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Who We Are
Our Vision
VOCAL's vision is a world in which feminist foreign policy is built from the knowledges, cosmologies, and political practices of the global majority — not adapted to fit frameworks already defined elsewhere. Power is shared and accountable, and the epistemological foundations of global policy are opened to those coloniality has refused to see.
Our Mission
Our mission is to build a feminist organization of scholar-activists, rooted in transnational solidarity and the plural knowledges of the majority world, that works through translation as a political methodology: carrying feminist knowledge into policy spaces not to make it legible to existing frameworks, but to change the terms of those frameworks themselves.
This matters because feminist foreign policy currently treats inclusion as the goal — more diverse voices in the same frameworks. VOCAL exists because inclusion without epistemological transformation reproduces the exclusions it claims to address.
Our Strategy
VOCAL has two main strategies that work together: convening and knowledge production and translation.
Our convening strategy brings together organizations and scholar-activists from different regional and political contexts around a shared epistemological question: whose knowledge counts in feminist foreign policy, and on whose terms. This distinguishes our approach from conventional coalition-building. Since organizations join around a question, not a position, their different traditions, methods, and regional histories remain part of the analysis rather than being resolved into a single shared view. The result is work that none of the participating organizations could have produced alone.
Our knowledge production and translation strategy centers on translation as VOCAL's core political methodology. We do not extract knowledge from movements and communities to fit external policy recommendations, nor do we simply document diverse perspectives. Instead, we collaborate with feminist movements, scholar-activists, and communities whose knowledge existing FFP frameworks cannot yet accommodate. We bring this knowledge into policy and research spaces to expand those frameworks, rather than making the knowledge conform to them.