Description
This paper examines how feminist movements articulate political desire, solidarity, and dissent through the manifesto form. Drawing from over forty manifestos across the Global South—spanning movements such as the Combahee River Collective, Pinjra Tod, and Latin American Ni Una Menos—the paper traces how feminist vocabularies of resistance travel, translate, and transform across borders. The manifesto emerges as both a rhetorical act and a political practice that sustains transnational feminist connection.
Situated within feminist International Relations and transnational feminist theory, the paper employs thematic analysis to identify recurring motifs around care, labour, the body, and freedom, while also attending to silences, tensions, and divergences that complicate global feminist solidarities. The analysis is supported by a digital curation that codes manifestos by geography, year, authorship, and thematic focus, enabling both close and comparative readings.
By reading manifestos as living archives of resistance, the paper asks how they challenge dominant understandings of power and security in IR, and what they reveal about feminist world-making in the Global South. Ultimately, it argues that manifestos offer a methodological and political lens to re-imagine international politics as an embodied, affective, and relational practice.
