While debates about girls’ political agency and the forms it takes are relatively recent in IR scholarship, there are long-running and lively debates about the capacity for women to engage in feminist activism within and against neoliberalism. For some scholars, feminist struggles, aims and organizations have been incorporated, or even co-opted, into exploitative capitalist frameworks and markets, while others document in detail the everyday micro-resistances women adopt in challenging neoliberal subjectivities. These debates are also key to understanding the girl powering of development and why it is, perhaps, that so little has been written to date on girls’ capacity to resist girl power subjectivities.

Neoliberalism can be understood most simply as ‘enacting an ensemble of economic policies in accord with its root principle of affirming free markets’ (Brown, 2015: 28). Neoliberal economic policies tend to favour the following: the privatization of public services; reductions in state services and welfare provision; low taxation and deregulation of industry; global competition; the financialization of everyday interactions and transactions; the celebration of individuals as entrepreneurial subjects competing within a ‘fair’ and open market; and the prioritization above all else of free market principles (Bent, 2013b: 6; Brown, 2015; Carty and Mohanty, 2015: 85). But neoliberalism is also so much more than a set of economic policies. It calls to individuals everywhere to embrace individualism and entrepreneurialism, to work on themselves, to compete with one another. From self-help books, to reality TV competitions, to educational courses and training programmes, people across the globe are sold the idea that if they only work harder, do better, make themselves more competitive, success can and will be theirs.