Femicide is the most extreme manifestation of a broader spectrum of gender-based violence that is rooted in interrelated patriarchal inequities, political economy, power relations, and social reproduction. This chapter outlines how femicide is a product of a social structure embedded in the global political economy. Often globalization and economic modernization promote structural changes that can lead to gendered social conflict and, consequently, gender-based violence in processes driven by intersecting layers of national, community, household, and individual level economic risk factors.

As a pervasive global phenomenon, femicide takes different forms according to trends and patterns that are rooted in political economy dynamics. While more public forms of femicide are associated with criminality and migration situated in the growth of free trade and illicit economies characteristic of developing countries, femicide is also present in developed countries, where economically and socially marginalized women are more vulnerable to gender-based violence. At the global and national levels, there has been some progress in fighting femicide through legal recognition and public policies, but there is still an imbalance between socio-legal responses and the political economy drivers of the phenomenon.

Because femicide is a product of and contributor to global, national, and gender inequality situated in the global political economy, it requires system-level changes that set the foundation for progress.