Transnational solidarity in feminist practices: power, partnerships, and accountability

ABSTRACT

In this paper, I offer a descriptive and normative analysis of the requirements for effective transnational solidarity between southern NGOs and their northern partners. Drawing on interviews conducted with staff members of Senegalese women’s rights NGOs and a private international development foundation, I contend that existing theories of feminist transnational solidarity cannot allow us to properly acknowledge the power asymmetries and obstacles to solidarity that these NGOs are facing. After assessing the divisions related to gender interests and limited resources that characterize this NGO-ized development landscape, I develop a partial theory of transnational solidarity that would center power asymmetries in order to address practical and political obstacles to solidarity. I argue that an effective account of transnational solidarity must include a commitment to disrupting global hierarchies of power as well as to building practices of accountability and attentiveness to power structures.

KEYWORDS:

• Transnational solidarity
• transnational feminism
• accountability
• power asymmetries
• non-governmental organizations
• Senegal

Acknowledgements

I would like to express my gratitude to the people that helped me in several ways in Senegal in fall 2019. For their helpful feedback on earlier drafts of this manuscript, I would like to thank Samantha Brennan, Monique Deveaux, Polly Galis, Michael Goodhart, Valérie Grand’Maison, Candace Johnson, Dallas Jokic, Lori Keleher, Mary King, Serene J. Khader, Gus Skorburg, Renée Sylvain, and Theresa Tobin. Thanks also to two anonymous referees, as well as Christine Koggel, who helped me to clarify my arguments.

Notes

1 To describe the people I interviewed, I interchangeably use the terms NGO staff members and women’s rights activists. I recognize that these categories do not necessarily overlap, yet they did in my fieldwork.

2 As Alvarez notes, reflecting on the first decade of work on NGO-ization: ‘NGO-ization, in my view, entailed national and global neo-liberalism’s active promotion and official sanctioning of particular organizational forms and practices among feminist organizations and other sectors of civil society’ (2009, 176).

3 See, for instance: (Alvarez 1999; Alvarez 2009; Bernal and Grewal 2014; Moeller 2018; Roy 2015; Roy 2017; Roy 2022)

4 See, for instance: (Nussbaum 2000; Okin 1998; Jaggar 2005a; Jaggar 2005b; Khader 2018a; McLaren 2019; Young 2011; Stone-Mediatore 2009; Aragon 2019)

5 See, for instance: (e.g., Ackerly 2009; Alvarez 1999; Alvarez 2009; de Lima Costa and Alvarez 2014; Bernal and Grewal 2014; Jong 2017; Lang 2012; Mosse and Babu Nagappan 2020; Hawkesworth 2018; Roy 2015; Roy 2017; Roy 2011; Prügl 2015).

6 Because the terms of my research’s ethics clearance prevent me from naming the national NGOs and organizations that partook in my research and to directly quote them, I will offer non-identifying details about the organizations surveyed as well as the broad Senegalese NGO landscape.

7 Because I was able to conduct interviews with people situated on the recipient side and on the donor side of development partnerships, I specify which side of the power imbalance they are situated when discussing a particular claim from an interviewee. I chose this terminology for the sake of clarity; I do not mean to deprive aid recipients of their agency by reducing them to the role of ‘passive recipients of dispensed benefits’ (Sen 1999, xii). I acknowledge that the power imbalance can sometimes shift such that the recipient of aid has the upper hand, but this dynamic did not appear as such in my fieldwork.

8 I have explored in more detail the limits of conducting fieldwork research in political theory and questions of positionality in (Lemay 2023).

9 See for example (Ackerly 2009; Alvarez 2009; Bernal and Grewal 2014; Jong 2017; Lang 2012; de Lima Costa and Alvarez 2014; Moeller 2018; Mosse and Babu Nagappan 2020).

10 The two zones of conflict I identified were not the only ones. Indeed, as expected, these divides primarily became apparent in the contexts of the rural and the urban divide, wherein rural communities experience a distance from organizations operating in Dakar. A development worker from a rural community expressed the need to advocate for a different strategy originating from local and rural concerns instead of following the leadership of Dakar-based organizations and agencies. However, for the sake of the argument, I set aside the rural and urban divide in order to focus on two divisions: a division in terms of gender interests and a division in terms of power.

11 Serene Khader defines missionary feminism in these terms: ‘Missionary feminism is […] characterized by a brand of universalism that is ethnocentric, justice monist (beholden to the idea that there is one possible set of gender-just cultural forms) and that is beholden to epistemic habits of idealization and moralism (the reduction of political actions to moral statements) that inure Western culture and Western intervention to criticism’ (2018a, 7–8).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada: [Grant Number 767-2016-1810].

Notes on contributors

Marie-Pier Lemay

Marie-Pier Lemay is an instructor in the Philosophy Department at Carleton University, Ontario, Canada. Previously, she was a Postdoctoral Scholar in the Political Science Department of the University of Pittsburgh. Her research, funded by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council and the Fonds de Recherche du Québec-Société et Culture, revolves around the challenges of practising solidarity in contexts of pronounced power inequalities.