On International Women’s Day (March 8), women and dissident groups in over 80 countries take action to confront growing systemic injustices and reaffirm our commitment to substantive equality, dignity and collective care. For more than 20 years, the International Network for Economic, Social and Cultural Rights–ESCR-Net has marked this day with collective action to amplify the demands, visions, and shared struggles of women, especially from social movements, Indigenous Peoples and feminists fighting globally for dignity, self-determination, and human rights. In the face of the conservative backlash against the gender equality and inclusion agenda, we reinforce our call for a Social Pact on Care, recognizing care as a central pillar for the sustainability of life and the planet.
We face an alarming global context: escalating militarization, persistent genocide in Palestine, deepening climate crisis, dispossession, and the rise of far-right extremism. Communities worldwide are confronting intensified attacks on democracy and human rights–whether through militarization, resurgent ethnoreligious nationalisms, and actions by various non-state actors. These attacks are not random; they are the direct result of a political economy of violence that sustains a profit-driven system through war, environmental destruction, and social control and oppression. From the territories of Tolima, Colombia, to the Abahlali baseMjondolo movement in South Africa, women resist a capitalist, racist, patriarchal, homophobic, transphobic and extractivist model that prioritizes profits over life. Women are resisting the long legacy of historic colonialism and imperialism carried in their bodies and life histories.
As a first collective action, more than 20 ESCR-Net member organizations are participating in CSW 69, where the main theme will focus on reviewing and evaluating the implementation of the Beijing Declaration and Platform for Action, as well as the outcomes of the 23rd special session of the General Assembly. We aim to intervene with a historical, social, and critical perspective, highlighting the impact of the neoliberal economic model, increasing corporate power, and international financial institutions that generate debt, impose austerity measures, and exacerbate the feminization of poverty, labor flexibilization, and precarization. At a time when the validity of multilateral spaces to achieve transformative outcomes is questioned, it is imperative to address decision-makers and denounce the corporate capture of public decision-making, the acceleration of the climate crisis, and repression and authoritarianism, which today serve as barriers to fulfilling human rights, especially for women.
This review presents an opportunity to advocate for the creation of conditions to move toward just, feminist, and equitable care economies, end the sexual and gender division of labor, and recognize care as decent and dignified work. We aim to establish the right to care as a public and collective responsibility, contributing to a world of work free from all forms of violence and harassment.
As a global movement, we bring a wealth of analysis on how the current capitalist, racist, colonialist, and patriarchal model impacts us in different ways. It’s time to design strategies for defending rights, with a special focus on advancing Social Pact on Care. This includes strengthening proposals from feminist economies, good living practices, and the knowledge of defenders of territories and natural resources, while prioritizing the inclusion of visions and solutions from communities and social movements–especially women of African descent and indigenous women, the LGBTQI+ movement, and others.
8M: A Call to Rethink Ourselves as a Global Feminist Network in the Face of the Neoliberal, Racist, and Patriarchal Backlash
The anniversary of Beijing, in this alarming global context of setbacks, not only in the women’s rights agenda but also in the rights of all people and the planet, calls us to rethink ourselves as members of a global movement that includes women’s and feminist movements and organizations, and to be more critical of the path we have taken by reviewing our strategies, the spaces gained, our strengths, knowledge, and reinforced capacities.
We aim to reflect on how we have advanced toward a diverse and internationalist movement that has learned to strengthen itself through the struggles of indigenous, Afro-descendant, black, rural, and peasant women, trade unionists, environmental defenders, academics, political women, educators, young people, the LGBTIQ+ movement, and community leaders. We want to understand how we have managed to articulate, think globally, and deploy political work that impacts gender equality and empowerment agendas at the regional, local, and community levels, and vice versa. It is imperative to learn from this long journey and from our collective strategies because, while we have made progress, it is far from the vision established in Beijing, and the hard-won rights are being rolled back.
We are called upon to be bold and more creative and to think about the conditions we have within networks, social movements, unions, and human rights organizations with an internationalist focus, to strengthen our struggles. It requires us to share those lessons we have learned and those key successes we have obtained so that we can unite our efforts at a national level with those taking place internationally. Thirty years ago, we understood that global debates on integrating a gender perspective into the economic and social development agenda, population and development, environment, and the enforcement and expansion of human rights impact the local reality of women and girls, and this is more relevant than ever.
In the new repressive wave promoted by the Trump administration and its corporate-led agenda, including the reinstatement of the Global GAG Rule which represents a clear attack on gender equality, human rights, inclusion, and diversity policies, the advance of authoritarian, conservative, and fascist governments is evident. These governments reinforce racist and discriminatory immigration policies and promote an agenda of the “natural or traditional family,” understood by many conservative actors as a monogamous, heterosexual union of a man and a woman in formal marriage with their children, disregarding the rights of women and LGBTQI+ people. In addition, some countries that have ratified the legally binding UN treaty CEDAW, and committed to Beijing Declaration and other agreements to advance gender equality and human rights, have also become a part of the regressive Geneva Consensus Declaration which poses a grave danger to safe abortion rights and bodily autonomy, among others. We recognise that the confusion of the times we live in is part of the plan to destabilise our efforts to achieve equality. That austerity measures and the decisions by so many governments to turn inwards mean that less financial support is being made available to us as a collective and to the international and regional human rights bodies that we look to for accountability. Collectively we are starved of resources, support and access to rights, whether its access to much needed health care, access to education or simply access to the spaces where policies are being discussed and made. We cannot remain indifferent to these issues.
One of the biggest challenges is to address the majority about the consequences of the new world order and call for the unity of women’s movements, human rights defenders, environmentalists, indigenous groups, unions, and academia, among others. Also, as a movement and a global network working for substantive equality, women’s autonomy, and social and environmental justice, we need to deepen ways to challenge the development paradigm that perpetuates these injustices.
In the face of the retraction of funds, we need to rethink the sustainability of our struggles through alternative sources to sustain our feminist struggles and advance our agenda for substantive equality. We must collectively think of more solidarity-based and collaborative ways to work in networks, strengthening ourselves through feminist political education strategies, systemic analysis, and further articulations with and between movements.
ESCR-Net, as a global network that has been working for over 20 years on systemic change, has great potential to generate political and educational reflection to grow and position ourselves in this new reality and contribute to a multilateralism free from corporate capture, promoting elements that lay the foundation for new forms of global governance that respond to the needs of people and the planet. This is the moment for the systemic transformations that are so necessary, strengthening the struggles of our movements and organizations to make human rights and social justice a reality for all.
This statement has been developed collectively by ESCR-Net’s Women and ESCR working group
