Gender Politics

The 68th session of the United Nations Commission on the Status of Women (CSW) has shown, how interlinked economic and gender justice are. At the same time, the linkage between feminist grassroots and UN institutions has drastically weakened, benefiting anti-gender actors.

The Global Feminist Pitch 2021 presents eleven feminists from Malawi, Brazil, Lebanon, Somalia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Nepal, Morocco and India who have realised nine projects on feminist resistance and resilience in social media in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic. 

The Global Feminist Pitch has been back to support feminists from Latin America, Asia, Africa, the Middle East and (Southern) Eastern Europe. We have selected twelve feminists this year who write on the topic of feminist mobilisation in their region. 

The Global Feminist Pitch 2023 continues to support feminists from Latin America, the Caribbean, Asia, Africa, the Middle East and (Southern) Eastern Europe. This year we are once again delighted to present the selected feminists to you. 

Which role does feminist development and foreign policy play as a tool of state-funded resources for feminist movements and organisations? A discussion with the activists Amina Doherty and Michelle Reddy.

In parallel to the newly-issued guidelines for Germany’s feminist foreign policy, the German Ministry for Economic Cooperation and Development (BMZ) has also launched a new strategy on feminist development policy. Here’s a look back at key moments in international development institutions’ back-and-forth on gender policy.  

“The main achievement of Safecity is that we managed to make the violence visible [...]. The second achievement is that we made the data available, so that individuals and communities can use them - to advocate for their own safety, to demand for a better infrastructure or better institutional accountability.”

Since 2020 a war has been ongoing in the Tigray region of northern Ethiopia. The conflict quickly spread to the neighboring regions of Amhara and Afar, leading to a humanitarian crisis. Sexual violence is being employed deliberately and systematically as an instrument of war by all parties to the conflict in northern Ethiopia. 

Despite the high number of rapes, the judicial progress that has been made, and the judgements passed by international, national and local courts, most of the affected women are still far from receiving compensation, reparations, or recognition as a victim.

Feminist and LGBTIQ+ issues are almost as diverse as the communities themselves, yet both movements are discriminated against, marginalized, often attacked, and violated, simply because of their non-conformity to conventional and hegemonic notions of gender.

Among those hardest hit by the climate crisis, women have taken some of the leading roles in combatting it. On local levels they are directly addressing the effects of climate change. Here we present some of the core calls for fair and gender-equitable climate financing on a global scale.

Women are more affected than men by plastics. Biological reasons are part of the problem: their bodies react in different ways to toxins, and the hygiene products that women use are often contaminated. But alternatives do exist.

To deal with the dramatic consequences of the global environmental and climate crises, international attention is also growing for civil society environmental movements and their louder feminist demands.

Gender justice, democracy and socio-ecological sustainability are politically and economically inextricably linked. Barbara Unmüßig, President of the Heinrich Böll Foundation, gives an insight into her own experiences and develops recommendations for action for politicians.

Gender-based violence is usually defined as violence against a person because of their actual or perceived gender. Discriminatory social norms, attitudes and practices promote notions of male privilege, dominance and violence, leading to widespread acceptance of GBV, but also to its invisibility.

More than 50 people were injured in attacks on journalists and civil society in Tbilisi in early July in connection with Pride Week. The German Federal Government and the EU should strongly urge their Georgian partners to address the violence through prompt and comprehensive legal and political action. 

In the middle of the night on March 20, 2021, a presidential decree was published in the Official Gazette, announcing Turkey would withdraw from the Council of Europe Convention on Preventing and Combating Violence Against Women and Domestic Violence, also known as the Istanbul Convention.

International treaties also give certain leverage to civic actors and women’s movement in Turkey in their efforts to overcome entrenched resistance to policy and practice changes. Since the Convention’s inception, women’s organisations in Turkey have been actively struggling for effective implementation and pushing public authorities to adopt women-friendly policies by making direct references to the Convention’s provisions.

The new online course on masculinity has now been released in a version with English subtitles, making the cooperation project of the Heinrich Böll Stiftung Moscow available internationally to anyone interested.