Major political and social shifts are resulting in new forces and alliances that are visibly pushing back, stifling the possibilities of equal women’s rights and gender justice.
Gender justice
is under attack.
How can we counter
backlash together?
What is needed for women’s rights organisations and gender justice defenders to counter backlash and the subtle erosion of gender transformative discourse, policy, and practice?
India.Kenya.Lebanon.
Turkey.Uganda.
Serbia.Turkey.
What's Happening?
Gender justice is increasingly contested the world over. Yet, equity across the genders is a critical foundation of human rights and sustainable development.
Backlash wages against the possibilities of transformative gender justice. To counter it, we must understand its diverse manifestations - from the subtle to the spectacular, the hidden to the explicit.
Solidarity, collaboration, and co-creation are the greatest tools in the box to mutually resist and counter coordinated and global attacks on gender and social justice.
Navigating Politics Under Patriarchy: Tools, Stories, Recommendations
This toolkit aims to equip politically active women with the required tools and skills to successfully navigate election cycles as candidates, voters, political campaigners and party participants. […]
Backlash Bites: Case Studies from Countering Backlash: Reclaiming Gender Justice
These cards are intended to illuminate and inspire – to show both the complexity and continuity of our struggles. We do this through showing the issues at stake, and how and why this is backlash; a timeline of events; the individual and collective actors working for and against backlash; and, finally, successful countertactics. […]
Countering Backlash: Reclaiming Gender Justice. Synthesis Report of Research Over Six Years
This report distils six years of collaborative research (from late 2019 to early 2026) by the Institute of Development Studies and 11 partners across seven countries on how contemporary gender backlash operates, and how feminist, queer, and other social movements are resisting it. It argues that current backlash is not simply anti-feminist business as usual but a qualitatively different, globally proliferating mode of patriarchal crisis management, emerging amid intersecting crises, authoritarianism, and deepening inequalities. […]