Black Feminist Praxis: Challenging Imperial Legacies in Global Development
Over the last year (2024-2025), the world has witnessed growing political tensions as pivotal electoral decisions unfolded in the United States, the United Kingdom, Ghana, and India, all against a backdrop of inflation and widening inequality. Voters, collectives, individuals and those navigating the margins are living with the consequences of unfulfilled promises. After all, it was only earlier this year that the Trump administration enacted drastic cuts to USAID* (United States Agency for International Development) and UK Prime Minister Keir Starmer announced plans to reduce the Official Development Assistance (ODA) budget to 0.3% by 2027.**
These cuts are not solely budget decisions; they are the latest chapter in a centuries-old imperial playbook that determines whose lives matter and whose struggles are recognised. But there is another reality. One rooted in a Black Feminist Praxis.
A Black feminist praxis is centered on learning and unlearning as a way of challenging one-dimensional approaches to marginalised and erased experiences. At its core, a Black Feminist Praxis involves organising with the understanding that true freedom requires dismantling the very systems that create humanitarian crises in the first place. By examining how groups like the Organisation of Women of Asian and African Descent (OWAAD) challenged both racism, sexism and imperialism in the 1970s and 1980s***, we can develop a roadmap for reimagining humanitarian politics beyond the development model that keeps global inequalities intact.
The state of geopolitics has directly reshaped the humanitarian landscape, inevitably shifting ethics of care across the world. But what does it mean for “world leaders” to make drastic decisions? When we interrogate the functioning of imperialism, the following considerations should be taken into account.
Firstly, imperialism causes hierarchies of civilisation through the functioning of white supremacy and patriarchy. Secondly, it produces different conditions for the exploitation of bodies, land and livelihoods. The United States and the United Kingdom have long been at the heart of imperial projects, and their policies continue to fuel ecological disasters, exploitative labour demands, and global tensions. For the case of Britain, far-right, neoliberal politics and media rhetoric, government drastic decisions are framed in the best interest of the “nation”. Thus producing a “pro-nation” discourse that frames domestic concerns and “local issues” as isolated from the suffering and violence elsewhere. We saw this dynamic unfold in the sovereignty and border control narrative surrounding Brexit. An argument framed in isolation from the broader global forces driving displacement and eroding belonging. When in reality, it only highlights how global systems reproduce and reflect the very crises we face at home. In this context, a care ethic emerges as a vital site of challenge in both dimensions, and offers a space to theorise and organise beyond dominant frameworks, outwards and otherwise.
This paper aims to demonstrate the crucial role of Black Feminist organising in resisting humanitarian precarity. It begins by examining how recent aid cuts in the UK reflect a continuation of longstanding imperial legacies. It then traces the work of OWAAD, highlighting their disruptive approaches to developing global resistance. The paper concludes by examining how a Black Feminist praxis can be employed to challenge and reimagine the dominant, often extractive frameworks of humanitarian politics.
Development in Crisis
The United Nations, established in the aftermath of World War II, was founded to restore and maintain international peace and security. Yet, we find ourselves questioning its efficacy as we witness the unfolding genocide in Gaza, despite numerous reports of aid blockades, attacks on hospitals and efforts to render the land uninhabitable. We look to the United Nations to uphold international law and facilitate accountability. Yet, a single nation's vote to abstain or oppose can effectively legitimise impunity, allowing “world leaders” to flout international norms without consequence.
In line with current reports of aid and famine in Gaza. Let us turn our attention to the politics of aid and the weight it carries, particularly when funding is intentionally withheld or diverted from those rendered invisible and inhumane by global systems. Since 2000, the United Nations has shifted towards a human development framework, moving beyond narrow measures of economic performance, largely driven by post-conflict efforts and postcolonial movements. This shift began with the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs 2000-2015) and continues under the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs 2015 - 2030). Despite this renewed focus on human well-being, the following goals have consistently been underfunded: sanitation, maternal health, HIV/AIDS, and other diseases (MDGs), life below water, gender equality, reduced inequality within and among countries, and peace, justice, and strong institutions (SDGs). These gaps persist alongside rising living costs and widening digital divides.
