Somatic Politics: Beyond Capacity Building Traps Somatic Politics: Beyond Capacity Building Traps: Lessons from the Gender Reversed Bootcamp in Madagascar

International audience This article challenges the "capacity building" model that dominates international assistance on women's political participation, arguing that political exclusion is not a knowledge deficit to be remedied through training but a structural condition produced by gendered power relations embedded in informal institutions. Drawing on feminist institutionalism, it distinguishes declarative knowledge (knowing that equality is a norm) from the procedural and embodied knowledge of how power, exclusion, and inequality are reproduced and endured. To engage this embodied dimension, the article analyses the Gender Reversed Bootcamp (GRBC), an immersive simulation conducted in Madagascar in 2022 in which members of a Green Party youth wing inhabited a matriarchal dystopia whose rules were reverse-engineered from documented statistical asymmetries affecting Malagasy women. Mobilising speculative design and the concept of the "total institution," the simulation generated "somatic knowledge" and "productive conflict": male participants viscerally experienced time poverty, economic dependence, and homosocial exclusion, while female participants rapidly internalised the habitus of power yet voluntarily relinquished it. A four-year longitudinal follow-up indicates durable procedural and behavioural change rather than a transient effect. The article reframes empathy as an informal political institution capable of interrupting domination, and offers recommendations for donors: shifting from training to simulation, targeting informal institutions, accepting conflict as a metric of success, and decolonising pedagogical methods.