Introduction
The adoption of a feminist foreign policy (FFP) by Mexico took Mexican feminist civil society by surprise. In September 2019, without prior consultations or dialogues with local feminist civil society, the Mexican Foreign Affairs Secretary announced its FFP during the 74th session of the UN General Assembly. While the UN New York City headquarters roared with applause in response to the Mexican Foreign Affairs Secretary’s claim that the “Mexican government is feminist,” many feminists in Mexico interpreted the statement as an effort to pinkwash the government’s poor track record on gender equality within its borders. Moreover, Mexico’s FFP was charged with racial and colonial undertones since its inception, colloquially known as the “first FFP from the Global South” (Thompson Reference Thompson2020; Thompson, Ahmed, and Khokhar Reference Thomspson, Ahmed and Khokhar2021).
In 2022, we cofounded a collective, Internacional Feminista, with the purpose of monitoring, evaluating, and better understanding Mexico’s FFP. As Internacional Feminista, we coauthored an in-depth evaluation of Mexico’s FFP and collaborated with various stakeholders to better understand the scope and impact of the FFP.Footnote 1 Our mission was to promote a critical dialogue about feminism, foreign policy, international security, and diplomacy in Mexico and the rest of the world. As researchers seeking to practice feminist ethics and self-reflexivity, we identify as cisgender white Mexican women and feminist scholars pursuing doctoral degrees in the Global North (Germany and Australia).
In this Note from the Field, we ask: Who benefits from Mexico’s FFP? Who does not? And why? Drawing on an autoethnographic approach as Mexican researchers studying FFP (Bochner Reference Bochner2016),Footnote 2 we explore the tensions, contradictions, and struggles at the core of the FFP ecosystem, relying on Mexico as the site of focus. We argue that the FFP is entrenched in a historical and racist practice that regards Eurocentric feminist knowledge production as the culmination of a civilizing trajectory to which feminists, particularly those of the Global South, should — naturally — aspire to (Quijano Reference Quijano2000). We observe the coloniality of feminist knowledge in three points: the tokenization — or exclusion — of Global South perspectives depending on the interests of dominant actors; the operation of a knowledge production space that responds to market logics; and the expression of hierarchies and asymmetries according to the — uneven — access to financing. These dynamics are fostered by FFP norm entrepreneurs (True and Mintrom Reference True and Mintrom2001) who have partnered with states at the expense of local demands.
We find that Mexico’s FFP primarily served the interests of individuals — Mexican high-level officials within the Foreign Affairs Ministry and a small group of Global North FFP-focused NGOs — who benefited directly from the exclusion of local feminists. Our research also shows that Mexico’s FFP has had a minimal impact on advancing accountability and gender justice, including within the government, and mainly serves as a pinkwashing strategy that obscures Mexico’s poor track record addressing gender-based violence (Internacional Feminista 2023a). Considering these findings, we advocate for a transformation of FFP knowledge production and emphasize that collaboration must prioritize radical feminist practices of solidarity to tackle Global North/South divisions and tensions (Alvarez Reference Alvarez2000).
The Global North’s Tokenization of Mexico’s FFP and the Exclusion of Local Feminists
As Global North organizations praised Mexico and provided officials in the Subsecretary of Human Rights Unit within Mexico’s Foreign Affairs Ministry with a platform, they inadvertently (or not) also provided Mexican government officials an alibi to ignore the demands of feminist civil society in Mexico. The addition of a Global South nation to the FFP club not only created the optics of a an inclusive FFP ecosystem, but also legitimized a group of predominantly liberal, white-led organizations from the Global North at a critical time when white, liberal feminism is under scrutiny for reproducing colonial and racist structures (Drullard Reference Drullard2023; Rivera Chavez Reference Rivera Chavez2022; Zakaria Reference Zakaria2021; Zhukova Reference Zhukova2023). Thus, the contradictions inherent in Mexico’s FFP and its deeply flawed design and implementation would not matter to them as long as the FFP optics looked good.
