Political ParticipationArticles

Bisi Adeleye-Fayemi revisits the African Feminist Forum and its Charter to show how solidarity is built through conflict, accountability, and organizing practice.

A UN Women-commissioned 2026 study examines online violence against women human-rights defenders, activists and journalists, including AI-enabled abuse, offline harm and self-censorship.

Maxime Houinato compares Senegal’s parity lists with Benin’s reserved seats to ask when representation becomes power. Unexplained figures in the brief conflict with IPU chamber-level data.

Titilope F. Ajayi moves from Nairobi 1985 through everyday organizing, Bring Back Our Girls and digital action to reflect on African feminist practice, memory and generational debate.

On January 18, 2025, tens of thousands joined the rebranded 'People's March' protesting Trump's second inauguration. While smaller than the 2017 event, the 2025 marches reflect a shift from mass mobilization to strategic, long-term grassroots and legislative action.

2025 marks the 30th anniversary of the Beijing Declaration and Platform for Action. Despite progress, 24% of countries report backlash on gender equality, and 10% of women still live in extreme poverty. This is a critical moment to renew commitments.

This article traces the evolution of feminist movements from the 19th-century suffrage campaigns to the digital activism of the #MeToo era. It explores the four waves of feminism, their historical contexts, and the persistent global challenges to gender equality, including political representation, reproductive rights, and social stigma.

Ms. Magazine honors 2024's most influential feminists, including the 27 women who sued Texas over its abortion ban, Kamala Harris, Black women voters, and brave women fighting for rights globally.

UN Women uses Kenya’s National Care Policy process to show how time-use evidence can inform childcare, social protection, labor rights, and basic-service reform.

Historian Madina Thiam’s three-part profile follows Bintou Sanankoua’s scholarship, teaching, feminist organizing and political life in Mali.

MISA’s UNESCO-supported regional study records media workers’ experiences and observations of technology-facilitated gender-based violence, with a clear account of its sample limits.

Led by the Heritage Foundation and supported by over 100 far-right organizations, 'Project 2025' is an 887-page policy blueprint calling for the deletion of terms like 'gender equality' and 'reproductive rights' from federal regulations. This document is a comprehensive declaration of war on women's rights.

UN Women defines care as a public good and social infrastructure, connecting gender equality, climate crisis, public services, and care workers’ rights in one policy framework.

In the United States, women's reproductive rights are rapidly being eroded. Since Roe v. Wade was overturned in 2022, nearly 30 states have restricted abortion access. This war on bodily autonomy threatens not just America, but women's rights globally.

UN Secretary-General António Guterres issues stark warning at the 2024 Commission on the Status of Women: 'Patriarchy is far from vanquished; it is regaining ground.' From Afghanistan to America, from digital spaces to political stages, women's rights are under systematic attack and decades of progress are being reversed.

This policy brief examines the strength, fragmentation, financing, and political space of women’s movements across Africa, emphasizing that durable equality depends on autonomous collective power.

An analysis of South Korea's complex gender landscape, where deep-seated structural inequality coexists with a powerful anti-feminist movement and political shifts that threaten existing protections for women.

Hamza Bensouda examines how Morocco’s women’s movement built coalitions across ideological divisions and sustained pressure for family-law, constitutional, and anti-violence reform.

UNESCO and ICFJ combine survey, interview and social-media evidence to show how online violence silences women journalists and threatens the public’s right to know.

This Beijing+25 regional synthesis measures progress and persistent gaps across work, care, violence, health, and political power, giving South Asian feminist claims a comparative policy baseline.

Written after Lebanon’s October 2019 uprising, Carmen Geha asks how women’s visible leadership in protest can become substantive power without being absorbed as symbolic representation.

This article critiques the expectations of 'perfection' and 'likability' in contemporary feminism, calling for recognition of the complexity and contradictions within feminism, and embracing those 'difficult women' who are nonconformist, hard to categorize, but drive change.

This regional legal review compares constitutional guarantees, nationality, family law, violence protections, labor, and criminal law across Arab states, making visible both reform and persistent discrimination.

Seven participants recount how Argentina’s green-scarf campaign turned abortion from a silenced personal risk into a mass, intergenerational demand for health, autonomy, and democracy.

Activists from Afghanistan, Bangladesh, the Maldives, Nepal, Pakistan, and Sri Lanka describe how rights work is sustained amid trafficking, autocracy, militarization, poverty, and gendered retaliation.

Amnesty’s Troll Patrol turned crowdsourced Twitter labels into evidence of racialized abuse against women in public life - and offers a case study in the limits of samples, categories and automated inference.

A regional case in UN Women’s fund report follows Dalit women’s organizations in Nepal, Bangladesh, India, and Sri Lanka as they connect land, labor, education, and political representation across borders.

A regional evidence base on Indigenous women’s physical, economic, and political autonomy that also exposes how statistical invisibility limits rights, policy, and accountability.

Adopted in Accra in 2006, the Charter links bodily autonomy and material rights to feminist organizations’ accountability and shared leadership.

How the Combahee River Collective connected Black women’s lived experience to interlocking structures of race, gender, sexuality, and class - and made self-definition a collective politics of liberation and coalition.

In this 1912 socialist address, Rosa Luxemburg argues that women’s suffrage is a working-class demand and exposes how wage-based definitions of productivity erase unpaid labor.

At an 1866 women’s rights convention, Frances Ellen Watkins Harper argues that voting rights matter but cannot by themselves secure equality. Black women face racial and gendered exclusion at once, and cannot be told to wait.

In an 1832 Boston address, Maria W. Stewart uses Christian rhetoric to call Black women and men toward learning and public participation while exposing how racialized labour restricts Black women’s opportunities.

Olympe de Gouges recasts revolutionary rights language in 1791 to ask why women remain outside citizenship, public speech and legal equality. This reading follows the declaration’s form and its historical limits.