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This article examines the use of gender in constitutions and its significance for gender equality. New democracies, and some older ones, are increasingly including gender provisions in their constitutions. What is the impact of these provisions on women's

This article examines the impact of political opportunity structures (POS) on the activity choices of women's groups in the UK, France, and Germany in order to determine whether political opportunities, specifically elite alliances and changes in electoral cleavages, are gendered. We ask how/whether various institutional structures impact the activity choices of women's groups, gauging whether women react to opportunities in a similar manner as other social groups, namely environmental groups. We find that social democratic elite allies and electoral cleavages prompted by de-alignment influence activity choice among women's groups in a similar manner as among environmental groups, yet the data show that women's groups are disenfranchised from direct contact with policymaking elites through consultation, thus suggesting the presence of gendered POS.

Systems of governance are legitimised as an almost indispensable response to global co-ordination over matters of environmental degradation. Considering sustainable development as the key label for 'common-sense' political approaches to environmental degradation and a key informant for international environmental policy-making activity, this article seeks to problematise such a widespread discourse as (re)productive of (hetero)sexist power relations. As such, this article, informed by Foucault's conceptions of governmentality and biopower, contends that the global thrust towards sustainable development projects works to construct identities and discipline power relations with regard to gender and sexuality. Specifically, I argue that the disciplinary narratives and apparatuses of international sustainable development initiatives work to construct gendered identities and naturalise heterosexual relations. To demonstrate this, this article focuses on the discourses surrounding one of the most important international documents directed at informing national environmental policy, Agenda 21.

Democracy has become a truly universal value and pursuit. Yet although international instruments, norms and standards continually reinforce democratic principles, achieving them remains a daunting challenge across the world. The continued lack of gender e

This discussion engages with Janet Conway's and Sian Sullivan's comments on our article, 'Deconstructing Militant Manhood: Masculinities in the Disciplining of (Anti-)Globalization Politics'. First, we clarify our understanding of global capitalist forms of ordering and of the gendered scripts attendant to them as a response to Conway's call for a more intersectional analysis and to her point about the relationship between the situated practices we explore and the global order within which we locate them. In doing so, we defend our methodology based on an ascending analysis of power and the usefulness of our particular ethnographical approach to carry out such analysis. Second, we address Sullivan's concerns about our choice of an academic journal as the site for a discussion of the forms of gendered exclusion that we have experienced. While we have not been able to engender a space of active listening in the activist groups we analyse, developing our own tools of analysis of what had happened to us and finding this academic space to share them has been part of a process of making sense of our traumatic experiences both intellectually and emotionally.

Over the past 50 years Cuban society has radically transformed its institutions and openly encouraged women to become independent, educated, and empowered. As a result, Cuban women revolutionized gender relations and made much more progress than men. This

Political participation is higher among men than women in most parts of the world. However, earlier research has shown that this does not hold true in Scandinavia, including Sweden, where gender differences are remarkably small. This article studies the c

This article examines the implications of the trial of Jacob Zuma, current president of the ANC, for sexual and gender politics in South Africa. The article argues that a central, contested issue in public debates on the trial was the relationship between

Although there have been many studies that address the representation of women in parliament, there are few analyses that compare the current state of gender representation between democracies and non-democracies. Focusing on Africa, Central and South Ame

Recent work argues that the relationship between Islamic faith, the lack of support for gender equality and democratization is spurious. This paper analyzes the correlates of individual support for increasing the number of women serving in Indonesian legi

A collection of studies published in Argentina shows that quotas for women on electoral candidate lists have been successful in achieving a certain level of gender balance in the parliaments of many Latin American countries. However, it says that more too

Based on ethnographic research conducted with the Network of Healthy Communities in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, this article examines how grassroots leaders have sought networks and partnerships as a strategy to amplify and strengthen their work, particularly

In this article, we consider how privileged masculine performances within different spaces of (anti-)globalization politics discipline political praxis in ways that bolster, as much as contest, the order that these movements seek to subvert or overthrow. We draw on two case studies: a British 'anti-imperialist' organization working in solidarity with Latin America and the emerging British anarchist movement. On the basis of our own interpretive participation within these spaces, we consider how each was structured with reference to a privileged masculine identity - that of a patriarchal and authoritarian 'Man with Analysis' in the case of the former and what we call 'Anarchist Action Man' in the case of the latter. We reflect on how these dominant gendered scripts set restrictions around which bodies and voices could be included, and within what capacity; and how our own 'off-script' performances were reinterpreted with reference to available cultural texts within these activist subcultures.

In this commentary I engage with Coleman and Bassi's significant intervention 'Deconstructing Militant Manhood'. My intention is a further problematization of what they identify as the exclusionary orderings of powerful gendered and heteronormative scripts within left-political organizations that otherwise identify with a project of contesting the inequities associated with patriarchal modernity. I draw on Nietzsche in considering the production and exclusion of societal 'truths', and the (im)possibilities of 'speaking truth to power', when what is empowered is so precisely through dismissal of difference. I affirm the significant political project of 'becoming-other', as a multiplicity of choices that do not collude with contemporary onto-epistemological order, at the same time as noting the seeming impasse of identity politics in shifting the juggernaut of broader disciplining structures.

In a commentary on Coleman and Bassi's study of hegemonic masculinities in the British anti-globalization movement, the author brings to bear the scholarship on the gendered culture of the World Social Forum and through this, suggests the importance of contextualizing such studies in particular places and incorporating race, nation and class as salient dimensions.

"This article problematizes the deployment of the concept of agency in contemporary international relations scholarship. It examines the problems of relying on a foundationalist conception of agency as a tool to achieve meaningful political action by exploring the case of scholarship on the topic of women and terrorism. I argue that scholars on the topic of women and terrorism inscribe agency into women's subjectivities, that is, they place agency as the goal of feminist political action. By tracing the way that scholars write agency into women's subjectivities through an examination of the literature on the topic, I am able to demonstrate how reliance on agency as a foundational concept hinders the goals of feminists."

Why have there been so many obituaries for the women's movement, written in so many different countries, despite so many continuing manifestations of life? We argue here that the problem is not simply the short attention span of the media and the constant quest for newness but also the terms in which social movements have been understood. This is partly a methodological question concerning how social movements are distinguished from other political actors, the repertoires that are expected of them, and the associated measurement of social movement activity through protest event databases. It is also a question of how "institutionalization" is understood. It has often been assumed that social movement activism is by definition extrainstitutional or that institutionalization is something that comes after, replaces, or usurps the role of social movements.

The fight for women's rights came about hand in hand with the struggle for democracy, civil rights and national liberation in different countries and periods, says Ines Alberdi, executive director of UNIFEM

More than fifty countries have adopted quota laws to regulate the selection or election of women to political office. This suggests that states have begun to identify quotas as a new state-led strategy for incorporating women into public life and, by exte

Grassroots women's leadership is important if democracy is to be 'deepened' - that is, if representative democracies are to formally include citizen participation in more ways than simply voting in elections. One approach to deepening democracy is to enco