Is gender equality advocates' emphasis on women as agents of change helping to legitimize a neo-liberal vision of government, and working against women's engagement in promoting food security and peacebuilding, asks Rob Jenkins
History reveals an abundance of democratic paradoxes: cases in which progress on women’s rights regressed in the aftermath of revolution. Coming to terms with the battle between secularism and Islam – a dispute long silenced by Ben Ali’s rabidly secular policies – will require a redefinition of wo
The SlutWalk protests came to London last Saturday, as part of a global show of solidarity challenging a 'rape culture' that holds sexual assault survivors partly responsible for crimes against them
Nairobi Women's Hospital treated more than 300 women who had been gang raped in the aftermath of the contested Presidential election. Speaking from personal experience, Wangu Kanja reports on the challenges these women now face
Orthodox Jewish feminists may seem to outsiders to be a contradiction in terms. But as Cassandra Balchin discovers while talking with Israeli Orthodox Jewish feminist, Dr. Debbie Weissman, Jewish politics in Israel is anything but straightforward.
"Egyptian women are lucky in one way. They have witnessed the predicament of Iranian women and seen how the Islamic state has hijacked the Iranian revolution, changed the laws and reversed women’s gains. My advice to Egyptian women is “do not give way to a government that would force you to choose
Despite the vibrancy of mobilization in Egypt after Mubarak, Hania Sholkamy’s account of the 8th of March demonstration in Tahrir square to mark International Women's day bears witness to the persistent resistance to women’s political participation
In the 1970s, the women’s liberation movement had a badge that proclaimed: women who seek equality with men lack ambition. We don’t want to participate as equals in the violence, oppression and greed of patriarchal power, says Rebecca Johnson.
The women party activists who applied for nominations to stand in next week's local elections in Sri Lanka found themselves blocked by a system of entrenched patron-client relationships. As one of them said, " for how long will the men decide where the wells should be, even though it is the women
An animated discussion is taking place about the relationship between Islam and equality and justice in the context of women’s human rights. How will the democratic uprisings sweeping across the Arab world affect this conversation?
Women's NGOs in Egypt denounce the decision of the National Council of Women to represent their views at international gatherings such as the UN CSW currently underway in New York.
That the guardians of women's virtue should present a direct threat to it, encapsulates the essential paradox of popular opinion about the Taliban movement in the Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa province of Pakistan, says Sana Haroon.
