Forging Futures for Rights
Feminist aspirations for a more just, liberational, and equitable future for all women push us to stand firm against any regression of hard-fought norms and standards. What currently exists is not enough; measures that tinker at the edges of inequality and discrimination proliferate and diminish concerted efforts at transformative and structural change, while longstanding norms and standards are emptied of their power and meaning. Too often, human rights are wielded as a tool to maintain existing power relations and the status quo, privileging some groups while discriminating against others based on their class, race, disability, Indigeneity, caste, religion, nationality, and other intersections where rights deficits occur, and where there is little effort to expand these protections to those more marginalised and less able to effect
change.
Our approach aims to explicitly and meaningfully transform the lives of those bearing the biggest
burden of the world’s inequalities. It rejects an approach to human rights that uses these instruments to maintain capitalism, patriarchy, militarism, and extractivism—permitting harm and loss of life, while protecting the futures of a small few.
This interference avoids delivering on the transformative reorientation of our political and
economic institutions that is needed to meet the scale and scope of the world’s problems. Alternative
and feminist rights frameworks already exist that, rather than maintaining the status quo, provide the
normative and legal underpinnings for a world where the needs and well-being of all people are met, no one is dispensable or disposable, and planetary boundaries and diverse ecosystems are protected for current and future generations. These are futures that we must forge, and those futures must inform how we interpret and apply human rights norms and standards today.
IWRAW Asia Pacific has over three decades of experience in clarifying and enhancing women’s human rights by partnering with norm-setting bodies, such as CEDAW, to push forward human rights standards, mechanisms and movements to reach their aspirational potential of substantive equality for all. his means co-creating in partnership with critical constituencies the strategies, evidence base, concepts and practices needed to infuse international human rights standards and institutions with the necessary structural, internationalist feminist politics.
It means using already-existing alternative frameworks on rights and equality to respond to the structures and specific contexts that significantly diminish women’s human rights and gender equality. However, it also means innovating in new areas and with new concepts and practices to meet today’s and tomorrow’s realities, including towards a whole systems approach to solving inequality issues for women, and to actively challenge the singularity in approach of using legal solutions and shift attention towards non-law approaches in building transformative change in ideology and practices. We will build our own capacity, contributing to and co-creating feminist knowledge and conceptual resources on phenomena, systems, and institutions that are currently under explored but necessary for forging feminist futures for rights.
Outcomes
- Global South feminist realities and voices are embedded in the co-creation of norms and alternative solutions leading to transformative change on women’s human rights, gender equality, and accountability of non-state actors.
- Built capacity and resources with our partners on transformative norms and practices for just and inclusive feminist futures based on care, solidarity,substantive equality, justice and freedom from violence.
- Creative and visionary alternative feminist spaces are sustained to strengthen collective action on new and emerging issues affecting the vision of feminist futures.