At UNGA, the Old Order Is Dying. But What Comes Next?

The scale of the official UN General Assembly week is staggering: 73 heads of state and 45 heads of government, 49 ministers, 11 vice presidents, one crown prince, 168 official side events and hundreds more outside the building. While UNGA should be a moment of universality and equal participation, unfortunately it was reserved for the privileged in the current U.S. political landscape where many were not granted visas. I (as someone living in the U.S., near to NYC, with local friends happy to host my stay) was able to be there. I participated in more than a dozen events over five days, some inside but mostly outside of the UN. 

The pattern was impossible to miss: the official machine is enormous, but most of the energy – and inclusivity – happens just outside it. If you want to know where the feminist agenda is actually being shaped, watch the margins, not the floor. This is where you can feel that people, both governmental and civil society, can let their guard down a bit and tell hard truths.

This year’s UNGA had a strange split-screen quality. Speakers described a multilateral system in crisis: trust collapsing, military budgets climbing while gender and humanitarian funding plummets, and backlash against women’s rights better funded and organized than ever. Yet in the same rooms there was a genuine effort to build a new kind of international politics from the ground up. What comes next wasn’t clear, but feminist and decolonial approaches to policy aren’t a niche concern anymore: they’re the answer. This tension between hope and despair ran through nearly every event I attended. Someone at the UN 3.1 event invoked the line that “trust is acquired in drops but lost in buckets.” Meanwhile, IPPF’s Director General Maria Antonieta Alcalde Castro emphasized that “hope is a political strategy.” 

The old system was never neutral, and nobody pretended otherwise. The General Debate and the plenaries are theater, though arguably an important theater. At an International Peace Institute event, Costa Rica’s former president Laura Chinchilla put it plainly: the multilateral order was designed when only four African countries were independent (Egypt, Ethiopia, Liberia, and South Africa). From inception, all sovereign states were not given equal footing despite equal sovereignty, especially in the UN Security Council. We can’t expect the same structures to meet the needs of today’s world. Speakers were blunt that “restoring trust” is the wrong framing when you can’t restore something that was never evenly distributed. That critique showed up everywhere: Latin American philanthropy networks pushed to recognize diaspora remittances and ancestral knowledge as capital and care economies as vital economic infrastructure, African and Asian governments described pursuing feminist foreign policy without importing a label that doesn’t fit their politics, and sessions consistently refused to let “global” mean Western, emphasizing localization over imported frameworks.

And over and over, the same word kept coming up: narrative. At a Reykjavík Global Forum event, Geeta Rao Gupta put it bluntly: “We’ve lost the battle on the messaging.” The data and policy case are largely made; what’s missing is a story simple enough to travel, and evaluation-driven funding makes that long-term work hard to finance. 

Changing the story matters, but feminist and women’s rights organizations are the ones doing the daily work of implementation, documentation, and survivor support, on shrinking budgets. At the IPI WPS event, Mary Robinson described a “coordinated pushback that’s heavily funded” against women’s rights gains, and in a funding sidebar someone put it bluntly: anti-rights actors outspend feminist movements by a significant amount. In 2024, IDS reported the gap to be roughly three to one, and AWID found that just three global anti-rights actors were funded double that of 1,174 feminist and women's rights organizations combined, and we know it has only grown since. Sima Bahous, Executive Director of UN Women, at the WPS Focal Points meeting put a number on it: redirecting just 0.07 percent of global military spending toward women’s leadership and peacebuilding was the ask on the table. We can write the best narrative in the world, but if the organizations living it day to day can’t keep the lights on, the narrative doesn’t matter. 

Gender backlash is increasingly understood as a deliberate tactic, one that undermines democratic institutions by targeting gender equality as an entry point. Underneath all of it is a rejection of the idea that feminist and decolonial politics are add-ons to “real” (“hard”) security policy. Who holds power, whose labor is counted, and whose knowledge is trusted are the real questions beneath war, poverty, and institutional collapse, and that's the actual terrain of the fight.

This is exactly the terrain VOCAL exists to work in. While we value the potential for feminist diplomacy happening within institutional settings, we see the power in the margins as sites of knowledge production and the unsettling of traditional dynamics – where the real political work of feminist foreign policy happens. Our commitment is intersectional, decolonial, and grounded in transnational solidarity, which means we show up critical of these spaces even as we build inside them. The narrative fight isn't abstract to us. It’s the actual work: translating lived knowledge from the Global Majority into policy language, and making sure organizations doing the daily, unglamorous work of protecting women’s rights aren’t left competing for scraps while bigger institutions debate how to frame hope. Someone has to keep pushing past symbolic inclusion toward the structural change that these movements have named for decades, so we believe that feminist and decolonial policymaking matters more now than ever.