The road we have travelled

We began our empirical analysis by arguing that the policy frame of the 2008 economic crisis further erases minority women's precarity by focusing policy attention and resources on the exceptional experiences of the economically privileged.

In Chapter Three, we demonstrated how minority women's routinised crises – institutionalised, ordinary and everyday social and economic inequalities – are treated as unremarkable in policy and political discourses, until minority groups disrupt the social order.

In Chapter Four, we then considered how third sector organisations are sites of minority women's activism, and explored what happens when these organisations become objects of state policy through governance arrangements and the impact this has on minority women's activism. In ostensibly opposite contexts of ‘multicultural’ Scotland and England and ‘republican’ France, we find similar issues at play. In a context of third sector organisations’ cut-throat relationships with each other, and where practitioners are disciplined into neoliberal ways of working, there appear to be rapidly shrinking spaces in which minority women activists articulate and advance their intersectional social justice claims.

Finally, in Chapter Five, we reflected on minority women activists’ personal narratives and how they speak about and construct their DIY activist spaces. These spaces stand in direct contrast to the politically raceless discussions of the white Left, which often seeks to deny and erase intersectional perspectives and activism. Minority women are radical activists simply because they are survivors. Their politics of survival represents a challenge to dominant ideas of what constitutes activism.

In this chapter, we take a step back to think across these three cases, and ‘beyond’ them. In the first section, we reflect on our cases in order to avoid the analytical straightjacket of national ‘models’ that can obscure similarities as much as they also elucidate differences.

In the second section, we move ‘beyond’ these cases, in the sense of thinking about the internationalist and autonomous dimensions of intersectional and minority women-led organising that we see in the creative, subversive and influential voices and actions of new actors and movements in both France and Britain.

Learning across cases: state power and national ‘models’

The ‘multicultural’ and ‘republican’ national ‘models’ of citizenship derived from France and Britain's colonial adventures have figured throughout this book and undeniably influence minority women's activism and their politics of survival.