NEWSLETTER: Marita Perceval — Joyful Rebellion, Vigorous Hope
Feminist Views and Outlooks on Climate, Peace and Democracy
REFLECTIONS FROM MARITA PERCEVAL, SENIOR FELLOW OF THE FEMINIST FOREIGN POLICY COLLABORATIVE
1. Let nothing stop us, let's go for that other possible world!
In the scorching Amazonia, thousands of women — Indigenous, Black, Quilombola, riverine, fishing, peasant and urban — who had come to Belém from different parts of the world, brought their voices and experiences to the center of the discussion about the future of the planet, demonstrating in favor of peace, equality, well-being and in defense of the common goods that nature provides.
However, a few days later, the governments present at the Climate Summit reached a compromise agreement, conditioned by the unwillingness of rich, oil-dependent countries to identify the main causes of global warming and promote a roadmap to move away from fossil fuels, thus perpetuating the devastating impacts of an unsustainable development model that endangers everyone's future.
“We come to remind everyone that the Earth is already speaking, and many of its voices are those of women.”
According to the World Meteorological Organization, the trend toward extreme warming will continue through 2025, potentially making it the second or third warmest year in the last 176 years. High concentrations of greenhouse gases, the accelerated retreat of glaciers and sea ice, along with extreme weather events, are placing the planet, its people and the future on the brink of disaster.
Biodiversity loss is progressing at an alarming rate: recent estimates indicate that species extinction is currently between 10 and 100 times higher than would occur naturally. In this context, Latin America is the region that has experienced the worst decline in the average size of wildlife populations over the last 50 years.
“The triple planetary crisis of climate change, pollution, and nature loss directly impacts a wide range of rights, including the rights to food, health, development, and the very right to life. The risks and threats of this crisis affect everyone, but gender, place of residence, livelihoods, and socioeconomic status determine the severity of this impact,” states a UNDP report.
“We prioritize life over profit.”
The reluctance of countries that have historically contributed most to global warming to openly embrace the principle of “common but differentiated responsibilities” will only perpetuate “developing countries indefinitely in a state of poverty, dependency, and indebtedness.”
Hand in hand with unscrupulous lobbies, predatory deniers and insatiable extractivists, those primarily responsible for the climate catastrophe refuse to adopt a roadmap to move beyond oil, gas and coal, and advance toward sustainable, inclusive social, economic and environmental justice with a human rights and gender perspective. In this sense, for women's, feminist and ecofeminist movements, the challenge is not only the future of the climate, but fundamentally eradicating the historical and structural roots of poverty, hunger and inequalities that the dominant economic and political system generates and deepens, since its priority is accumulation rather than the sustainability of life.
“We do not seek to exploit nature, but to keep it alive.”
“The climate crisis is, fundamentally, a crisis of rights, justice, and life, rooted in colonialism, exploitation, and structural inequality,” states the Political Declaration of the Global Summit of Indigenous Women and Youth, adopted on the sidelines of COP30.
“There is no life without nature. There is no life without ethics and without care work. That is why feminism is a central part of our political project….We place the work of reproducing life at the center, and that is what radically differentiates us from those who want to preserve the logic and dynamics of an economic system that prioritizes profit and the private accumulation of wealth,” states the People’s Summit Declaration.
And they are right.
For example, in Latin America and the Caribbean — the most unequal region in the world — the structural factors of inequality are perpetuated and exacerbated by the climate crisis. A report prepared by the ILO and the UNDP indicates that by 2030, between 68 and 135 million people could fall into poverty due to the climate crisis, which — here too — disproportionately affects women, rural communities, Indigenous people, Afro-descendants and migrants.
It is equally evident that in every corner of the planet, women are the ones who face loss, scarcity, dispossession, violence and inequality, creating solutions, sharing knowledge and weaving community networks to guarantee rights. and protect life.
“The world needs to learn to share.”
