Imagine, for a moment, standing at the precipice of a global reckoning—not in the abstract, but in the gritty, blood-soaked corridors of power where empires still whisper their promises of progress. The United Nations, that grand stage of diplomatic theater, is yet another monument to the same systems that have historically carved women out of the narrative of world dominion like so much flotsam tossed overboard. It is time for a coup within a system: an anti-imperialist feminist overhaul that exposes the way feminism has been co-opted, domesticated, reduced to a PR ploy for a club that has repeatedly traded its principles for the indulgent gazes of its colonial past. This is not about adding women to the room—it’s about dismantling the very architecture of the room itself. And it demands, fundamentally, that feminism become more terrifyingly relevant than ever: a radical act of decolonization in real time.
The UN’s Feminist Facade: When Performative Progress Polices Resistance
The United Nations has long cultivated a relationship with feminism that smells suspiciously like window dressing. Officials at UN Women (born from the ashes of the failed 1995 Beijing conference) have become experts in spinning women’s liberation as a checkbox for development agendas, a soft-power tool to deflect from the raging capitalist crisis, or better yet—an unarmed weapon aimed exclusively at non-Western women’s lives. The “gender lens” is no panacea. It’s a smoke screen designed to obscure the ways in which Western feminism has historically been an appendage of neocolonial enterprise: a tool to justify interventions dressed up in suffragette hats and peacekeeping rhetoric.
The irony? The same organizations tasked with dismantling patriarchal structures have spent decades propping up nation states that systematically erase women’s agency. Take the war on terror—forged under a false gendered narrative of “protecting” women from Islamist extremism—leaving millions of women impoverished, traumatized, and criminalized in the aftermath. This is not feminism; it’s a script rewritten for the stage of imperialistic self-righteousness. And it’s time to pull the curtain back.
Worse yet, the UN’s feminism remains fundamentally parochial. Consider the Women, Peace, and Security (WPS) agenda, which positions women primarily as victims at the table rather than as the architects of geopolitical futures. When women in Afghanistan demand autonomy over their own futures, the dominant discourse frames their resistance as the exception, rather than the rule. What if feminist foreign policy were not about “representing” women, but about radical reparations tied to the material conditions that have allowed patriarchal states to thrive? Imagine a system where feminist policy is weaponized to dismantle extraction economies, where development is reframed as a collective practice of care, or where global trade policies are read through a feminist, anti-capital gaze. What would peace look like if it refused to privilege masculinity’s expansionist appetites?
Anti-Imperialism Must Be the Bedrock, Not the Guest Star
Feminism must stop being the guest at the imperialist table. It has long been an unwilling accomplice—an afterthought thrown into the mix of capital, violence, and empire-building. In this context, “feminist foreign policy” (FFP), when deployed in places like Sweden, Canada, and New Zealand, becomes just another layer of ideological insulation for a system that will not change. It’s a trick—giving feminism “the floor” while maintaining the script, the language, the architecture. True feminist disruption would demand an ending to these nation-states who imagine themselves as avatars of progress, whose foreign aid is a form of economic punishment for inconvenient peoples, and whose diplomats are trained to “engage” rather than dismantle the systems that uphold white supremacy and neoliberalism.
The anti-imperialist dimension of feminist foreign policy is a radical notion. It is not about the US or Europe “doing” feminism in foreign lands, but about challenging the very terms on which these nation-states operate. It means interrogating the mythos of humanitarian intervention: Who exactly is being “protected,” and from what? Why do we assume that the women we envision aiding want our salvation? Feminism, after all, is a rebellion. If it becomes a tool of state control, it has been entirely co-opted.
This is also a critique of the UN’s own contradictions. Organized under the facade of universality, the UN remains a bastion of the “civilizing mission” in all but name. The so-called feminist interventions in Myanmar, in Colombia, in Congo are rife with this condescension—the assumption that women there must be molded into the mold of “progressive” Western notions of personhood. Anti-imperialist feminism demands an admission of fault, a radical humility where nations and organizations must ask: Who has benefited from how we have framed women’s liberation? Whose futures have we sacrificed for the sake of “peace”? Whose definition of justice have we insisted upon?
