Women’s Internationalism and Democracy in the Global South

In this episode with Durba Mitra, we discuss her latest book, The Future that Was (Princeton University Press, 2026). The podcast highlights the emergence of women's internationalism as both a political project and a mode of knowledge production that grew out of the crisis of Third World developmental nationalism in the 1970s and the search for new forms of international solidarity. We examined how changing ideas about women, the family, and social reproduction became central to postcolonial politics, while highlighting how women from the Global South emerged as strong actors for creating a vision of democratic internationalism. Durba talked about how feminist activists transformed international institutions through conferences, UN initiatives, policy research, and autonomous scholarship, even as these spaces increasingly redirected radical feminist inquiry toward technocratic development agendasunder the influence of foundations and global development institutions. The conversation concludes with reflecting on the legacies of Third World feminist internationalism in an era of NGOization, professionalized feminism, and privatized global capitalism, asking what has been lost and what remains vitalfor building democratic movements and emancipatory knowledge today.