The transformative potential of feminism lies in the fact that it constitutes not only a form of creative resistance but also of transformative re-existence, contributing a radically different ethical and political vision of thinking, feeling, knowing and relating to the world — to human and non-human life — questioning the foundations upon which patriarchy and its capitalist modes of production appropriate common goods and jeopardize the sustainability of life.
As the Women and Gender group at COP30 stated, “the just transition to sustainable development” still falls short of the ambition demanded by the most vulnerable communities, from the mountains, forests, islands and favelas of Latin America and the Caribbean to every region where women, Indigenous peoples, Afro-descendants and gender diversity defenders safeguard life and biodiversity. Their hopes, solutions and resistance remind us that incremental progress is not enough. The world urgently needs, without exception, a transformation based on justice and equality.
2. Neither war that destroys us, nor peace that oppresses us
“Disarm masculinity and disarm the armies.”
In April 1915, as the First World War multiplied unnecessary cruelty, unjustified suffering and preventable deaths, the First World Congress of Women in favor of a culture of peace was held in The Hague. This was not naiveté, but rather clear-sightedness, since, even though the call made by thousands of women demanding an end to violence and destruction went unheard by the “warlords,” in 1939 those unheard voices would acquire an even deeper meaning and undeniable relevance.
In 2025, the world registered the highest number of active conflicts since 1946. There are more than 56 active armed conflicts involving more than 90 countries.
In the conflict in Ukraine, there are no consistent casualty figures, although Western sources believe that around 350,000 people have died directly in the war since 2022.
The Palestinian genocide in Gaza is one of the greatest man-made humanitarian disasters in one of the most densely populated areas in the world. As of early August 2025, 1,700 Israelis — including 1,200 in the October 7 attack — and more than 60,000 Palestinians had died as a result of the Israeli invasion of the Gaza Strip, where more than 70 per cent of the victims are women and children.
In January of this year, the Sudanese Doctors' Syndicate reported that 522,000 babies had died from malnutrition in just over 18 months of civil war in Sudan.
In Yemen, more than 25 million people are suffering from hunger.
The conflict in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) is one of the deadliest conflicts in the world since World War II. More than 7.8 million people are displaced due to the indiscriminate violence that has plagued the country for decades. Sixty percent of the displaced and refugees are women and children. In the Democratic Republic of Congo, a woman is raped on average more than once in her lifetime.
“A culture of peace goes beyond the mere absence of war.”
It is undeniable that girls and women throughout the world not only know but also have lived experience of the destructive logic of patriarchal violence. Wars are the ultimate expression of an exercise of power that seeks the subjugation and humiliation of individuals, groups, communities, or peoples considered different, inferior, disposable and — within this constellation of cruelty — girls and women, always, have been and continue to be considered the primary victims of violence and hatred.
Faced with this scourge, in 2000, the UN Security Council adopted Resolution 1325, which recognized for the first time women not only as immediate victims of war and violence, but also as fundamental agents of society and strategic actors in peace processes. Therefore, one of the objectives of this Resolution is to recognize women's right to participate in all negotiations and decision-making processes in conflict situations, generating effective mechanisms and positive actions that guarantee their equitable and effective participation.
However, despite overwhelming evidence demonstrating that women's participation makes peace more lasting, they continue to be excluded from decision-making.
In 2024, nine out of ten peace processes had no female negotiators and women represented only 7 per cent of those participating in negotiations and 14 per cent of those involved in mediation processes worldwide. A mere 31 per cent of peace and ceasefire agreements mentioned women, girls or gender.
A year later, the UN Secretary-General’s report, published to mark the 25th anniversary of Security Council resolution 1325 on women, peace and security, warned that 676 million women now live within 50 kilometers of a deadly conflict zone — the highest level since the 1990s. It also noted that civilian deaths of women and children were four times higher than in the previous two-year period and that conflict-related sexual violence had increased by 87 per cent in the past two years.
