What We Do

VOCAL's work is organized around five interconnected pillars:

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1. Knowledge Justice. We engage the debate about whose knowledge informs feminist foreign policy. We focus on the structural question of whether the foundational categories of FFP can accommodate the cosmologies, political traditions, and feminist practices of the Global Majority. This includes examining how research is funded and for whose purposes, how concepts like gender and equality travel across different political and cultural contexts, and what it would mean for FFP to be shaped by plural knowledges that have been systematically excluded.

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2. Circular Policy Implementation. We engage the gap between how FFP is designed at the national and international level and how it is lived at the local level. Communities are already doing the work that FFP claims as its project, negotiating the effects of trade, climate change, militarization, care, to name a few examples, in their daily lives. This local feminist practice rarely enters the frameworks that could be shaped by it, because FFP design has no mechanism for that knowledge to travel back upward. VOCAL works to name this circularity, analyze its political costs, and build the bridges that allow local feminist organizing to be recognized as foreign policy knowledge.

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3. Regionalism. We engage with the challenge of building transnational feminist analysis that is genuinely collaborative rather than universalizing. VOCAL's own collective is regionally diverse, as we believe that feminist knowledge produced from different regional traditions, histories, and political contexts is irreducible to a single framework, and that the conversation between those traditions is itself analytically generative. Our work builds epistemological alliances across regions to create the conditions for different regional feminist knowledge traditions to think together, challenge each other, and produce transnational analyses. The alliances we are building are epistemological and political, not merely geographical.

 

4. Macro-Economic Resourcing. We engage the debate about what it would mean for feminist principles to govern the macroeconomic architecture of FFP itself, including how knowledge is funded, which organizations are resourced, what accountability mechanisms govern the relationship between funders and movements, and how the structural concentration of decision-making power in Minority World institutions is challenged in practice rather than in principle.

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5. Feminist Policymaking. We engage the question of how international governance can be reimagined when no single epistemological tradition is presumed universal. Rather than seeking consensus around inherited frameworks, VOCAL explores governance grounded in epistemic plurality, reciprocity, and negotiated coexistence between different political traditions and feminist practices.