Rapid Scoping Review 2025: Egypt

Egypt has a rich history of feminist activism, but progress on lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer, intersex, and more (LGBTQI+) rights and women’s rights ‘remains elusive, characterized by fits and starts along a non-linear trajectory’. Although Egypt’s President, Abdel Fattah al-Sisi, regularly pays lip service to women’s rights, his government’s record is very poor, and it has been critiqued for ‘not tolerat(ing) any form of feminism but its own’. Feminist and LGBTQI+ movements in Egypt are working within a civil society that is very tightly controlled, both by laws and the security forces, who engage in human rights violations with impunity. This brief is based on a review of 13 feminist groups, founded during the third wave (1980s to 2011) and fourth wave (2011 onwards) of feminism in Egypt. It explores the context of rollback in Egypt, the landscape of anti-rollback actors, counter-rollback strategies, and gaps and areas for future research and work.