VOCAL
VOCAL brings together feminist thinkers, activists, diplomats, peacebuilders, and practitioners whose expertise emerges from lived experience, collective resistance, and context-specific knowledge across the majority world.
We share a commitment to reimagining foreign policy through our plural perspectives, centring voices and analyses that have historically been marginalised in global decision-making. Our work is rooted in transnational solidarity and intersectional feminist values. For us, intersectionality is not a sum of identities, but a lens that reveals how systems of oppression overlap. We resist the rigid and binary categories that policy often imposes, and instead, hold space for complexity. We recognise that colonial structures continue to organise the present, shaping whose knowledge counts, whose security is prioritised, and whose lives are made invisible. In response, we position ourselves as translators and bridge-builders, mediating between different ways of knowing and being, and connecting feminist movements, institutions, and communities across political and epistemic borders.
Our commitment is to ground global policy in the knowledges, struggles, and innovations of those historically positioned at the margins of power, recognising that transformation must emerge from the peripheries, not be prescribed from the centre. Through this approach, we are building an organisation that embodies the feminist futures we imagine: collaborative, plural, reflexive, and transformative.
Our Vision
We are building an organisation committed to design feminist foreign policies from the majority world, on their own terms, that do not reproduce dominant discourses or simply adopt existing “Western” concepts. We understand feminism as a global movement, but not a universal project.
We want to contribute to the creation of a world built on radically imagined feminist systems that prioritize human dignity over profit, environmental renewal over extraction, and solidarity over competition. Power is shared and accountable. Historical harms are acknowledged and repaired.
All communities have the conditions they need not just to survive, but to thrive. Global relations are rooted in listening, mutual respect, and collective action. Policy is no longer designed in isolation from the people it affects but shaped by those at the margins and carried forward through shared leadership.
Our Mission
To build and sustain a feminist organisation that translates, analyses, and advances feminist foreign policy from the majority world, using horizontal collaboration, transnational networks, and plural knowledge systems to influence global decision-making in ways that are intersectional, decolonial, and transformative. Feminist decoloniality, for us, is not a theoretical gesture; it is a practice of reimagining how we live, relate, and build together across political and epistemic borders. We welcome the shared learning and mutual exchange that will be necessary if our societies and governments are to truly walk the talk, both at home and abroad. Otherwise, feminism will remain foreign.