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.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.
Countering gender backlash in Uganda’s infamous Sexual Offences Bill
Uganda has registered significant steps in promoting gender justice, equality and women’s rights in recent years. Considerable progress has been seen in women’s collective advocacy for strengthening rights in marriage, inheritance of family property and political participation since independence. […]
Unravelling Backlash in the Journey of Legislating Sexual Offences in Uganda
This paper interrogates the reality of gender backlash in Uganda by tracing the process of legislating on the 2019 Sexual Offences Bill (SOB). We trace the early beginnings of the Bill by highlighting the motivation that guided the framing of the Bill, the role of individual actors and alliances in pushing for the gender equity reform, and the oppositional forces against the reform. Working with participatory forms of qualitative research methods, the focus on the legislative cycle of the SOB as a policy case aimed to enable us to understand what constitutes backlash, and its drivers and manifestations. […]
Backlash against student activists during #MeToo in Kolkata, India
Student politics in Kolkata is dominated by left-leaning organisations who look at the world in terms of ‘class struggle’ and claim to be supportive of all democratic movements – including women’s movements and anti-caste struggles. However, some scholars such as […]