It is significant to note that the first World March of Women also took place in 2000. Since then, it has mobilized and convened thousands of feminist organizations and women's movements through international, regional and national actions to demand the effective exercise of sexual and reproductive rights, promote women's economic autonomy, foster social change that ends all forms of discrimination and violence against women and girls and bring about a radical transformation of hegemonic power relations. These relations, justified and fueled by "patriarchal warmongering," unleash their cruelty against women with impunity, unchecked in times of peace and with fervor in situations of conflict.
“Patriarchy, armed with weapons, becomes emboldened and takes on far more cruel forms.” (–Beatriz Quintero Garcia, Coordinadora de la Paz en Colombia)
The demand for peace without weapons, the end of wars, the transformation of a power system in international relations based on competition, distrust and the friend-enemy dichotomy, the overcoming of a geopolitical landscape marked by hegemonic disputes, the abandonment of aggressive tactics of conquest and subjugation that adhere to the “law of the strongest,” and the rejection of the illegality of all forms of colonialism, supremacism and subjugation are fundamental principles and concrete objectives that feminism, from its inception, has established as an ethical imperative, a humanitarian priority and a transformative action in foreign policy.
Beyond the fact that this activism is based on valid ethical or moral principles, there is today a concrete and compelling reason for women to continue demanding an end to wars and a halt to brutality, given that funds allocated to peacebuilding have drastically decreased while conflicts are dramatically increasing.
Global military spending reached $2.718 trillion in 2024, representing a 9.4 per cent increase in real terms compared to 2023 and the largest year-on-year increase since the end of the Cold War.
More than 100 countries worldwide increased their military spending and the top 10 spenders accounted for 73 per cent of global expenditure.
To put the $2.718 trillion allocated to military spending into perspective, this amount is “seventeen times greater than the total expenditure on COVID-19 vaccines, the total GDP of all African countries and thirteen times greater than the amount of official development assistance (ODA) provided by the countries of the Development Assistance Committee (DAC) of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) in 2024.”
As UN Women Executive Director Sima Bahous stated, “These are not isolated data points. They are symptoms of a world that chooses to invest in war instead of peace, and that continues to exclude women from the design of solutions.”
“The time of pain will be clothed in hope.”
The defense of a balanced and inclusive internationalism and a supportive, complementary, renewed and effective multilateralism; the development of policies and areas of cooperation based on good faith, dialogue, respect, horizontality, consensus, non-conditionality and mutual benefit; and the strengthening of an international normative architecture that generates fair, equitable and symmetrical rules of the game, promotes negotiation and guarantees the peaceful resolution of disputes are — among others — issues of paramount importance for feminist activism and thought-sense.
II. Confluence of Causes and Meaning of Feminist Foreign Policy
“Our commitment is total to disobedient dignity,
joyful rebellion, and vigorous hope
that becomes a cry, a word, or silence.”
1. We need multilateralism that works for everyone, not just the powerful.
In a scenario of escalating, interdependent and global polycrises, for a feminist foreign policy, issues such as the challenge of achieving economic, social and environmental justice as the objective of a development model that prioritizes the sustainability of life, and the imperative urgency of striving for peace, cannot be separated from other urgent matters such as eradicating the growing
These measures aim to address inequalities, end climate catastrophism, prevent technological advancement from being held hostage by the deregulatory whims of the markets, and move towards a global agenda of cooperation, taxation and care that translates into binding commitments and sustainable debt financing and restructuring mechanisms.
In this regard, at the recent Fourth International Conference on Financing for Development, those in civil society and governments who embrace feminist diplomacy expressed their firm commitment to continue supporting the process of the United Nations Convention on International Tax Cooperation and the search for real solutions to the debt crisis, "so that it is finally possible to transfer resources from billionaires and large corporations that are destroying the planet towards the well-being of all people, especially those in the most vulnerable situations.”
