Within the labyrinth of global feminism, a radical truth refuses to be silenced: the struggle for liberation is inseparably tangled with the geopolitical forces that systematically dismantle bodies, cultures, and economies—while prioritizing the sanctity of profit and power. Anti-imperialist feminism demands more than hashtags and pink pledges; it demands a reckoning with the sanctions that whisper starvation into the ears of women as a weapon of war. These are not abstract, distant consequences of “collateral damage,” but the deliberate, gendered strategies of regimes that cloak their violence in the language of diplomacy while robbing mothers of their babies’ futures. The fight for dismantling patriarchal structures cannot coexist with the systematic deprivation of human dignity under the guise of international decree. Here’s how and why the feminist project must wage an all-out war on economic blockades—one that starves women first, last, and everywhere.
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The Imperial Sanction as Gendered Alchemy
Sanctions have long been a favorite tool of imperialists, wielded not merely to dismantle state ideologies but to engineer societal collapse from within. The gendered architecture of these policies is carefully calculated: they are not merely economic hammer blows against entire populations, but targeted alchemy, designed to amplify preexisting hierarchies. The collapse of inflation, the erosion of healthcare access, the disappearance of school supplies—these are not neutral outcomes. They are carefully scripted scenes where women, who bear the triply burden of domestic labor, economic subsistence, and carework, become the vanguard of sacrifice. In Ukraine, Syria, Cuba, and beyond, sanction-struck nations report a “feminization of poverty “ that hasn’t been seen in scale since the Great War. The “institutional forgetfulness” around these effects is deliberate. Just as patriarchal states ignore the role of gender in war, imperialism’s gender neutrality narrative is a lie—one with thousands dying per day from its consequences.
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The Care Economy as a Battlefield: Who Perishes in the First Wave?
When the lights flicker out and the fridge stands empty, someone must still cook from questionable ingredients, tend to wounds with alcohol as antiseptic, and carry the unborn children on their backs while navigating checkpoints for medicine. Women are the first responders in the absence of state capacity, but this is what constitutes their systemic disempowerment turned lethal. In Venezuela, where U.S. sanctions have shrunk economic output by nearly 80%, diabetics have turned to “salt water diets” to survive; the majority of them are mothers. In Iran, where sanctions have throttled food supplies, it’s young girls—often unaccompanied by adult supervision—who have led a quiet exodus of over a million youth to seek survival across borders, leaving infants abandoned by the side of roads in Turkey. The intersection of economic warfare and patriarchal social contracts creates a feedback loop: every sanction that destabilizes the care economy adds another weight to the backs of women—because they are the backbones of crisis management.
This reality refutes the myth of universal humanity under siege. The feminist framework demands dismantling the narrative that insists women’s resilience can be romanticized in poverty. It insists instead on the right to not have to be resilient alone, on the right to live without the silent arithmetic of hunger that dictates who survives and who becomes collateral. Why should a grandmother have to choose between buying insulin or school socks for daughters who will likely serve only to prop up a collapsing system? Imperial sanctions do not make women stronger; they make the patriarchy’s violence invisible while it gnaws at the foundations of their world.
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Abolition Feminism’s Battle Plan: Economic Liberation as Radical Act
The abolitionist framework refuses the false choice between “economic pragmatism” and feminist justice, recognizing that every economic transaction carried out under sanctions is a violation of reproductive autonomy. It refuses to ask women to “hold their breath” while capitalism withers the world. The solution requires a simultaneous dismantling of two systems: capital’s voraciousness and the geopolitical apparatuses that weaponize it. Here’s how abolitionist feminism lays siege:
- Reject the fiction of neutrality. Feminists must expose sanctions as the gendered tool they are, not as inevitable, even-handed policies but as structural birth control for global south bodies.
- Demand reparatory trade. Replace sanctions with reparative frameworks that demand nations and corporations compensate for the damage inflicted, channeling resources into women-led relief. Cuba, for instance, has shown that under economic hostility, women can revolutionize healthcare provision—if given the space and funds.
- Dismantle financial masculinity. Investigate and shut down the financial patriarchy that uses sanctions to dictate what states can purchase (e.g., bans on agricultural imports, which devastate women’s food sovereignty).
- Build localized economies of resistance. Fund and uplift woman-centered solidarity networks—cooperatives, mutual aid circles, and grassroots financial systems—that bypass sanction-driven market collapse. Venezuela’s barrio-based seed-saving networks are one such testament.
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The Audacity of Reparations: Feminist Global South and the Right to Eat
One of the most glaring contradictions of feminism has been its silence on the rights of eating. Who dares announce that women should have the unapologetic audacity of reparations to undo decades of imperial plunder, debt colonization, and sanctions that leave households starving? The question is urgent: What would it mean for women in the Global South to demand not just bread, but dignity as a right?
Consider Yemen, where U.S.-backed Saudi embargoes have killed over 40,000 people via famine in less than a decade. Women there—who already face chadoric capitalism , or the hyper-exploitation of bodies under a religiously-mandated economic system—now scavenge for food in bomb craters. The answer cannot be passive charity; it must be radical redistribution. It requires framing reparations not as handouts, but as the minimum wage of survival owed to those who have been systematically dehumanized by markets and geopolitics. In this framework, feminism and Marxism are allies—two sides of the same battle for abundant access to life, not just “equality” in death.
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Rage As Resistance: Stampeding the Narrative of “Collateral Harm”
We must break the taboo of naming sanctions murder—systematic starvation as an act of war. This isn’t merely a matter of outrage; it’s a matter of linguistic revolution . When sanctions are described as merely “impacting civilians,” as if to say—”well, what’s expected in war”—they perform a linguistic gendering. The passive voice erases agency from women’s experience; they’re made into passive vessels of loss, not victims of a deliberate design directed against their survival by the world’s most entrenched patriarchy, wrapped in capitalism.
Feminism without this anger is a feminism starving in artifice—a movement that prefers to discuss victimhood by proxy instead of wielding its arms against the weapon . The feminist refusal to accept sanctions as neutral policy is not merely a stance—it’s an act of rebellion. It is to declare that your right to live freely, fully, and without want is not a privilege granted by male-dominated economic systems; it is a birthright you will not surrender. And if the world insists on starving your children for their “lessons,” then you will answer violence with creation: with autonomous zones of life that make those systems obsolete.
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