Decolonizing entrepreneurship: navigating, resisting and transforming patriarchy through infrapolitics in Palestine and the Global South – a systematic literature review

Purpose This study advances a decolonial understanding of women’s entrepreneurship in the Global South by synthesizing how women entrepreneurs resist and navigate patriarchal constraints through infrapolitical strategies. It introduces infrapolitics as a critical lens to theorize subtle, informal, and contextually embedded acts of resistance that often remain overlooked in mainstream entrepreneurship literature. Design/methodology/approach The study undertakes a qualitative systematic literature review of 75 peer-reviewed articles published between 2003 and 2023. Using an inductive, three-stage thematic synthesis approach, the analysis first codes forms of entrepreneurial resistance, then groups them thematically, and finally interprets them through Scott’s concept of infrapolitics. The case of Palestine is used illustratively to explore how gendered and colonial oppressions intersect in a uniquely constrained entrepreneurial landscape. Findings The review identifies five infrapolitical strategies employed by women entrepreneurs: (1) strategic disobedience, (2) quiet activism through negotiation, (3) leveraging social networks, (4) bricolage and cultural entrepreneurship, and (5) Islamic feminism. These strategies reflect how women subtly subvert patriarchal and institutional constraints while advancing entrepreneurial goals. The study reframes resilience and resistance not as isolated themes, but as outcomes of infrapolitical action. Practical implications The findings urge policymakers, development practitioners, and entrepreneurship educators to design context-sensitive interventions that recognize and amplify the existing, culturally rooted strategies women already employ. Moving beyond one-size-fits-all models, programs should support women’s agency without undermining their informal adaptive practices. Social implications By foregrounding infrapolitical agency, the paper challenges Western-centric framings that often portray Global South women as passive victims. It advocates for epistemic justice by validating non-Western knowledge systems, resistance practices, and entrepreneurial imaginaries. Originality/value This study contributes a novel theoretical synthesis that bridges feminist, postcolonial, and entrepreneurship literatures. It introduces infrapolitics as an original framework for analyzing entrepreneurial agency under constraint, offering a significant step toward the decolonization of entrepreneurship studies.