Patriarchy Is the Crisis

Abstract The global displacement crisis—which has reshaped global politics over the past decade—has all too often been understood through the discourse and framing of the same powerful actors who helped generate the crisis in the first place. Western colonialism and neocolonialism established patterns of unequal and extractive economic relationships that trapped many peoples and nations in the global South in a state of dependency. This is a crisis not for governments but for the people forced to endure displacement and exile from their homes. It is a crisis compounded of decades of structural injustice and oppression directed against people, and most especially women in the global South. In short, it is a “crisis” in the feminist sense of the term. This feminist understanding of the crisis calls in turn for a feminist solution. This article has sought to suggest a preliminary sketch of what that feminist crisis response might look like. No final version of how it could develop from here can be conjectured. Feminist organizing is an unfolding praxis, not a fixed outcome. It is, in philosophical terms, a “becoming” rather than a “being.” Collective liberation can be experienced only in this way.