Civil Society and Feminist Foreign Policies in Latin America
2025-08-27
In the 1980s and 1990s, many Latin American countries transitioned from dictatorships to democracies, paving the way for the structural redesign of their foreign policies. In response to sustained feminist mobilization in civil society, by the 2000s several of these countries had established gender divisions in their Ministries of Foreign Affairs. These divisions prioritized the incorporation of gender equality norms in their national and international legal obligations and established protocols to implement gender equality measures. As part of this process, there was also a push for increased participation of women in the foreign policy arena, especially in Argentina, Brazil, Costa Rica, and Uruguay (Fuentes-Julio et al. 2022).