The argument here is not that the SDGs must be ranked by importance, but rather that chronic underfunding in certain areas reveals a deeper pattern. Those navigating the margins of social identity and human rights are conditioned by violent historical and systemic structures. Especially women, racialised communities and those existing in conflict zones are continually deprioritised.
In addition to this deprioritisation, we repeatedly hear of activists, community leaders, and scholars from the Global South being excluded from “global conversations” such as COP29**** due to visa restrictions, border controls, and bureaucratic barriers. And this is only part of a much bleaker picture of silencing. These exclusions and funding decisions reflect an intentional structuring of global priorities and narratives, designed to preserve hierarchies and reproduce systems of control and subjugation.
Aid reductions reverberate across multiple scales and geographies, compounding both human and economic costs over time. As governments that once depended on grant-based financing are forced to turn to loans, they become further entangled in debt relations with Western institutions and nations, relations that often come with stringent conditions and limited flexibility.
It comes as no surprise that the majority of African countries spend more on paying external debt than towards education and healthcare*****. These financial constraints, coupled with chronic underfunding and the persistent exclusion of voices from the Global South in global decision-making spaces, leave local NGOs severely under-resourced. A clear example can be seen in South Sudan, where Christian Aid reported that 59% of cuts to UK aid in 2021 significantly undermined humanitarian operations. These organisations, often closest to the communities they serve, are increasingly expected to fill growing gaps with minimal support.
With limited capacity to respond to crises and even fewer resources to carry out long-term monitoring, evaluation, and advocacy, local NGOs are left in a perpetual state of reactive survival rather than sustainable intervention. The result is a development landscape in which inequality is not only reproduced but structurally maintained.
Holding the Line, When Institutions Fail: Lessons from Black Feminism
Ultimately, the withdrawal of aid while clinging to imperial power structures serves only to reproduce global precarity. In contrast, a Black Feminist praxis offers a roadmap for refusal, resistance and radical change. Adopting a Black Feminist Praxis is central to the development of discussions around organising against humanitarian precarity. It offers both a disruptive and visionary approach, one that challenges intersecting systems of oppression and opens up expansive possibilities for living in a world rooted in dignity, care and healing.
Data from the Black Feminist Fund ‘Where is the money for Black feminist movements?’
(2023) reveals the persistent marginalisation of Black feminist organising: 59% of Black feminist groups have never received core funding, and 75% rely primarily on project-specific grants******. What does this say about the credibility of achieving the SDGs by 2030?
Black, Brown and indigenous communities remain among the most vulnerable during times of crisis. Their lands have been pillaged and their people exploited for centuries; now they face the compounded pressure of rising inflation, climate instability and political conflict. The relationship between underfunding and those most affected by global instability only highlights further how imperial violence creates conditions of vulnerability. One example of this is seen through displacement and forced migration.
National reports continue to indicate that 20% of the Official Development Assistance (ODA) budget is being diverted to cover the costs of hosting refugees within Britain*******. This reallocation of international aid not only reduces the funds available for global support but also imposes further limitations on the rights and freedoms of refugees living in the UK. It reflects a broader pattern of neglect and a growing prioritisation of defence spending under the guise of national protection.
These words from the Organisation of Women of African and Asian Descent (OWAAD), continue to resonate:
“When we use the term ‘Black’, we use it as a political term. It does not describe skin colour; it defines our situation here in Britain. We’re here as a result of British imperialism. ”
OWAAD emerged as a direct refusal of the erasure of African, Caribbean and Asian women within both mainstream feminist and anti-racist movements in Britain. As the first Black women’s umbrella organisation, it organised under a political Black identity that brought together diverse struggles affecting racialised women in Britain, from campaigns against SUS laws and virginity testing, to immigration raids and deportations, to the social housing crisis. Their politics advanced an expansive framework: one that acknowledged difference while strategically challenging divisions shaped by imperial projects, and that championed new narratives to dismantle the epistemic violence Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak names.
