ABSTRACT
Connecting cosmopolitanism and feminism, “cosmofeminism” is a feminist political project and a social practice that have transformed over the past 20 years. This chapter analyzes the process of disenchantment with the project of cosmopolitical democracy initiated at the international level in the 1990s. It shows how feminist aspirations for democracy and NGO’s access to decision-making as well as to implementing women’s rights (UN cosmofeminism) morphed into narrow participation of a handful of bureaucrats, experts, and representatives of central NGOs (elitist cosmofeminism). Especially in Europe, this process led to the (self-)exclusion of numerous collective actors from grassroots social movements struggling for a citizen cosmofeminism and it was legitimated by traditional NGOs (based on bourgeois cosmofeminism) which reoriented feminist discourses towards maternalism.