Because building a fair, legitimate and effective financial system; working to move beyond the geopolitics of the strongest and the extortion of the veto to create a credible, democratic and effective governance of international peace and security; Strengthening universal justice bodies and mechanisms for the protection and guarantee of human and environmental rights are key elements of a feminist foreign policy, since its aim is not simply to add more women so that everything remains the same.
2. Beware, beware, beware, the feminist struggle is on the march in Latin America!
A feminist foreign policy differs from “diplomacy for gender equality” in that it does not only seek to ensure that more women access leadership positions in their professional development and in their countries' foreign services, or that, for reasons of strict justice, representative and equal participation of women is respected in decision-making spaces and in the various international forums and organizations considered central to each State's foreign policy. While this is a highly valuable objective, it is not considered sufficient in and of itself.
A radically feminist foreign policy entails embracing the worldview, historicity and epistemic approach of feminism as a critical theory and emancipatory political praxis, aimed at transforming humiliating and cruel power relations, unsustainable development models — economically, socially, and environmentally — violent structures of domination, and discriminatory cultural patterns that find their justification and perpetuation in patriarchy, that are rooted in racism and colonialism for their selectivity, and that use authoritarianism, discrimination, and denialism to impose an unjust, extortionate, and predatory social order.
A coherent feminist foreign policy refuses to be silenced by the furious spokespeople of a decaying civilizational model, nor does it allow itself to be co-opted by the privileges of the sophisticated international bureaucratic structures of the status quo.
The powerful capacity to resist and the indomitable will to transform that defines a feminist foreign policy are not born in offices or ivory towers, but rather reside in and are nourished by daily practice and collective construction stemming from plural histories and diverse realities that converge on the urgent need to dismantle patriarchal power relations, resist creatively, and collectively build a future worth living.
Without arrogance and in sorority, Latin American feminists — along with feminist movements, especially those of the Global South — share the resolute will to recognize and embrace themselves as an active, pluralistic, diverse, and situated thought, so that another world may be possible.
3. We must ensure that democracy is experienced as something exciting (–Judith Butler)
In 2024, I was honored with the responsibility of being a Senior Fellow of the Feminist Foreign Policy Collaborative to document the journey, crossroads and challenges of feminism in Latin America and the emergence, evolution and prospects of feminist foreign policy in our region. Remembering the words of French philosopher Simone de Beauvoir who argues that feminism is a way of living individually and fighting collectively, I set myself the objective of “building democracy” through my order to fulfill this responsibility entrusted to me.
Through the diligent effort of many hands, we made good on that promise. Mundializar la igualdad: Política exterior féminista desde América Latina (in English, Globalizing Equality: Feminist Foreign Policy in Latin America) is a collective work of 900 pages with 40+ essays — and it’s still just the tip of the iceberg to the innovation, impact and hope that feminists in my region of Latin America are leading with grace and conviction. Launched in an official side event to the France-hosted Fourth Ministerial Conference on Feminist Foreign Policy, this anthology is a mosaic of stories and lessons learned that, in my sincere hope, can inform the resistance of this global community of feminists with a rallying cry of a future where all are free — gathered by the community of practice shaped by the principles of feminist foreign policy.
From community feminists to diplomats, academics to trade unionists, the path to Mundializar la igualdad has mobilized more than 500 feminists in such inspiring diversity. A product of careful hours, our work focused on creating spaces to intertwine our struggles, construct meaning, unravel “the commons,” co-define priorities and implement concrete strategies to globalize the cause of equality. Anchored in a decolonial and intersectional principles, this involved forging multilevel, pluricultural, multisectoral, intergenerational and transnational alliances to promote and ensure that our voices and proposals were made visible and had an impact in significant multilateral forums and events at the regional and global levels, such as CSW69/Beijing+30 (UN Women), the X Latin American and Caribbean Conference of Social Sciences “Horizons and Transformations for Equality” (CLACSO), the XVI Regional Conference on Women in Latin America and the Caribbean (ECLAC/UN Women), the United Nations Conference in Seville, the EU-CELAC Summit 2025 and the Fourth Ministerial Conference on Feminist Foreign Policy, among others.
