Finding colleagues, finding home, finding energy : Rethinking African feminist engagements with international politics through vernacular rights cultures. Reflections from a study of pro-abortion activism and allyship.

Duffy, Deirdre and Coast, Ernestina and Berro Pizzarossa, Lucía and Irakoze, Judicaelle (2025) Finding colleagues, finding home, finding energy : Rethinking African feminist engagements with international politics through vernacular rights cultures. Reflections from a study of pro-abortion activism and allyship. International Feminist Journal of Politics. ISSN 1461-6742 (In Press)

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Abstract

African feminist pro-choice abortion activism and political mobilisation is shaped by colonial legacies in a multitude of ways. A key area where the sustained colonialist dynamics is visible is in the relationship between pro-choice abortion activists and organisations funded by and/or located in the Global North. How activists in the African space navigate these relationships and infrastructures has been a sustained site of critique within decolonial and post-colonial literature. However, accounts from pro-choice abortion activists and allies working on abortion access in Africa, particularly those working in and with communities, are limited. As a result, Afrofeminist experiences of and perspectives on navigating transnational pro-choice abortion activist infrastructures are invisibilised. This paper centres these perspectives and interrogates the complex reasons why and process through which African pro-choice abortion activists and allies navigate transnational collaborations. Through centring activist and allies’ contributions and Afrofeminist perspectives, we contend that African pro-choice activists strategically engage with international collaborations to challenge anti-abortion politics that have gained traction in the African postcolony where abortion has been positioned as ‘un-African’. The paper highlights the need for conversations on relationships between the different actors in pro-choice abortion activism to centre African feminist voices and work from Afrofeminist perspectives.