Francine Mestrum has worked as a conference interpreter at several European institutions. At the age of 40, she decided to return to university (Université Libre de Bruxelles) and earned her PhD in development cooperation with an analysis of the international discourse on poverty. She has also worked at several Belgian universities as a guest lecturer. In her work for the European institutions, she acquired a thorough knowledge of the mechanisms of making policies and of inter-institutional dynamics. This was an important stepping stone towards her research on international institutions.

Her current research is focused on the social dimension of globalization, poverty, inequality, social protection, public services, and gender, looking each time at the meanings and the semantic dynamic of concepts and words. She has continued to closely watch the social dimension of the Bretton Woods policies, the way in which their discourse adjusts to the needs of the time, mostly eroding the meaning of ‘development’.

She also works on a ‘social commons, ’ a concept allowing for a common, active, and participatory approach to economic and social rights and hence citizenship. From there, the road to ‘global commons’ with universal social dividends is a short one. She actively supports all research and ideas concerning new internationalism and multilateralism.

Francine has abundant practical experience with educational programs in many areas of the world, particularly Asia, Africa, and Latin America. For 20 years, she was an active member of the International Council of the World Social Forum and was also a part of the International Organising Committee of the Asia Europe People’s Forum, in which she was co-responsible for the social justice cluster. In this context, she has organized webinars on social issues that were linked to environmental justice and peace. She has also worked on an initiative for the renewal of the World Social Forum along with Boaventura de Sousa Santos and Roberto Savio, which ultimately allowed for the creation of a separate and autonomous ‘Global Social Assembly of Struggles and Resistance of the WSF’.

She is the founder of the global network of Global Social Justice, for which she publishes a monthly newsletter, and a member of the Global Coalition for Social Protection Floors.

She was a member of the board of CETRI (Centre Tricontinental), an NGO that was founded by François Houtart, in Louvain-la-Neuve. CETRI does research on North-South relationships, giving a voice to people and movements from the South.

She is also a member of the editorial board of Uitpers (www.uitpers.be), an e-zine on foreign relations where she mainly writes on Latin America, Europe, development, and international organisations.

She wrote several books in Dutch, French, and English on the subjects of development, the World Bank, poverty, inequality, and social commons. One of her recent books is titled Redefining the Social Justice Agenda—voices from Europe and Asia, in collaboration with Meena Menon, which was published by Palgrave in 2021. In 2025, she published the book Make Poverty Illegal, an agenda for social justice in English, Spanish, French, and Dutch. The book gives a short history of social thinking in the past half-century and analyses the new ideas that are now being promoted. They clearly indicate the end of neoliberalism and the emergence of a new era of conservative thinking, with risks for people rendered poor. The ‘multidimensional’ thinking on poverty is an important element in this new ideological shift. Inequality is defined as a more serious and political problem than poverty.

Francine lives in Brussels, Belgium, but spends the cold European winters in the city of eternal spring, Cuernavaca, México.