Why Cooper’s coalition risks joining the graveyard of failed international treaties

A global coalition headed by the UK will be at the forefront of the battle against gender-based violence. This is what the foreign secretary Yvette Cooper announced at the Global Partnership Conference in London.

The coalition, which has secured the commitment of 8 other countries, aims to prevent and eradicate all forms of violence against women and girls worldwide by bringing together cross-border expertise and practices.

The Labour government has made tackling violence against women and girls a central pillar of their manifesto, introducing a national VAWG strategy just last year to halve gender-based violence against women.

This international partnership could be an unprecedented opportunity for the UK to positively transform the lives of millions of women and girls and to reassert itself proudly on the international stage as a leader of societal progress.

Yet, I worry that through this initiative, the government may have bitten off more than it can chew.

In response to the launch of the coalition, the humanitarian agency Care International UK warned that “warm words won’t protect or rebuild capacity needed to deliver the exact changes that world leaders are finally promising.”

In other words, Yvette Cooper’s determination “to work across borders to ensure women’s safety” is just an empty promise if Britain’s cuts to foreign aid are not reversed.

This April, foreign aid spending hit its lowest level in over two decades.

These cuts have been justified by the government to increase defence spending due to the waning of the US’s security umbrella in Europe under the Trump administration and the looming threat of a Russian expansion into NATO territory.

The Guardian has reported that slashing to foreign spending would result in drastic cuts to sexual and reproductive health programmes, leading to over a million unwanted pregnancies, over 300,000 unsafe abortions and more than 1000 maternal deaths.

The UN reports that the rollback of humanitarian assistance by Western states is overwhelmingly impacting women-led and women’s rights organisations.

Indeed, women in developing countries are at risk of being deprived of crucial services because of a lack of funding. Countries like Sierra Leone, where teenage pregnancies are rife, are fearing the closure of centres that provide free advice on menstruation, contraception and consent to young girls because of the cuts.

The compelling words of political leaders and their display of cross-border cooperation are not enough to radically transform the lives of women and girls. Real change requires a substantial financial commitment to grassroot organisations that can directly improve their realities.Without the necessary financial subsidies, Cooper’s coalition is doomed to fail in its aims.

On top of the financial constraints, a UK-led partnership for the promotion of women’s rights risks adopting an essentialist liberal feminist framework that ignores the plight of women in the Global South due to racial hierarchies.

Let’s not forget that Cooper is a member of the same Labour government that has imposed significant restrictions on immigration into the UK, which will disproportionately affect women and children escaping war and persecution in developing countries.

The suspension of the family reunion programme for refugees means that women and children who want to join their partners are much more likely to risk their lives by taking dangerous journeys across the Channel and falling into the arms of smugglers.

By reducing the time of leave to remain in the UK from 5 years to 30 months and increasing the required years to achieve indefinite status from 5 to 20 years, refugee women in the UK are faced with instability and economic precarity.

Unsuitable accommodation in barracks and prisons exposes women to harassment, and the retrenchment of asylum support means that they are more likely to be forced into sex work or to find unprotected jobs in the informal sector.

The Labour government is not signalling to the rest of the world that it is interested in protecting all women and girls. In 2025, around 370 Afghan women were refused entry into the UK. Do the lives of Afghan women not matter too?

Similarly, it seems paradoxical that a government that continues to actively support and export arms to Israel, which has killed more than 38,000 Palestinian women and girls over the past 3 years in Gaza and unleashed a humanitarian catastrophe in the strip which disproportionately affects women, is now committed to eradicating the global epidemic of violence against women and girls.

Until our leaders are able to conceive of the lives of black and brown women and girls as being just as important as the lives of white women, no global treaty will ever be successful in overcoming the barriers to women’s emancipation worldwide.

Finally, we can no longer expect states to abide to international agreements. The days of a relatively stable world order governed by international law are long gone. Instead, we are facing an increasingly fragile geopolitical context driven by reckless and erratic leaders who act with impunity. To continue believing in a liberal institutional fantasy of global cooperation is delusional, at best, and dangerous, at worst.

This is not to say that there should be no hope for a better world for women and girls and that we should recoil into a state of hopelessness and inaction. Radical transformation is needed, and Cooper’s efforts should be praised as a first step in the right direction. But for her efforts to succeed, she needs to address the discrepancies and hypocrisy within her own government’s policy and formulate suitable strategies to navigate an increasingly unpredictable world order.