Solidarity or Coloniality in the Feminist Foreign Policy Knowledge Market? Lessons from Mexico

When developing its feminist foreign policy, the Mexican government did not conduct consultations with feminists in Mexico, ignoring their needs and recommendations. Despite this important omission, feminists worldwide praised the Mexican government for being the first country in the Global South to adopt a feminist foreign policy. In this Note from the Field, we ask: Who benefits from Mexico’s FFP? Who does not? And, why? Drawing from an autoethnographic analysis and our lived experiences as Mexican researchers studying FFP (Bochner 2013), we explore the tensions, contradictions, and struggles at the core of the FFP ecosystem relying on Mexico as the site of focus. We argue that the FFP is entrenched in a historical and racist practice that regards Eurocentric feminist knowledge production as the culmination of a civilizing trajectory to which feminists, particularly those of the Global South, should -naturally- aspire to (Quijano 2000).