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All of these issues will be debated at a two week session of the U.N. Commission on the Status of Women (CSW) Feb. 25 through Mar. 7, which is expected to draw over 5,000 participants from governments, civil society and international organisations. UN

During 1998 Buenos Aires witnessed a singular event: in the context of a broad legal renewal, street sex work was decriminalized. This decision proved to be highly problematic though, and led to a series of juridical reformulations that culminated in the delimitation of an official red light district in 2004. Nonetheless, although it might be thought that the legalization of this area as a site for street sex work (de facto aimed at trans sex workers) would stabilize the conflict, the regulation of sex work continues to be the object of an intense political struggle and the current situation is still far from achieving a fair agreement for sex workers. Certainly, although these debates might seem focused on the legal status of sex work, they have been addressing much broader issues that appeal to profound moral beliefs that are in turn intersected by the social organization of gender and sexuality.

Using a critical review of selected works on Africa by prominent African intellectuals, this interdisciplinary study concludes that, contrary to Amartya Sen's theory about the "real freedoms" that people enjoy in democratic states, these freedoms cannot be realized in Africa, because the continent's mode of capitalism is dependent upon international finance. This system cannot function as an autonomous structure and has engendered major political contradictions in the continent's nation-states. The capitalist ruling elites have hindered the expansion of full democratic rights in Africa by encouraging and exploiting the politics of class division. The African experience with liberal democracy indicates that Sen's theory of development and "real freedoms" fails to take into account these contradictions as well as the religious and cultural idioms in Africa that run counter to liberal conceptions of emancipation. Achieving democracy and freedom in Africa is not merely a question of capacity building, it involves resolving difficult issues of power - particularly, in class and gender relations. The essay concludes by suggesting that there needs to be a shift away from conceptualizing development in terms of only economic factors to a new approach which combines more enlightened neoliberal capitalism with new indigenous strategies of development.

There will be "elections" in Burma this year. But we should not be fooled into believing they will be free or fair. They will be a sham and will further entrench the military at the heart of power. The new constitution is harsh and one of the most unfair

KIGALI , Jul 29 (IPS) - Fifty-six percent of Rwanda's parliamentarians are women, a manifestation of the active role women have taken in rebuilding the country since the 1994 genocide.

The expansion of women's formal political representation ranks among the most significant trends in international politics of the last 100 years. Though women made steady political progress, substantial country-level variation exists in patterns of growth

In A Room of One's Own, Virginia Woolf implicitly addresses the necessary conditions for equal participation in deliberative democracy. Woolf's analysis indicates that proponents of deliberative democracy must be attentive to the angry, unconscious resist

She was orphaned by Angola's liberation struggle against Portugal, but through it she found a new family and a life-long inspiration. "I was raised on politics, I grew up through the revolution," says Luzia Inglês Van-Dúnem, one of Angola's top women pol

She fought alongside men in the Ethiopian liberation struggle. She fought for a free and fair society. But today, Yewubmar Asfaw feels that Ethiopia's revolution has failed to deliver a fair share of political power to women. In her book, published this

Dalit or ex-untouchable women's voices and perspectives have been marginalized not only in Dalit movements but also in predominantly upper-caste Hindu-led women's movements. This paper aims at exploring the unheard voices and perspectives of Dalit women i

In the last three decades in China, few and declining numbers of women have participated in the main grassroots institutions of rural government, the village committee and the village branch of the Chinese Communist Party. This article examines a project

An analysis of the literary representations of women and violence in three postwar Salvadoran narratives sheds light on El Salvador's new neoliberal reality and provides a basis for understanding the role of women in national reconstruction and democratiz

Malawi's primary elections are getting ugly for women candidates. Shoving, derogatory songs and being pelted with stones are just some of the intimidating tactics aimed at discouraging women from contesting the primary elections that will select candidate

Decentralised governments have often been presented as a formula for strengthening democracy and citizen participation, and giving women greater access to power. But experiences like that of Eufrosina Cruz, who was denied the right to run for mayor of her

It was a policy born of a shining promise - that decentralized governments would help empower tens of millions of women in developing countries. But has shifting more power and resources to the local level really improved women's lives? Has it resulted in

Cynthia Cockburn, From Where We Stand: War, Women's Activism and Feminist Analysis, Zed Books, 2007. The current book delves even deeper. It involved her travelling 80,000 miles over a two-year period and visiting 91 feminist groups or organizations in f

The south's civil service is huge, containing both Khartoum's former employees and the thousands who served in rebel-held areas as administrators. Hiring more people, including women who have returned to the South with skills, has been discouraged and bad

This article compares the views of Turkish secular feminist and Islamist activists and/or scholars with respect to the question of the compatibility of Islam and feminism. The issue of whether Islam is compatible with feminism has been a subject of debate

This report reviews the current state of women's participation in Latin American countries that have either maintained or adopted a representative and multi-party democratic system since 1978. It also examines the extent to which women are present in po

Inter Parliamentary Union A new report by the Geneva-based Inter Parliamentary Union (IPU) has shown that women are changing the priorities and sometimes the tone of legislatures around the world. But, it also highlights the slow pace at which the numbe