Feminism

The 2025 Anne Klein Women’s Award goes to the Belarusian feminists and women’s rights activists Darya Afanasieva, Irina Alkhovka and Julia Mickiewicz. All three, the women’s and human rights activist Irina Alkhovka, the feminist blogger Darya Afanasieva and the feminist activist and politician Julia Mickiewicz, are victims of officially sanctioned persecution and repression, which has forced them into exile in Europe from where they are continuing their gender democratic activism.

Pregnancy termination is still a criminal offence in Germany under section 218 of the Criminal Code, with serious consequences for access to abortion and women’s right to self-determination. There can only be one answer to this.

Violence against women is particularly alarming, as one in three women have been subjected to physical or sexual violence. In this article, lawyer Ekaterini Georgiadou provides an unparalleled critical review of the legislative framework for gender-based violence in Greece. She examines the provisions of the Istanbul Convention and the severe concerns reflected in GREVIO's evaluation report about the implementation of the Convention in Greece. Furthermore, she focuses in particular on the newly adopted EU Directive on combating violence against women, which Member States are obliged to transpose into their national law within three years.

This dossier is a result of an exploration of Germany's current feminist foreign and development policy, aiming to address the fundamental question: What is actually feminist about it?  

In a blow to women across Europe, a crucial law to combat sexualized and digital violence was thwarted by Germany and France. With rape still not uniformly defined, and digital abuses narrowly defined, the fight for women's safety demands a stronger, unified front. Equal rights demand equal security.

Working on and with AI is inherently influenced by gender and race. The small number of women and minorities among AI developers has even been described as a "diversity crisis". At the same time, however, women from the Global South are strong in lowly-paid areas of the field, from hardware assembly to crowd work addressing bias and injustices in AI. Understanding these present discriminating structures is the first step to social change.

What does it take to realize an intersectional feminist foreign policy that benefits countries in the Global North and Global South? How can we prevent feminist foreign policy from turning into a branding tool with little substance or transformative potential? Why is it necessary for democratic governments to pursue a feminist foreign policy in an increasingly authoritarian world? These are some of the questions that a group of young feminists fellows set out to answer during a study tour in the United States organized by the Heinrich-Böll-Stiftung Washington, DC office.

Feminist Foreign Policy is about more than giving women power - creating the space for intersectional understandings of power imbalances is at its core.

The German Federal Government presented its Feminist Foreign Policy strategy on 1 March  2023. This ten-point strategy was discussed by Luise Amtsberg, Federal Government Commissioner for Human Rights Policy and Humanitarian Assistance, during of the colloquium "Feminist Foreign Policy: from ambitions to actions" of 6 April 6 2023 organised by the Heinrich-Böll-Stiftung Paris office and the association Women In International Security - WIIS France.

Not even ten years after being mentioned for the very first time, feminist foreign policy has made it into the political mainstream: the guidelines ‘Shaping a Feminist Foreign Policy’ of the German Federal Foreign Office outline a strategic shift in German foreign politics. At the same time, digital policy has become more and more international.