Envisioning the Asia-Pacific’s Feminist Future

CHIANG MAI, THAILAND – A room of 500 Asian feminists chanted “women, united, will never be defeated” and then “the people, united, will never be defeated” to kick off the three-day Asia Pacific Feminist Forum (APFF), held in Chiang Mai, Thailand, from September 12-14.

Unified by the recognition that patriarchal structures, which intersect with a host of -isms – militarism, fundamentalism, capitalism, imperialism, colonialism – are at the root of oppression, the gathering of feminist activists from across Asia convened for the fourth time by the Asia Pacific Forum on Women, Law and Development (APWLD) sought to explore “feminist world-building.”

From APWLD’s network of more than 320 member organizations, from 31 countries and territories in Asia and the Pacific, 500 people gathered for the long delayed forum. Envisioned as a triennial event, the APFF was last held in 2017, with previous forums in 2014 and 2011.

“We believe in the power of the feminist movement but we also recognize that we cannot exist as just feminist movements, so that we have to have capacity and solidarity toward other social justice and people’s movements,” Misun Woo, APWLD regional coordinator, told The Diplomat. “We don’t just talk about the symptoms of the violations of women’s human rights, but we interrogate what are the causes of those oppressions.”

The three-day conference was built around assessing “where we are,” “where we want to be,” and “how we get there.” With plenary sessions featuring speakers from across the region, and dozens of workshops highlighting the efforts of feminist movements from Central Asia to the Pacific Islands, the forum was a carnival of solidarity, replete with dancing, chanting, and art.

Imagining an optimistic future is often encumbered by the enormity of the challenges that exist at present, an intersecting web of crises from the economic to the political, exacerbated in recent years by the pandemic and populist backlashes. The many challenges – and the extensive diversity of the movements present – generated an at-times confusing array of discussions. Finding solidarity between Pakistani fisherwomen and Indigenous peoples fighting imperialism in West Papua, between queer Dalits in India, Central Asian migrant workers, Filipina careworkers, and so on, can seem impossible.

But, as Woo explained, the APWLD and the APFF sought to bring their diverse members together, “not with the assumption that we are all okay or we all share the same positioning or analysis but actually to have a dialogue and sharing to understand how different we are in some cases and how diverse we are, because without that kind of conversation we’ll never be able to reach the point that we want to be.”

The plenary speakers delivered what one moderator described as “trigger speeches,” that touched on a variety of issues and aimed to provoke conversation.

In context of “where we are” the subjects included militarization, fundamentalism, and geopolitical conflict. In highlighting the United State’s outsized defense budget, which in 2023 accounted for 37 percent of global defense spending, according to the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI), and the many (mostly Western) defense corporations that profit enormously from weapons sales, Azra Talat Sayeed of Roots for Equity, Pakistan, argued that “feminists do not speak about the defense industry to the extent, to the priority it should be spoken about. It’s missing from our focus and attention.”

Dr. Theresa (Isa) Arriola, a cultural anthropologist and Indigenous rights activist from the Northern Mariana Islands, a U.S. commonwealth, also highlighted the impact of the defense-industrial complex on islands in the Pacific, prized for their “strategic locations” but dismissed from conversations about the military use of their territory and left to bear the consequences.

Sarala Emmanuel of the Feminist Collective for Economic Justice, Sri Lanka, highlighted the devastating reality that “developing countries are facing the worst debt crisis in history, with almost half their budgets being spent on paying back their creditors.” Countries struggling to service their debt, she noted, often pursue austerity programs that result in the cutting back of investment in health, education, social protection and climate change measures – which harm women and marginalized communities most. Meanwhile, large projects, such as the $442-million Mannar Wind Power project, which was awarded to Indian billionaire Gautam Adani’s Adani Group, proceed despite environmental concerns.

Ultimately, Emmanuel argued, the “collusion of elite class interests with international lenders has never been so explicitly visible than under the current government in Sri Lanka.”

But at the same time, she highlighted pending legislative changes, encapsulated in the Unified Employment Law, which includes provisions to respond to sexual harassment in the workplace and grants legal rights to domestic workers. “This places some dilemmas for our feminist activism,” she said. On the one hand, the state is rapidly rolling back rights – following IMF recommendations related to austerity – and on the other hand, addressing long-standing issues related to women’s and labor rights.

“In this terrain, where long-standing feminist and labor movement demands have been appropriated by the IMF and the government, in the guise of debt restructuring, how do we position ourselves?” she asked, addressing the cognitive dissonance that occurs when the powerful take on the language of the marginalized opportunistically.

