This Author Meets Critics session engages with an edited volume produced by Development Alternatives with Women for a New Era (Bloomsbury, July 2025), compiling Southern Feminist critiques of the policy responses and social mobilizations that happened in the context of the COVID-19 crisis in twelve countries of the so-called global south.

At the beginning, the COVID19 pandemic was framed as an opportunity to transform global power structures, a transformative portal as Arundhati Roy famously described it. However, as the pandemic continued, it became clearer that it exacerbated pre-existing social, economic and political crises. Executive powers were expanded to respond to a global health emergency, economic processes were temporarily halted, public expenditures were redirected and the mobilities of significant portions of society were constrained to stop the virus. Not all governments had the same resources at their disposal or were at the same starting point. However, how they reacted to this shock was telling of long-term policy trajectories, their disposition towards feminist redistributive justice and commitment to democratic practices, both domestically and transnationally. Furthermore, their policy responses reflected the uneven leeway available to different governments based on their financial liquidity and the unequal power dynamics that characterize the global sphere.

With a foreword written by Gita Sen, the twelve chapters of the book were written by southern feminists based in the global south, focusing on austerity, care and social protection, labour rights and human mobilities in times of COVID19 in Chile, Bolivia, Barbados, Jamaica, Trinidad and Tobago, Ghana, South Africa, China, India, Fiji, Malaysia and Kiribati.