The Antimilitarist Feminist Network: Addressing Mexico’s Security Failures

Despite adopting progressive policies and making significant progress in gender parity (Delgado 2020; Piscopo and Vázquez Correa 2023), Mexico faces important security challenges that undermine gender equality. Mexico’s security policies, especially its military-based solutions, risk undoing the country’s ambitious gender equality agenda (Kloppe-Santamaría and Cruz 2023). In response to increasing security failures and militarisation, Mexican antimilitarist feminist activists have pushed back against the government with some success despite setbacks. But what are the underlying preconditions for the rise of antimilitarist feminists? And how are they organising in response to increasing militarisation? This paper begins by describing the context and recent history of militarisation and antimilitarism in Mexico. Then it explores the underlying preconditions that enable the emergence of antimilitarist feminist mobilisations: feminist peace and security theorising and political democratisation and human rights frameworks. Drawing on semi-structured interviews with feminist activists, it finds that the Antimilitarist Feminist Network has been pivotal in exposing Mexico’s contradictions and failures regarding its policies on security and gender equality. The Antimilitarist Feminist Network (re)defines security and (re)imagines alternatives to militarisation by promoting and demanding women’s meaningful participation and feminist perspectives in security policymaking.