In the current debate on internationalising human rights groups, there has been a lot of talk on the most effective way to internationalise and who benefits (or doesn’t) from this shift. Contributors have discussed the professionalization of aid work, competition for funding in the global North and South and the decentralisation of international human rights organisations. But these discourses, like many others in human rights, often ignore or omit the realities of women’s organising and movement building.
African women have been particularly left out, their voices and experiences deleted out of histories, despite being actively involved in everything from liberation struggles against colonialism to contemporary struggles against conflict and poverty. These women are often depicted as passive victims of human rights abuses with no particular agency to resist, rather than as people who creatively manoeuvre challenges while changing and shaping practices and discourses. Unfortunately, Northern institutions, including human rights organizations and the media, have greatly contributed to these global images of women in Africa.
African women’s movements and processes
Women activists and women’s movements have been practising internationalism through global movement building and transnational coalition building for a very long time. For decades, African women have challenged cultural and religious ideologies, as well as neoliberal policies that continue to make them poor and marginalized. At the same time, they bear the brunt for rising religious and cultural fundamentalism from their own governments and communities. These factors have led to women working together, whether at local, regional or global levels, to build movements despite their position in society. These processes can be traced back to the World Conferences of Women starting in 1975, which brought women together from different regions of the world and backgrounds to advance the rights of women.