Dismantling the Nation-State: Feminism Beyond Borders
Nation-states are the original monsters. Their borders are not neutral; they are arbitrary cuts through lives, ecosystems, and futures, enforced with violence to protect capital. Feminist policy cannot hope to reform this apparatus from within. Instead, it must begin to imagine structures that render the nation-state obsolete, or at the very least—neutered. This means embracing decentralization: feminist movements linked across continents, not by the UN, but by mutual interest and shared resistance. It means challenging the very assumption that “sovereignty” can be a feminist project—unless we reshape it into collective care, not just a club of men (and a few complicit women) trading in power and profit.
Consider the following: If feminist policy is to matter, it must punish empire. It must strip away the illusion of neutrality held by those who preach “gender equality” in their halls of power, while their foreign policies continue to funnel resources into militarism, corporate looting, and colonial extraction. This means advocating for reparations—not just for the descendants of slaves, but for the global underclass of dispossessed women whose labor and land have been stolen for millennia. And it means exposing how even the “female” diplomats and aid workers deployed in the name of feminism often act as cultural colonizers, inflicting their own ahistorical narratives on the bodies and communities they claim to liberate.
The UN’s vision of globalization is a fantasy. It insists that capitalism (and the empire that sustains it) can be “humanized” through the addition of women in boardrooms. It refuses to challenge the fact that imperialist structures ensure patriarchal power at every level, from the United Nations Security Council to the last village council in an extractive state. Anti-imperialist feminism sees clear. It demands that we stop treating the symptoms of empire—as if aid is healing while extraction rages on—as if meetings and pledges are acts of resistance.
Rebellion is the Only Language of Change: Toward Feminist Geopolitics
The real question is: What if feminism became a form of geopolitical warfare? Not the kind fought with drone strikes or trade tariffs, but the kind redefined by those who have been erased. It is time to weaponize the unapologetic anger, the refusal, the creative destruction that women’s movements have always been. To think of feminist policy as not merely accommodative but subversive: disrupting the flow of arms to regimes that violate bodily autonomy, redirecting foreign aid from war economies to abortion funds, to food sovereignty, to community-controlled healthcare. It is time to ask: What if feminism’s foreign policy agenda began with the premise that capitalism is not a fact of nature, but a system built on the erasure of women and non-Western people?
This will require breaking the myth of the “global village,” where every act of resistance is equally worthy, where no one is expendable. But it also requires celebrating the ways feminism has already been radicalized by those on the front lines: from the Zapatistas’ “the masculine is a social construct” proclamations, to the Indigenous women of Standing Rock fighting for land rights with every blow of their maces, to the Iranian feminists dancing beneath the hands of the Morality Police. Their rebellions suggest a different architecture: one that sees the nation-state not as the arena of change, but as the battle to be won elsewhere entirely.
The Path Forward: An Anti-Imperialist Manifesto for the UN
In the halls of the UN, feminism must become a threat. The United Nations must be asked to prove its willingness to dismantle the colonial, capitalist roots of its existence, because, as it stands, it operates as a tool for maintaining the current hierarchy. What if the UN were held to accountability? What if feminist foreign policy demanded a global tax on corporations, or immediate debt cancellation for countries mired by neocolonial agreements? What if the “security agenda” were actually a justice agenda, reckoning with the material legacies of empire?
These are the questions that refuse to be met with polite speeches and photo-op moments with “gender experts.” The UN’s “gender lens” is a cheap trick—it sees the world in binary: here are the victims, here are the saviors, a stage set for the illusion of empathy. True feminist policy must abandon the stage entirely. It must demand to rewrite the rules of the game. And it must begin with a confession: there is no “them,” only an us who must all burn, together.
The time for incremental change is over. Feminism, when wielded correctly, is a nuclear option: it can dismantle empires from within, expose the fraudulence of progress, and refuse the false dichotomy between “the political” and “the personal.” A feminist overhaul of the UN, therefore, must not be a matter of adding up more women; it must be a wholesale rejection of its imperialist, patriarchal, and capitalist foundations. If we do not demand this kind of revolution, we are complicit in the continued subjugation of those we claim to liberate. So light the fire. Start with the documents. Let them all go up in flames—because the only justice worth achieving is the kind that refuses to be contained by borders or diplomacy.
