The Contested Making of Feminist Futures: Conflict and Shared Visions at the NGO Forums in Copenhagen 1980 and Nairobi 1985.

The history of women’s and feminist movements has always been transnational as well as marked by conflict, ruptures, and negotiation processes. Thus, the rise of transnational women’s movements since the 1970s also led to new debates and lines of tension. At the NGO forums of the World Conferences of the United Nations Decade for Women 1976-1985, actors from various contexts and social movements gathered. In particular, activists from the so-called “Third World” challenged the predominantly Western, white, middle-class feminism of the “Global North” and promoted negotiations on diverse visions of feminisms and women’s struggle.

This paper examines these negotiation processes of feminist visions at the NGO forums in Copenhagen in 1980 and Nairobi in 1985. I ask which conflict issues and debates participants raised at the conferences and which power relations and categories of difference shaped these negotiations. The NGO forums were not only places of conflict, but also spaces where tensions were bridged, and common feminist visions and struggles were imagined. The paper therefore also asks about the shared visions of the future, hopes, and solidarities created in Copenhagen and Nairobi. Notions of the future are thereby conceptualized as social and political actions and understood as a lens to a sharpened historical understanding of gendered movements.

The international NGO forums of the UN Decade for Women have had profound impacts on the history of feminist struggles and movements – both on a global and local level. The focus on the conflicts as they unfolded between, among others, women from the “Global South” and “Global North” aims to counteract Eurocentric historiography and shows how women from the “Global South” have transformed transnational women’s movements and gender struggles. The study of the conflicts and common future visions contributes not least to a better understanding of contemporary social movements that are transnationally networked in manifold ways.