Decolonising Feminist Foreign Policy, IPSA World Congress, Seoul, 2025 -

At the 28th International Political Science Association (IPSA) World Congress, I had the honour of participating in the panel "Decolonising Feminist Foreign Policy; Rethinking Gender, Power and Global Hierarchies", brilliantly organised by Diana  E. Chacón. In a great dialogue with Kavita Nandini Ramdas, Farah Faizal, Katie Whipkey and Isabel Hernandez Pepe, and with insightful comments from Dr.Yasmine Hasnaoui, we engaged in a collective interrogation: What does it mean to claim a feminist foreign policy? Who takes part in shaping it, and who is shaped by it? Whose knowledge counts, and whose demands remain on the margins—excluded by the very way the policy is built and understood?

Approaching feminist foreign policy through a decolonial lens, we did not seek merely to add more voices or identities to an existing structure. Instead, we aimed to analyse how colonial structures are embedded in the present, and to ask what kinds of ways of being, knowing, and relating does this policy make possible—and which ones does it silence. Our concern was not with feminism as a label, but with feminism as a space for rupture, a way to challenge how the “global” is organised and imagined.

We refused to treat feminist foreign policy as a finished project or a normative framework solely based on gender equality. Instead, we approached it as a contested space—one that reflects global inequalities, but also holds the potential for new forms of solidarity and resistance to emerge. In this sense, the question of global and epistemic justice is not just about improving existing systems, but about rethinking the terms on which they are built. What would it mean to shift from a feminism of inclusion to a feminism of disruption that does not ask to be let in, but instead works to transform the very foundations in which it was created?

This panel was an act of collective dreaming. We reflected on the Global South as a space of radical thinking. We explored intersectionality not as a list of identities, but the imbrication of oppressions, resisting the clear-cut categories that policy often demands. And we asked what it means to truly commit to decoloniality—not as a metaphor, but as a radical way of reimagining how we live, relate, and build together across borders. In a world shaped by backlash, exploitation, systemic violence, and complicity, we ask how feminism—and feminist foreign policy—can continue to be a tool for resistance and for building transnational solidarity.

Maria Paulina Rivera Chávez