Civic Space for Countering the Anti-gender Backlash: A Literature Review
This literature review maps changes in civic space across different contexts around the globe over the last ten years. […]
Holding the Line: Defending Civic Space to Counter the Gender Backlash
This brief synthesises insights from interviews with gender justice activists living and working at the confluence of these tendencies. Their experiences and navigation strategies offer grounded perspectives and suggest some refinements in how governments, funders, and allies support them. […]
Digital Backlash: Manifestations and Resistance
This working paper shows how recent power shifts in socio/digital relations reflect, facilitate, and amplify a broader backlash agenda. […]
Patriarchal Backlash against Gender Equality in Kenya: A Mixed Methods Study
This study conducted in Kenya explores the multifaceted dimensions of patriarchal backlash and resistance to gender equality initiatives. […]
Revisting Feminist Advocacy
This special issue seeks to critically explore the diverse strategies utilised by feminist advocacy to advance gender justice rights, present the interests of the historically oppressed, and offer feminist and decolonial approaches to the workings and operations of mainstream advocacy, largely led, funded, and deter-mined by the politics of the Global North. […]
Al-Raida Journal: Countering Backlash Vol. 49 No. 1 Special Issue
This special issue includes cross-regional perspectives and offers readers a unique comparative advantage in understanding the transnational and interconnected nature of Vol. 49 No 1 Special Issue (2025) anti-feminist movements, as well as some strategies for resisting them. […]
‘The Constitution is our only Weapon’: Resisting and Countering the Assault on the Citizenship Rights of Muslim Women in India and Uttar Pradesh
This research from GenderSphere documents and analyses what assaults on the Muslim community in India over the last several years mean for the citizenship rights of Muslim women. […]
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. […]
Institutionalising Backlash: Anti-Gender Frameworks as a Means to Justify Democratic Erosion in the United States
This study explores the increasingly visible relationship between anti-gender backlash, authoritarianism, and right-wing populism in the United States […]
Troubling Masculinities in Patriarchal Backlash: Tools, Stories and Insights
A toolkit to inspire and inform civil society actors and activists, as well as researchers and students, with stories from partners’ practice along with practical tools and resources to counter backlash more effectively […]