By Max Jansen

With the successes of the women's movement, an image of women has become established in public discourse that emphasizes the integration of women in global value chains. This idea, in which women are above all an investment in society as a whole, also dominates transnational development cooperation today. The underlying image of women is one-dimensional and apolitical. If development cooperation pursues the goal of truly empowering women and girls, it must follow a political self-image.

Over the past 100 years, feminist struggles have helped women to achieve far-reaching legal equality and increasing economic, political and cultural participation. In connection with this, a new image of women has been established in the media and culture over the last few decades, which no longer portrays women as disadvantaged and oppressed, but rather as dynamic, competent, social and successful. Today, young women in particular are met with fascination, enthusiasm and lusty excitement in public debates. Within feminism, however, those currents that focus on the unhindered participation of women in the labor market have become the most prevalent. This feminism, often referred to as "liberal feminism", is currently also shaping the image of women conveyed in development cooperation by states, foundations, non-governmental organizations (NGOs) and companies in the global North.

The Girl Effect: girls as the perfect recipients of development aid

The idea of so-called "girl power" - a power that belongs to women and girls - runs through the development policy programmes of state development agencies, international organizations and the advertisements of Western NGOs. For example, the title of a report by the global financial services provider Goldman Sachs is "Women Hold Up Half the Sky", while the headline of the International Economic Fund is "Girl Power - Policies that help integrate women into the workforce benefit everyone". The campaign "The Girl Effect", supported by the Nike Foundation, states that "change starts with a girl" because girls are the "most powerful force for change on our planet". In letters addressed "To all women in Germany", the children's aid organization Plan International also speaks of a "girl effect", which works by enabling private donations from individuals in the global North to provide educational opportunities for young girls in the global South. These educational opportunities should lead to girls initially changing their own lives and, as a consequence, the societies in which they live.

In short, women are no longer portrayed by development aid donor organizations primarily in a victim role, as "third world women" in need of help, but as icons of efficiency and altruism - and last but not least, as a profitable investment. While boys and men from the global South are increasingly portrayed as a problem through the image of the potentially dangerous "refugee", women and girls appear as competent partners willing to cooperate in building the (better) world of tomorrow.

Competent and apolitical

Following a (neo-)liberal logic, such campaigns specifically address ideas of personal empowerment and individual agency. They emphasize economic activities and strive to firmly integrate young women and girls in the global South into existing forms of global value creation. In this view, the economic and social returns that a society receives from investing in women and girls depend on their optimistic attitude and aspirations - in short, on notions of virtuous femininity. In doing so, they place the responsibility on individual women and girls to lead the societies in which they live into a new era. Political debates about the need for structural change are thus relegated to the margins of insignificance.

Presented in this way, global injustices appear to be solvable at an individual level through the clever allocation of resources, while the need for fundamental social change recedes into the background. Due to the potential attributed to them, young girls in the global South in particular appear to be a supposedly feminist solution to the world's current development problems (and increasingly also to climate change). In this way, a commodified femininity is produced: Women are portrayed as consistently kind, beautiful and, in a sense, malleable. They radiate benevolence, aspiration and good will, making them appear as attractive harbingers of a new female type. The successful girl is only created through an externally triggered effect that is linked to specific expectations. The task of bringing about a positive change in the world is thus shouldered by those who suffer most from the current global conditions.

Outlook: The woman in Jinwar and the need for structural change

While this image of women suggests a possible improvement of the world, which seems to do without analyzing and eliminating the structural foundations of the existing grievances, other examples show that a transnational commitment to women and girls is also possible in a different way. One example of this is the image of women that is reflected in the public image of the women's village of Jinwar in northern Syria. The women's village was founded by a committee of female villagers in the north of the Democratic Federation of Northern Syria, better known by its Kurdish name "Rojava", and is supported by the Confederation of the Women's Movement in Rojava in cooperation with the Free Women's Foundation in Rojava/Syria. The motto of the women's village is: "The free woman is the basis of a free society". So in Jinwar, too, the woman serves as the embodiment of an imminent change that is intended to have an effect on society as a whole far beyond her individual life. However, women are not portrayed here as an effect to be triggered from the outside, but as self-determined and diverse individuals who build a communal life through collective self-empowerment and carry their experiences to the outside world themselves. In newsletters and lectures, the village's residents report on their efforts to create a new life, work and community free from violence and oppression in the midst of the ongoing civil war in Syria, as well as on the construction progress in Jinwar.

With their communal way of life, the women in Jinwar want to build on prehistoric social structures in present-day Mesopotamia, which they describe as collective, communal, ecological and matriarchal. For example, they consciously build in a traditional and sustainable way. They produce the clay bricks they use themselves and source all the necessary raw materials from the region. The large, ecologically managed community garden also meets the requirements of a self-sufficient and self-determined lifestyle. While Western development agencies portray women in the global South in a one-dimensional way in order to integrate them into existing forms of value creation, Jinwar instead embodies a more comprehensive image of women that includes autonomously chosen self-organization and, in view of the horrors of the Syrian civil war, the possibility of self-defence, for example, as shown by the cooperation of the women in Jinwar with the Women's Defence Units in Northern Syria (Kurdish: Yekîneyên Parastina Jin, YPJ).

The image of women conveyed in Jinwar thus goes far beyond the passive role generally assigned to women and girls in the dominant paradigm of development cooperation. Here, women are not unilaterally portrayed as ambitious, cooperative and downright harmless, but also as self-sufficient, combative and political. This offers numerous starting points that international development cooperation could take up if it wants to perceive women not as a means to an end, but as self-determined, heterogeneous and political subjects.