Leadership Quote by Emma Bonino

There is a quiet pivot in Bonino's line, and it lands like policy disguised as confession. "I am now concerned" signals evolution, not awakening: the tone is managerial, the shift deliberate. The interesting word is "different". It implies a before-and-after without naming the earlier phase, inviting readers to infer a political biography in shorthand: from domestic battles over rights, representation, and bodily autonomy to an outward-facing agenda shaped by war, displacement, and international law.

By narrowing the frame to "women's issues" and then immediately widening it to Afghanistan and Cambodia, Bonino does two things at once. She treats gender as a serious analytic category (not a side cause), while refusing the comfortable Western tendency to keep feminism local, symbolic, or purely cultural. Afghanistan and Cambodia are not random; they function as metonyms for state collapse, militarized religion, mass violence, landmines, refugees, and the long half-life of foreign intervention. The subtext is that women bear history's most routine brutalities, and that "women's issues" are often the most accurate name we have for geopolitical failure.

The line also reveals the tightrope of late-20th-century liberal internationalism: compassion with a passport. Bonino is staking a claim to legitimacy by relocating moral urgency beyond her electorate, but she risks sounding like the benevolent observer cataloging distant suffering. That tension is precisely what makes the quote work. It sketches the uncomfortable truth that solidarity is both ethical impulse and political strategy, and that the global turn in feminism arrives not as a slogan but as a recalibration of where power, vulnerability, and responsibility actually sit.