very issues we now confront: an abundance of commitments and consensus documents, paired with limited capacity—and often limited political will—to deliver structural change. As such, feminist work has been reduced to what can be funded and managed, rather than what is necessary to redistribute power.

The consequences of this shift are tangible. Gender equality has become something to be “mainstreamed” when convenient, funded through volatile and discretionary budgets, and justified with arguments designed to appeal to the market instead of justice. Evidence remains an essential tool, yet its influence increasingly depends on whether it can be translated into return-on-investment terms. Closing gender gaps is now framed as “smart economics.” While this message gains political traction, it also quietly reinforces the idea that rights must pay for themselves and that inequality is unacceptable only when it is inefficient.

The limits of this logic are stark in the current political climate. Despite decades of evidence demonstrating women’s contribution to economic growth, productivity, and social resilience, there is a resurgence of calls for women to retreat from public life—to go back home, rebuild families, and reproduce nations. In this context, appeals to women’s economic utility ring hollow and offer little, if any, protection. They neither shield rights from erosion nor challenge the deeply political project of reasserting gendered control over bodies, labor, and autonomy.

A further paradox lies in how we now understand accountability itself. Each major convening delivers yet another set of agreed-upon conclusions, roadmaps, or pledges painstakingly negotiated, publicly celebrated, and meticulously—albeit quickly—archived. These commitments are rarely accompanied by concrete action plans, sustained financing, or meaningful metrics to track their implementation. The result is a strange inversion: a rapid increase of promises, reporting requirements, and tracking exercises, alongside a persistent absence of structural change.

This gap has fueled a deepening sense of disillusionment. Feminist advocates are asked to engage in processes that deliver little, and policymakers are pushed to navigate cycles of symbolic compliance without political follow-through.

So where does this leave us? At a crossroads that demands greater honesty and precision about the kind of feminist politics this moment requires.

If feminist demands have been depoliticized, then feminist advocacy must recover what earlier movements insisted upon: a politics of naming. We must name power—economic, racial, colonial, militarized—rather than translating injustice into neutral frameworks. This means bringing feminist analysis directly into debates on debt, austerity, climate finance, and security, instead of confining gender equality to parallel tracks with limited influence.

Instrumental arguments are no longer sufficient. In an era marked by the resurgence of pronatalist and nationalist projects, feminist strategies must assert bodily autonomy, care, and social reproduction as political necessities, not market variables.

Progress must also be redefined. It cannot be measured by the volume of declarations produced or reports submitted. It must be judged by whether gaps are closing, resources are shifting, and power is redistributed. If we are to demand more, we must rethink accountability and impact to make change harder to avoid, not easier to perform.

Across all these tensions runs a simple truth: feminist futures are inseparable from struggles for economic and climate justice, labor rights, racial justice, and peace. These cross-sectoral alliances are not partnerships of convenience; they are recognitions of shared structural terrain. We cannot afford isolation as power becomes more concentrated and aggressive across borders and sectors.

The feminist movement is confronting the limits of strategies shaped by a different political era. Sitting with paradoxes is not a sign of drift; it is a reckoning. The question now is whether we can translate that reckoning into a politics ambitious enough to meet this moment—one that confronts power directly, demands more collectively, and refuses to mistake procedural progress for justice itself.