The tokenization of Mexico’s FFP was noted by over 100 Mexican feminists who issued a call for international feminist solidarity to hold the Mexican government accountable and to seek coherence between its domestic and foreign policies (CSOs Letter 2021). Instead of heeding these calls, Subsecretary of Human Rights staff repeatedly headlined international FFP fora while not a single Mexican feminist civil society actor was afforded the same platform or space. As a result, the silence and complicity from Global North FFP advocates emboldened the Mexican government to ignore Mexican feminist civil society and override their demands for gender justice and the right to a life free of violence. In turn, the FFP allowed them to amplify their “progressive” reputation at the international level and multilateral sphere.
With the backing of Global North advocates, Mexico’s FFP strategy allowed the government to elude feminist accountability. How can governments and stakeholders question Mexico’s poor track record on gender-based violence when the country positions itself as a champion of feminism and pushes progressive rhetoric in multilateral fora? We conclude that Mexican authorities and diplomats benefitted considerably from this strategy while Mexican women, feminists, and sexual dissidences continue were ignored.
Supply, Demand, and Accountability in the FFP Knowledge Market
As cofounders of Internacional Feminista, we decided to write a report evaluating Mexico’s FFP for several reasons. The main one was that we were curious (Ahmed Reference Ahmed2010; Enloe Reference Enloe2004) to understand FFP advocates’ enthusiasm for Mexico’s FFP, which is repeatedly referred to as the “first in the Global South” (Thompson Reference Thompson2020; Thompson et al. 2021). Acknowledging that FFPs could not be compared to one another due to local contexts, we designed a methodology to evaluate Mexico’s FFP using the framework and goals set by Mexico’s Foreign Affairs Ministry as the benchmark (Internacional Feminista 2023a). We wrote the report in Spanish to share our findings with the local feminist community, noting that the FFP knowledge market is primarily conducted in English and mostly targets audiences in the Global North. It is also important to stress that we wrote the report without any funding, reflecting the capitalist dynamics of free labor that make feminist research precarious and vulnerable.
One of the findings of this initial evaluation was that the process to adopt an FFP was exclusively led, managed, and promoted by the Subsecretary of Human Rights Unit within Mexico’s Foreign Affairs Ministry. In other words, it was not mainstreamed across the foreign policy apparatus. A coalition to advance FFP was never forged, not with civil society nor any other key government counterparts. While sharing our report with local actors, we also learned that not only was there a lack of cooperation but there was also in fact significant friction between local government actors and diplomats regarding FFP. Allegedly, no one was allowed to participate in FFP dialogues other than Subsecretary of Human Rights staff. This created a toxic, competitive, uncollaborative, and distinctly unfeminist environment.
Another key finding of our report was that there was no instrument outlining the policy actions, goals, and indicators of Mexico’s FFP. The guiding text was only a slide deck. Consequently, there are no mechanisms of accountability for the relevant policy actors. Even more concerning, there were no resources or budget allocated to the FFP, casting doubt on the seriousness of this policy package. Lastly, we found that, although intersectionality was outlined as a key pillar of Mexico’s FFP, there was a fundamental misunderstanding and contradiction regarding the term “intersectionality” and how it is used by the Mexican government — who use it to refer to women and girls only, instead of to overlapping forms of oppression (Crenshaw Reference Crenshaw1989; Internacional Feminista 2023a, 30).
However, despite the empirical contradictions and the findings of our report, FFP advocates in the Global North promoted Mexico’s FFP and worked closely with Subsecretary of Human Rights personnel. To our knowledge, there was no intention to push for meaningful accountability and transparency mechanisms, let alone engage with Mexican feminist civil society. We quickly realized that to “be taken seriously” in the FFP ecosystem, we had to translate the report Spanish into English. In other words, we registered the impossibility of epistemic disobedience in the colonial dynamics of FFP knowledge production (Mignolo Reference Mignolo2010).
Hierarchies of Power Within the FFP Ecosystem
Before launching the English version of the Internacional Feminista report, which we again self-funded, we met a key FFP stakeholder and funder from the Global North. Initially, this stakeholder was keen to openly collaborate with us and provide material support for a webinar to present the text. Nonetheless, this was contingent on collaboration with a Global North-based FFP entrepreneur with close connections with Mexican state authorities. This was proven by their objection to openly participating in the webinar without the inclusion of Subsecretary of Human Rights personnel as panelists. Because we rejected the imposition, we were once again sidelined by powerful stakeholders who gatekeep resources, influence, and spaces.
