about GSWF 2023

IWRAW Asia Pacific’s Global South Women’s Forum returned in October 2023 for its eighth iteration. Taking place online for the fourth time, GSWF 2023’s theme was ‘Border CTRL’, and it spotlighted conversations about challenging and dismantling border regimes. Its sessions were built around lived experiences of migration, and centred those who have been impacted by border regimes in additional ways. Our goal for the 2023 forum was to build capacity and solidarity around our shared and intersecting agendas to counter the violence caused by bureaucratic documentation, carceral measures, and disenfranchisement of non-citizens and stateless people.

GSWF 2023 included transnational and cross-sectoral representation of movement actors and activists forging links across borders, highlighting common struggles and sharing experiences and strategies, with a pointedly Global South focus. The programme was designed to avoid replicating conversations that already have traction within our orbit, and instead to focus on bringing groups and issues from the margins to the centre.

Organised across four days from 28 – 31 October 2023, the forum:

• shared impacts of border regimes on the lived experience of people on the move and those facing detention, and strategies to counteract these
• shared analyses by NGOs of governments’ responses to the exposure of border violence and border-related inequalities and their impacts on the lives of marginalised people
• brought examples of possible or already implemented intersectional, intergenerational and inclusive feminist responses to border violence