Building Solidarities: Gender Justice in a Time of Backlash

Significant progress on gender equality has been made in past decades, but in recent years gender and sexual rights are increasingly under threat from a global wave of gender backlash.

This is not new. Feminists have long faced resistance while building strategic steps towards greater gender justice and equality. But today, diverse anti-gender actors have gained in strength, funding and impact, amid wider global political shifts, which has resulted in a new and complex political landscape. Gender advocates face explicit violence, harassment, intimidation or threats of violence offline, and new forms of attacks online. There has also been a deterioration of legal protections for women’s rights in many countries, including attacks on laws around bodily autonomy, sexual and reproductive health and rights (SRHR) and gender identity.

Bringing together evidence from across multiple geographies, this report traces the evolution of the gender and development field, from challenging universalist assumptions about gender to visibilising care work and moving towards collective empowerment approaches, including sexual rights and paying attention to masculinities and patriarchy. Echoing much of the existing work in this field, this report puts forward six guiding principles for building solidarities for gender justice as a primary tactic to counter the rising backlash.