Earlier this month I met a group of Jordanian women in leadership positions. The attraction about this group was not only the diversity of their professional, economic and social backgrounds, but actually the uniformity of their journeys: they all worked really hard and against incredible odds to be where they are today.

 

Sounds like a simple statement and many may retort that all paths to leadership are peppered with persistence, patience, hard work and dedication, but the truth is that women face twice the task of their male counterparts. Again, many of those who know and have worked with successful women would also dismiss that statement as old news, and they would be right because documentation of those journeys is rife with stories of women overcoming social, economic, political and professional hurdles.

 

And as I looked at these women across the room - animated, powerful, resilient - and as we lamented the constant testing of our credibility, legitimacy and authority by entrenched patriarchal systems, it struck me that the same structures that exhaust women leaders in peacetime do not disappear in war; they intensify.

 

In war, the inequalities women negotiate daily are stripped of subtlety and laid bare. What was once a struggle for recognition becomes a struggle for survival.

 

And for decades, feminism has documented the structural disadvantages women face in law, work and public life. Feminism always understood that war does not suspend those inequalities; it accelerates them. But war also tests institutions and the political frameworks that have become institutional languages by exposing the gap between values and leverage.

 

Why feminism, and why now? Because moments of war test ideological frames not in theory but in practice. Feminism is one of the most influential political frames of the last century.

 

I think in the way that many political movements around the world are reflecting on their ideological positionality and stance towards wars ongoing, feminism is exactly such a political frame. It is important to recognize that modern feminism did not begin as a sector. It began as a movement: oppositional, disruptive, often uncomfortable with power. Across the 20th century, feminist organising shaped labour rights, legal reform, anti-war mobilisations and decolonisation struggles. It was not always institutionally welcomed; it was often confrontational by design.

 

Ultimately, feminism and feminist politics became an informative, conceptual and organising framework that informed and guided political governance.

 

Look at Sweden for example. It was the first country to formally adopt a feminist foreign policy in 2014 under Foreign Minister Margot Wallström. The idea was built around what they articulated as the “3 Rs”: rights, representation and resources. It aimed to integrate gender equality into foreign policy, peace processes, trade, development and diplomacy. And although Sweden officially dropped the feminist foreign policy label in 2022 under a new government, many policies that were introduced during that era remain today.

 

France declared a “feminist diplomacy” approach starting around 2019 under President Macron. It emphasised gender equality in development, support for women in conflict zones and delivering funding for feminist organisations globally. Similar feminist-informed foreign policy approaches were later adopted in Spain, Germany, Canada and Mexico.

 

These were not symbolic gestures. They signalled that feminism had become a language of governance, a claim about how power should be exercised. For a time, this suggested that feminism had moved from the margins of protest to the center of governance. Gender equality was no longer merely an advocacy demand; it was articulated as a principle of statecraft and specifically of foreign policy and advancement of peace.

 

Yet the escalation of contemporary conflicts has exposed the limits of rule-based diplomacy and rights-centred policy frameworks when confronted with sustained military force, strategic alliances and veto power politics.

 

At this point, it becomes clear that feminism is only one window onto a wider phenomenon: the limits of institutional politics in an era of hard power. When power is exercised through armed force, vetoes, alliances, securitised narratives and the strategic management of access, even principled frameworks, whether feminist, human-rights based, humanitarian, or liberal internationalist, struggle to translate moral clarity into leverage.

 

Feminism is a particularly revealing case because it has, in recent decades, been both a movement and an institutional language of governance. Over time, however, many strands of feminism became institutionalised - translated into programmes, mandates, and funded delivery models. As gender equality entered development frameworks, humanitarian mandates and multilateral agendas, feminist work increasingly operated through policy engagement, programme delivery and institutional partnership.

 

Once a political frame becomes a governing framework, it must operate through formal systems and, we all know, formal systems, by design, trade disruption for continuity.

 

In the Global North, feminist institutions became embedded within the liberal international order; working through multilateral systems, diplomacy and development frameworks. That order now appears strained by geopolitical confrontation and renewed militarisation.

 

In the Global South, feminist actors often operate within donor-dependent and politically constrained environments, where organisational survival requires calibration rather than rupture.

 

These are not symmetrical conditions. Northern institutions navigate reputational and political risk; Southern organisations often navigate legal, financial and personal risk. Both shape how and when confrontation is possible.

 

Yet the global response, and that of the feminist institutions, operates within systems that reward access, operational continuity and institutional presence rather than openly naming power, challenging state violence, or risking institutional access.

 

The gradual institutionalisation of feminism within development, humanitarian and multilateral frameworks has inevitably reshaped its political leverage. As embedded actors, they are rarely able to function as mobilisers, and when the international order itself begins to fracture, they mostly no longer possess the instruments to confront hard power.

 

This is not an accusation. This is the trade-off built into institutional life: legitimacy and access expand reach, but they narrow the range of permissible confrontation. The realities of funding, registration, political survival and institutional partnership are not trivial considerations. In many contexts, they determine whether organisations can operate at all. But war alters scale. It shifts the terrain from incremental reform to existential rupture.

 

When international law falters and military power overrides diplomatic restraint, the tools that feminism has honed over decades appear suddenly fragile. The question is not whether feminism cares. It is whether its institutional form, as it evolved and was influenced as the drums of war became louder, is equipped for an era in which hard power eclipses norm-building.

 

The women in that room in Amman will continue negotiating authority within ministries, agencies and international institutions. Women in Gaza, Syria, Yemen and beyond will continue negotiating survival. The structures are connected. The scale is different.

 

Perhaps the challenge before global feminism today is not to abandon its principles, but to reconsider its political instruments. What does mobilisation look like when access is constrained? What does solidarity mean when systems fracture? And what tools are required when the world is no longer organised around the assumption of restraint?

 

The future relevance of feminism as a norm-based political framework will depend on whether it can adapt its instruments to an era in which hard power increasingly sets the terms.

 

Nermeen Murad writes on governance, statecraft and institutional politics