The clearest available example of such epistemic violence is the remotely orchestrated, far-flung, and heterogeneous project to constitute the colonial subject as Other.********
When identities become institutionalised, they reproduce violent histories and narratives that erase “Other” voices while producing “knowledge” in service of white supremacy. This is epistemic violence. We see this materialise in the UK’s increasingly hostile environment: from anti-refugee campaigns and the narrowing of the Commonwealth Immigrants Act (1962) to the recent Rwanda deportation scheme. These acts do not merely restrict borders; they obscure the global entanglements that generate insecurity in the first place. The state’s refusal to acknowledge its imperial legacy becomes a strategy of erasure, rendering Black and Brown lives hypervisible as “problems” and simultaneously invisible in their demands for justice.
The legacy of OWAAD, organising under a political black identity, reminds us to find ourselves in each other. It is an identity claimed and revitalised by community groups which helps organise and theorise across different geographies, experiences and realities. Political Blackness resists institutionalised data, rigid social categories and artificial borders. The hierarchies of civilisations through which our world operates, connect seemingly disparate violence: the forced sterilisation of women through Depo-Provera in Zimbabwe (1970s)********* links directly to current conversations around overpopulation in the Global South**********, and to the continuation of “Build a Wall” and deportation schemes. In the development of a black feminist praxis, resistance becomes a relation, and this relation becomes the foundation on which we navigate our present and build our future.
Conclusion
Returning to the cause: The imagining of Black women’s resistance across the nation and globe. In revisiting their struggles and organising, I ask, what lessons have we learned and how might they inform our imagining for those yet to arrive?
This calls us to reflect on where we stand by asking fundamental questions:
Local to whom?
Whose nation?
Whose threat?
In doing so, we must decenter individualised politics and recognise that real power lies in collective action. The fetishisation of struggle through narratives about ‘resilience' is precisely how the capitalist system exists and thrives. Furthermore, the notion that we in the Global North, and those with social and economic privilege, serve as mouthpieces for the "voiceless" elsewhere reinforces the positioning of Europe and the West as the sole geographies of agency and civilisation. This framing upholds an invisible power structure that says, “Yes, we stand in solidarity, but you remain apolitical”.
Finally, we must rethink the commodification of care in this climate. OWAAD was organised during a time of limited technology, without social media or digital advocacy. They gathered in libraries, church halls, and community spaces alike, places that neoliberal policies are now making increasingly harder to access. What does it mean to create space, theorise, and contest during troubling times? To think clearly, find a connection and organise directly?
Only through this interrogation can we begin to demystify the foundations of our existence and the structures that determine which side of the coin our fate lies on. To think, to imagine, to disrupt, to redact. These are not merely acts of creativity, but of refusal. A refusal of containment, of restriction, and of the rigid narrative that seeks to hold histories and livelihoods captive. In that refusal, we make space for freedom, for nuance, and for futures otherwise.
Sources
*Miolene, E. (2025). Deep dive: The unraveling of USAID https://www.devex.com/news/deep-dive-the-unraveling-of-usaid-110584
** Loft, P & Brien, P. (2025). UK to reduce aid to 0.3% of gross national income from 2027. https://commonslibrary.parliament.uk/uk-to-reduce-aid-to-0-3-of-gross-national-income-from-2027/
***Bryan, B., Dadzie. S., Scafe, S. (1985). Heart of the Race: Black women’s lives in Britain. Verso
**** Taylor, L. (2025). Tighter borders bar poor nations from summits - on poor nations. https://www.context.news/socioeconomic-inclusion/tighter-borders-bar-poor-nations-from-summits-on-poor-nations
***** Harcourt. S, Rivera. J, Robertson, F. (2025). African Debt. https://data.one.org/analysis/african-debt
****** Black Feminist Fund. (2023). Where is the money for Black Feminist Movements? https://www.fundblackfeminists.org/where-is-the-money-for-black-feminist-movements
*******Loft, P & Brien, P. (2025). The UK aid budget and support for refugees in the UK, 2022 to 2024. https://commonslibrary.parliament.uk/research-briefings/cbp-9663/
******** Spivak, G,C.(1988). Can the subaltern speak? In: Nelson, C., Grossberg, L. (Eds.), Marxism and Interpretation of Culture. University of Illinois Press, Urbana, pp. 271–313
********* Bryan, B., Dadzie. S., Scafe, S. (1985). Heart of the Race: Black women’s lives in Britain. Verso
**********UN. (2025). Peace, dignity and equality on a healthy planet. https://www.un.org/en/global-issues/population