The coloniality of knowledge also manifests through a hierarchy in the production of material according to its source, not only the language. Days before we released the English version of our report, a Global North organization published a competing report that excluded a number of factors, which conveniently allowed for a more positive reading of the impact of FFP in Mexico. According to this report, Mexico’s FFP was the third-best in the world (Papagioti Reference Papagioti2023). Yet, we noted that only for the case of Mexico, variables that would have impacted its place in the ranking negatively were ignored. For example, while militarization in Mexico has increased significantly in recent years, the report only measured military spending and arms trade, both of which are fraught markers of Mexico’s criminal war and insecurity crises (Zepeda Gil Reference Zepeda Gil2023).
As a result of the gaps in the report, International Feminista published an open letter challenging the claims of this report on methodological grounds (Internacional Feminista 2023b). This had significant repercussions. First, a prominent FFP entrepreneur withdrew her public support at the launching webinar of our English report. In a meeting, we were told that criticizing the Mexican government so openly compromised the trust that Global North FFP entrepreneurs had developed with Subsecretary of Human Rights officials and that it was not “the right attitude.” We interpreted this to mean that we were being disciplined for not conforming to the Global North entrepreneur’s expectations and the interests of the Subsecretary of Human Rights personnel. Latin American academics have long denounced this pressure for self-tokenization as a mechanism of anti-intellectualism and the continuation of colonial dominance (Mignolo Reference Mignolo2010).
The launch of our report in English, which went on despite the setbacks,Footnote 3 and the publication of the competing report also coincided with a change in the political context in Mexico. The Subsecretary of Human Rights officers in charge of the FFP left their positions as the former Secretary of Foreign Affairs, Marcelo Ebrard, prepared to participate in the presidential primaries of the ruling party. Although Ebrard failed in his presidential bid, the departure of the team that monopolized the FFP in the institution created a void in the ecosystem. The “diversity and inclusion” element was suddenly left without representation. It was at that moment that we began to receive invitations to events and our report began to be cited. Within the Mexican government, we finally received a response to our months-long request for a meeting to discuss our findings and the policy recommendations.
Conclusions
The FFP community is only now beginning to understand what FFP means in practice. As feminists, we are particularly concerned about the ethics of feminist organizations in the Global North and the unchallenged nature of their relationship with state actors. Nonetheless, while writing this Note, we also reflected on how our journeys have changed and how FFP has shaped us as feminist scholars. We realized that along with our ideas and understanding of what FFP is, or should be, our paths and careers have also evolved. We acknowledge that we too are stakeholders within the FFP ecosystem and ensuing knowledge market. As participants of these dynamics, we have also benefited in some ways (i.e., expert interviews, invitations to events, and publications), while we have been disadvantaged in others (i.e., almost never materially remunerated for our work).
Scholars from the Global South who have access to academic circles in the Global North have been criticized for extracting and appropriating contributions from their countries for their own economic and professional gain without a meaningful dialogue with their counterparts (Rivera Cusicanqui Reference Rivera Cusicanqui2012). We recognize that our position within the feminist movement in Mexico lies in a privileged margin and it is far from representative. In an unequal country with high rates of gender-based violence, the priorities of feminist activists are normally distant to foreign policy issues. This often made us feel alienated and doubtful of whether our contribution would be of any value to the movement. The tension of our relative positionalities, as feminists with privilege in Mexico and as feminists from the Global South internationally, shaped our interactions with FFP actors.
Lastly, having conducted this work together for almost five years, we have also benefited personally by forging a friendship and a reliable academic partnership. We consider it particularly important to have a trustworthy friend and partner at critical times when we have faced doubt, frustration, and gaslighting from multiple actors within the FFP ecosystem. These bitter experiences have made both of us skeptical of FFP. Despite all of this, and to end on a more uplifting note, we underscore that we continue to have hope, if not in FFP, in the feminist values that continue challenging the deeply embedded coloniality of power within our current economic, political, and social structures. Following Lugones’s proposal (Reference Lugones2010), we make a call to reimagine a feminist coalition that impels us to know each other as dense, in-relation selves at the colonial difference to construct a new feminist geopolitics of knowing and loving.
Acknowledgments
We are deeply grateful to Toni Haastrup, Jennifer Thomson and Columba Achilleos-Sarll for their thoughtful comments and feedback.
Competing interests
The authors have no competing interests to declare.
Open access