Moving toward the future, speakers in the second day’s plenary spoke to issues of accountability and breaking free of marginalization, achieving true inclusion.

Speaking during the second day, Sarita Lamichhane, a visually impaired activist with Prayatna Nepal, described the future she sees: a future suffused with acceptance and access, including in digital spaces. A future, she said, in which those with disabilities are not viewed as objects of pity, but where disability is recognized as diversity.

In her remarks, Beverly Litdog Longid, a red-tagged Indigenous Kankanaey activist from the Philippines, stressed that “at the core of our demands is the recognition of all people’s rights. Human rights are not privileges. They are inherent to all of us.”

Zebunisso Sharipova of the League of Women Lawyers of Tajikistan ended her remarks by expressing the desire for the women of Central Asia “to continue their journey toward the goal of social and gender justice, collecting their stories, their experiences, passing on their knowledge, and amplifying the voices of women in all their diversity – inspired by the experience of all sisters in Asia.”

The challenge, of course, rests in bridging the gap between the present and the imagined future. The third day plenary sought to explore pathways between, with speakers ranging from Laisa Bulatale of the Fiji Women’s Rights Movement, who began her remarks with song, to Mehrub Moiz Awan of the Gender Interactive Alliance, Pakistan, who delivered a darkly satirical letter welcoming the audience to the many Pakistans – such as the “loving” Pakistan that “loves” its women and trans citizens with fists and clubs and bullets.

This creativity is part of how the feminists who gathered in Chiang Mai envision the pathway between the present and the future. Woo noted the importance of examining “existing solutions that are driven by the lived realities of women and what we used to have that we lost because we are oppressed by different systems.” These conversations, she said, are not always easy because they “really require hard thinking, imagination, and also documentation of our stories and herstories.”

Bulatale, of Fiji, honed in on the need not only for women engaged in feminist movements today to learn from those who came before but for older generations to learn from the youth as well.

“We must learn from older Pacific feminists, who have been in the movement for 20, 30, 40, 50 years,” she said. “But they also need to learn with us.”

An aspect of this learning is the preservation of knowledge, and the process of passing it on. Joviana Guterres, of the Asia Justice and Rights (AJAR) Network, Timor-Leste, spoke to the power of storytelling in the aftermath of conflict. “AJAR works in a context where impunity is entrenched, and justice takes forever to achieve,” she said. It is especially important, Guterres argued, to not just venerate the stories of those who carried guns but those of women and others who suffered and struggled, too, as their stories are often left behind.

“Our movement itself is a victory,” Sring Sringatin of the Indonesian Migrant Workers Union in Hong Kong said after charting both the progress made and the difficulties, especially since 2019, in organizing protest actions in Hong Kong.

While there were no speakers from mainland China, organizers told The Diplomat that individual Chinese were able to attend the conference. Woo said that APWLD has China-based member organizations but “the conditions are so harsh it is difficult for them to operate as an organization.” Balancing participation with safety is a difficult task, especially for women activists residing in authoritarian contexts.

One glaring omission was the absence of discussion of the plight of Afghan women. This was, in part, due to the lack of Afghan members in the APWLD network, a product of the impossibility of feminist organizing in the country, but also the fact that Afghanistan, oddly, falls outside APWLD’s geographic mandate. (An organizer noted that individual Afghan women have participated in some of APWLD’s programmatic activities.) But while the challenges faced by women in conflict zones – from Myanmar to West Papua – were aired, and chants in support of Palestine broke out, there were no high-profile discussions of the difficulties faced by women in Afghanistan, particularly under the Taliban regime.

Feminist organizing necessitates the ability and opportunity to organize in the first place, thus also the absence of North Korean voices or those from Turkmenistan.

The multiple threads of Asian feminism are each colored and shaped by the myriad cultural contexts of the Asia-Pacific. But the sheer diversity of these threads nevertheless weaves into a singular tapestry. Although the strands differ immensely, an overarching belief emerges that the world not only can be better for those marginalized by patriarchal structures – women, people with disabilities, queer folk – but that it must for the good of all people and the planet on which we reside.

“We want to build and strengthen a shared political unity, not only a shared analysis but a shared very clear vision,” Woo told The Diplomat. That vision, she noted, is perhaps something we cannot yet name, but “we really wish that this space – interacting, sharing, challenging each other – will get us closer to that point [that] is our biggest aspiration.”