The collective work Mundializar la igualdad is an example of the path traveled by 2025 and clear evidence that sorority — as an unwavering ethical principle of feminism — is fundamentally a political, social and emotional pact built among diverse but not separate women, stemming from the recognition that together we are stronger.
Across 900 pages, diverse perspectives and voices outline the most pressing issues of the present and foresee the urgent challenges of the future, making it clear that the agenda of a feminist foreign policy is “our” agenda and that the commitment to defend freedom, equality, sustainability and justice so that everyone can live without fear of violence, discrimination and dispossession is, and must be, a collaborative task. Always collaborative.
4. Long Live the Butterflies
Surely you will read these reflections on November 25th.
1981. First Latin American and Caribbean Feminist Meeting. Bogotá, Colombia. It was decided that November 25th would be the International Day for the Elimination of Violence against Women. On that same day in 1960, the genocidal dictator Leonidas Trujillo perpetrated the femicide of the Mirabal sisters — Patria, Minerva and Maria Teresa — known in the underground as "Las Mariposas" (The Butterflies), for being an emblem of opposition to the regime of cruelty, terror, torture, persecution and death imposed by that dictatorship.
In 1999, the UN established November 25th as the International Day for the Elimination of Violence against Women in memory of the "Butterflies" and as a global symbol of feminist resistance and its unwavering defense of democracy, human rights and true equality.
As Minerva's daughter, Minou, says, we feminists who are determined not to succumb to oblivion or indifference have no choice but to walk "through plazas and streets with memory in our hands."
Today, globally, 1 in 3 women suffers physical or sexual violence at the hands of their partners.
Today in Latin America, gender-based violence affects 80 per cent of women in politics.
Today in my country, Argentina, a woman is a victim of femicide every 35 hours.
Faced with this reality, which is not just statistics, faced with a power system that lacks the will to fight against inequality, injustice, violence, destruction and hatred, who will dare deny us the right to seek solutions and unite collaboratively so that the planet is our common home and the world is a place where life is worth living?
I hope not only that you will support the valuable work carried out by the Feminist Foreign Policy Collaborative, but also that you, too, will not give up.
May we support each other in sorority to continue the journey, pursue our dreams and clear away all the rubble to discover the sky.
In solidarity,
Marita Perceval
Senior Fellow, Feminist Foreign Policy Collaborative
About Marita and her Fellowship
María Cristina (Marita) Perceval (she/her) is a Senior Fellow with the Feminist Foreign Policy Collaborative and the President of Feminists Without Borders in Argentina. Most recently, she was the Special Representative for Feminist Foreign Policy of Argentina. From 2021-2022, she served as the Secretary of Equality and Diversity of the Ministry of Women, Genders and Diversity of the Argentine Republic. Marita has held various Secretary and Under-Secretary positions in the Government of Argentina, including portfolios regarding international cooperation on education and the promotion of human rights, focusing her work on the regulation of Argentina’s gender identity law and the launch of a support platform for women human rights defenders. In 2016, Marita became the Regional Director of UNICEF for Latin America and the Caribbean.
Notably, in 2012, Marita became the first female Permanent Representative of the Argentine Republic to the United Nations and was elected Vice President of the 69th General Assembly and Vice President of ECOSOC. She carried out two terms as a National Senator for the Province of Mendoza, serving as the first female President of the Defense Committee and creating the Women’s Caucus which coordinated to advance legislation informed by international women’s human rights law on the prevention of gender-based violence, combating human trafficking, promotion of sexual and reproductive health and rights.
* The views and opinions expressed by members of the Visiting Fellows Program are solely their own and do not necessarily reflect those of the Feminist Foreign Policy Collaborative. Fellows are invited based on their experience and expertise, independent of their personal beliefs or opinions.