It’s February 2025 and like clockwork, it is time to get organized, because in a few short weeks, there will be hundreds of activists, funders, government & UN officials descending into New York for the 69th Commission on the Status of Women. This year, thirty years since the Beijing Declaration and Platform for Action (BPfA) was released, the CSW will review and appraise its implementation. With flight and hotel prices skyrocketing, visa rejections, and venues filling up fast, I can only imagine that thirty years ago things looked very different.
Many of the activists who were present in Beijing in 1995 continue to engage with the CSW, and are peppered across government, academic, multilateral and civil society spaces. Retrospectives about the conference speak of the solidarity, connection and sense of hope. Through the grainy pictures that remain from the conference, you can sense the feeling of possibilities- built on the understanding that truly progressive language on gender equality was possible to agree on, codify, and be used as a tool for accountability at the global, regional and national levels. It feels impossible to imagine that environment of hope around accountability today.
The smoke and mirrors of ‘accountability’:
What emerged after Beijing is an industry of accountability processes at national, regional and global levels. The most recent one, launched in 2020 by UN Women, during the COVID19 pandemic, was the Generation Equality Forum, with a focus on increasing investments in gender equality- $40 Billion of financial commitments was pledged. In 2021, we unpacked the $40 Billion figure, and our analysis showed that in reality, only $2 Billion of these were new commitments going directly to feminist and women’s rights movements- the rest were existing commitments made through other mechanisms.
According to the latest GEF Accountability Report 2024, UN Women reports ‘$50.3B pledged, doubling the $24 billion reported in 2022 growing financial commitments’. The data shows that only a small percentage of these commitments were made by State agencies, sometimes more than one from a single country (371 out of 1386 commitments reported), and the majority of the commitments were made by civil society. Over the course of the last year, with elections in over sixty countries around the world, and sustained economic, political, humanitarian crises, closed civic space and withdrawal of funding from gender equality and marginalized groups, it is hard to understand how these commitments turn into action. These accountability mechanisms are compromised by the difficult political climate and the rise of the far right across regions. Indeed, as imperfect as these mechanisms are, the entire international system is a clear target of authoritarian leaders, dictators, and all anti-rights forces seeking to dismantle every obstacle to complete impunity.
AWID’s Organizing at CSW:
Like probably any feminist organization engaging in the CSW, we constantly question and reflect on our presence and our role. As a global movement support organization,we are committed to meeting feminists where they are at, and thousands of feminists still engage with the multilateral system. Not because of its impressive efficiency, commendable accessibility or an opportunity to be truly heard, but because we lack other democratic institutions and mechanisms. Our accountability as AWID is primarily to the feminist movements that expect us to challenge the accepted and normalized practices of exclusion that often characterize advocacy spaces.
So what is it that we do? Formal & informal organizing, sharing information and resources, supporting activist participation, and organizing accessible spaces for feminists to gather and strategize. We are not part of official delegations, but we provide space for reflection and connection for those who are in the negotiations rooms, and those who are often kept out.
Over the years, the CSW space has increasingly been infiltrated by anti-rights actors who are gaining ground and influence. AWID has witnessed and documented these ‘trojan horse’ tactics before, to name a few- online harassment, co-opting our rights language, pitting groups against each other and building a parallel human rights framework. Through collaboration with our members, partners and allies, such as the Observatory on the Universality of Rights, we build knowledge and generate spaces for sharing, learning and reflection and dialogues that decenter the spaces of power.
Organizing ‘on the sidelines’ is part of our DNA. During the last Beijing review in 2020, AWID co-organized a series of collective reflection spaces to centre the visions and agendas of young feminists through ‘Beijing Unfettered’, outside of formal policy processes. At CSW67, we digitally connected in-person feminist gatherings in New York, Nairobi and Bangalore through our ‘portals to Feminist Power’, to challenge the accessibility of spaces like the CSW that are by design exclusionary.
Beijing+30 and making meaning of the current moment:
This year, the official UN Women campaign reads ‘For All Women and Girls - Rights. Equality. Empowerment.’ I cannot help but think how these often repeated words would have felt revolutionary in Beijing, but seem to fall flat at a time with ongoing and unfolding genocides in Gaza, Goma; protracted economic and climate crises; the mainstreaming and codification of anti-rights discourse, funding and aid freezes that have left marginalized communities and groups , for example in Sudan. Over the past few weeks, we have been holding space (like many others) for our members and communities to map, share and strategize around the short-term and long-term impact of this.
Do we need CSW to become a more effective and productive advocacy space? Yes. Do we also need to rethink how we occupy this space at this political moment? Most definitely.
For those of us who have the scarce resources to be present in global spaces (for now, at least)- traditional advocacy spaces must double up as movement organizing spaces- and these categories do not (and cannot) fit into neat categories. We are committed to continue to build political power in ways that center connections, collaboration and solidarity between movements- as we saw from the recently concluded 15th International AWID Forum in Bangkok.
Join the conversation #FreezeFascisms
We believe that this is the time for us to continue to organize from a place of solidarity, hope and radical imaginations; to stand on the shoulders of the feminist activists who did this before us, and we invite you to do the same. Join our conversation in New York and online- where we will be mobilizing and rallying our members, partners and allies to share how they have always, and will continue to push back against anti-rights at all levels and in spaces- #FreezeFascisms. We are in it for the long run. See you there!
Gopika Bashi is the Director of Programs at AWID