Introduction

Transnational feminist networks (TFNs) have been crucial to formulating and diffusing gender equality norms (True and Mintrom, 2001). They have advanced legislation and policies to uphold women's rights (Weldon and Htun, 2012), reinforced shared ideals of gender equality (Moghadam, 2005) and affirmed identity-solidarity among women globally (Alvarez, 2000). Feminist networks organize locally, nationally and transnationally and coalesce around various issues, from economic policy to environmental justice. More generally, feminist networks engage in collective action to contest patriarchal social, economic and political power structures and norms (Tarrow, 2011; True, 2024).

Feminist networks are manifestations of social networks that describe social and political problems using a gender and power-critical perspective (Tarrow, 2011; Krinsky and Crossley, 2014). Social networks ‘coordinate their efforts, pool their resources and act collectively’ (Krinsky and Crossley, 2014: 2). These networks use different strategies, such as framing, to create shared meanings and make sense of their reality (Benford and Snow, 2000). By framing collective understandings of injustices and inequalities, feminist networks lay the groundwork for initiatives (see Tarrow, 2011; Caiani, 2023). Hence, feminist networks extend their engagement beyond the descriptive realm to one that encompasses actionable demands and solutions.

Transnational networks connect organizations and ties across borders ‘through common ways of seeing the world … and contentious relationships with their targets’ (Tarrow, 2011: 241). Moghadam (2005: 4) defines TFNs as structures that ‘unite women from three or more different countries around a common agenda’. TFNs played a particularly relevant role in international politics during the 1980s and 1990s, when they lobbied states to guarantee and expand women's human rights and achieved concrete policy outcomes (Moghadam, 2005). The recent proliferation of feminist foreign policies has put feminist-informed foreign policy and governance at the forefront of international politics once again. With the diffusion of feminist foreign policy, what is the role of TFNs in advancing feminist-informed foreign policy and governance? This chapter seeks to answer this question.

One of the main criticisms of TFNs is that the shift in focus from the local to the transnational oversimplifies local complexities. For instance, Markland (2020: 20) argues that ‘combining global, regional, national and sub-national spaces can undermine and/ or mask existing social forms whose function cannot be reduced to a greater whole’. Transnational activism is critiqued for diminishing sense of place and flattening differences based on national origins and identities (Conway, 2017).