“Woman, Life, Freedom”

In this editorial, we want to recognize and align ourselves with the courageous women and girls of Iran who, at the time of writing, are out on the streets shouting their rage against a repressive regime run by elderly clerics and religious patriarchs. These men have declared women's lives to be worth half those of men. Indeed, this is a regime built on the systematic curtailment of women's rights. Confronted by a ruthless security apparatus, some of the protesters are paying with their lives as they demand “Woman, Life, Freedom.” The death of Mahsa Amini – imprisoned and ultimately killed for a “bad hijab,” a wisp of hair escaping the legally mandated headscarf – has rallied them. Women's hair has become their symbol – shaved off in mourning, cut in protest and solidarity, but also set free and displayed proudly in public as it prefigures a new freedom.

We should not forget that Iranian women have resisted this regime in various ways from its inception more than 40 years ago, as documented in various articles in this and other feminist and decolonial journals (Erfani 2020; Hassani 2017; Hoominfar and Zanganeh 2021; Sameh 2010). Furthermore, while their struggle is no doubt unique in many ways, it resonates eerily as we observe right-wing, populist, and fundamentalist movements entering governments around the world, doing their grotesque best to assert control over particular sexed, racialized, and gendered bodies, rolling back the gains that feminists have made through decades of struggle, denigrating migrants and others at the bottom of colonialist hierarchies, and fostering violence and hate. These agendas have propelled gender politics into the center of global power politics (or made this centrality more visible), where stifling moralism fuels our anger and increasingly our resistance.

The relationship between feminisms and “the state” has long been fraught, but today we see unusual levels of complexity and contradiction. On the one hand, feminists continue to lobby governments to change policies and laws, to better “govern” sex/gender in its multiple intersections – from demanding control over our own bodies to claiming a seat at the tables of power. Indeed, feminisms of a particular kind have entered a range of governance arenas, including not only state bureaucracies and the United Nations but also universities, non-governmental organizations (NGOs), and even private corporations, where initiatives for diversity, equity, and inclusion proliferate. On the other hand, feminist values are under attack in Iran and beyond, in a remarkably diverse range of ideological, authoritarian contexts. One has to ask: why are states across the ideological spectrum so invested in regulating sexuality, gender, and women's lives?

The articles in this issue of the International Feminist Journal of Politics reflect the complexities of the current moment. For example, Valentine Berthet explains how the European Parliament has become polarized around the issue of fighting violence against women and domestic violence as it has considered ratifying the Istanbul Convention. In associating the Convention with “gender ideology,” right-wing forces are undermining a basic human rights norm – that is, ending gender violence – and with it attacking what has been considered a core European value: gender equality.

While right-wing populists and fundamentalists fight feminism when it comes to what Htun and Weldon (2018) have called “doctrinal politics,” feminist strategies to challenge the state apparatus are bearing fruit in other areas in sometimes unintended ways. Two articles in this issue explore development, a field that has pioneered gender mainstreaming and has generated sophisticated gender expertise, albeit in a context of neoliberal and technocratic change management practices. Speaking from this perspective, Gloria Novovic and Rebecca Tatham discuss how to create knowledge for development that both honors feminist methodological principles and is policy relevant. Their study of Indigenous activism against a mine in Guatemala highlights the role of feminist researchers as “knowledge mediators” and “cultural translators” who through their diverse methods are able to make visible different discursive frames and valorize either situated or dominant knowledge. Meanwhile, Kelly Gerard's article on “aid chains” – that is, subcontracting arrangements of development funders with private actors, which have become increasingly common in the context of “development partnerships” – similarly identifies that there is leverage for NGOs at the bottom of these chains. Tracing four tiers of subcontracting in a project to enhance women's empowerment through market inclusion in South-East Asia, she finds that regional and local NGOs were able to incorporate feminist and rights-based strategies into the “empowerment lite” approach envisioned by the funders.

By contrast, two studies in this issue reveal gender mainstreaming as somewhat more problematic in the security sector. Thus, in the making of the Dutch National Action Plan (NAP) to implement the Women, Peace and Security (WPS) agenda, the logic of partnerships has also become exclusionary. Hanna L. Muehlenhoff shows how the Dutch NAP has essentially become a funding instrument for a limited number of Dutch civil society organizations that are in this way incorporated into the Dutch national security agenda. Not surprisingly, the NAP continues to target racialized Others as it imagines experts of the Global North fixing problems of the Global South. Illustrating another hurdle for mainstreaming gender in the security sector, Alexis Henshaw offers a rare glimpse of the obstacles to implementing the WPS agenda in the United States. Drawing on interviews in four agencies tasked with the job and echoing insights from early feminist scholarship on gender mainstreaming, she identifies one of the problems to be gendered labor dynamics, with WPS mandates added on to inexperienced women's jobs or given as temporary assignments. She also highlights the stereotyping of WPS initiatives as “women's work” and the associated devaluation of this kind of labor.

In light of these difficulties, it is well worth asking whether international frameworks, such as the WPS agenda, are fit for feminist purpose. Karie Cross Riddle suggests that they may not be and proposes that, for those interested in peacebuilding, the time may be ripe to think creatively beyond the WPS agenda. Combining critical feminist methodology with a contextual and relational approach to conflict transformation, she engages in an exercise of grounded theory building with peace activists in Manipur, India, to develop the notion of a “critical feminist justpeace.”

While feminism is relentlessly pummeled in contemporary international politics, it has nevertheless made inroads into governments, producing contradictory governmentalities. However, there will always be a role for feminisms beyond governance and governmentality, for transforming our worlds by building just peace from the bottom up, or for passionate, angry rebellion when our lives and freedoms are trampled.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.