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A witness account from Abbia on the politically motivated sexual assaults targeting female protestors of the Arab revolt in Cairo. These have been taking place since the revolution in 2011 which deposed President Mubarak. …

Hania Sholkamy examines the disempowering aspects of women’s work and calls for a more progressive agenda to empower work and re-position it not only as an income generating activity, but as a social role, an ideal, and political engagement. …

In as much as women's subordinate status is a product of the patriarchal structures of constraint that prevail in specific contexts, pathways of women's empowerment are likely to be ‘path dependent’. They will be shaped by women's struggles to act on the constraints that prevail in their societies, as much by what they seek to defend as by what they seek to change. The universal value that many feminists claim for individual autonomy may not therefore have the same purchase in all contexts. This article examines processes of empowerment as they play out in the lives of women associated with social mobilisation organisations in the specific context of rural Bangladesh. …

This article examines the experience of mobilizing for the right to safe, legal abortion in Brazil. It focuses on exploring the strategies pursued by the feminist and women’s movements to ‘win hearts and minds’ both within these movements, and beyond them, through collective struggle, dialogue and coalition building. Tracing the trajectory of the Brazilian campaign for the legalization of abortion, Jornadas pelo Direito ao Aborto Legal e Seguro (Brazilian Journeys for Legal and Safe Abortion), the article looks at avenues of action and modes of activism. It describes how the efforts of campaigners have focused not only on engaging support from the public and the media, but also on working with the Ministry of Health and health professionals to guarantee the availability of services for abortions that are legal under current restrictions, monitoring changes in public opinion and the media, and on legislative change, which has recently become especially difficult in the wake of increased activism by the Church. …

The organisation of women domestic workers in Brazil reveals a process of collective empowerment at work in a society where gender, race, and class inequalities intersect, giving rise to complex mosaics. Analysing processes of empowerment in these circumstances calls for abandoning universalizing visions of women and recognizing differences and inequalities beyond gender in multiracial and multicultural societies. Women domestic workers face class contradictions in establishing harmonious relationships with women bosses, who are also participants as workers in unions and other political spaces. This contradiction creates difficulties in constructing a common agenda for the advancement of domestic workers' labour rights. …

The organization of women domestic workers in Brazil reveals a process of collective empowerment at work in a society where gender, race, and class inequalities intersect, giving rise to complex mosaics. Analysing processes of empowerment in these circumstances calls for abandoning universalizing visions of women and recognising differences and inequalities beyond gender in multiracial and multicultural societies. Women domestic workers face class contradictions in establishing harmonious relationships with women bosses, who are also participants as workers in unions and other political spaces. This contradiction creates difficulties in constructing a common agenda for the advancement of domestic workers' labour rights. …

This chapter is a tale of women reaching the height of political activism and the pit of their political representation all in one year (January 2011-January 2012). It is a year that began with women and men rising in revolt against the thirty year dictatorship of President Mubarak and ended with the parliamentary elections a year later that brought an Islamist-majority bloc to the Egyptian parliament. …

Brazil has 9. 1 million domestic workers. 95% of them are women, 60% are black. Many earn less than five dollars a day. …

This chapter contextualises empowerment historically in Palestinian practices of mobilisation and resistance. The author draws on interviews and focus group discussions to explore the meanings the term has come to acquire in the Palestinian context. …

Mwaura-Muiru highlights the need for the women’s movement and donors to work towards and support woman-led (especially poor woman-led) transformation. Collective organizing and social networks is a means of empowerment that allows women to respond to challenges, but grassroots organizing is being threatened by social and macro economic models of development. The women’s movement’s renewed interest in grassroots women’s coping strategies could potentially be a huge step forward for the women’s movement, but, Mwaura-Muiru argues, the views of the less privileged should be seen as the critical voice in the design of appropriate interventions. She critiques Gender and Development as being too focussed on technical and professional training, which continues to marginalize poor women, and argues that there is a need to rethink development and women’s empowerment, and stresses that strategies towards women’s empowerment need to consider grassroots women’s needs and diversity. …

Alan Greig uses his experience as a development practitioner to reflect on the lessons that have been learned with regards to women’s empowerment, what questions remain unaddressed, and what the frictions, hopes and challenges are for women’s empowerment. He discusses the things that need to be considered more attentively in the broader attempts to ‘empower’ economically and politically, and offers his opinion on the determining factors for women’s empowerment. …

Kamau draws upon her experience at ActionAid International Kenya to reflect on development interventions and what makes them successful. She views empowerment as both an individual and collective process of understanding and action, and highlights the importance of education and access to information as essential to empowerment. She concludes with an ActionAid Kenya case study that illustrates the success of the rights-based approach in aiding an empowering development process. …

A witness account from Farah Shash on the politically motivated sexual assaults targeting female protestors of the Arab revolt in Cairo. These have been taking place since the revolution in 2011 which deposed President Mubarak. …

This book is about taking an upside down approach to women’s political empowerment. Its starting point is that the academic and policy focus on getting the electoral system right in order to narrow the gender gap in representation needs to be complemented with a bottom up approach that examines women’s pathways of political engagement. …

This introduction outlines the central themes that are covered in the chapters and sheds light on the linkages between these issues as well as drawing out the conclusions that tie the arguments of the individual chapters. Three central themes connect the chapters in this volume. The first is concerned with problematising binaries and uniform categories. That is, many of the chapters address the question: What is concealed when both reform efforts (and the public debates about them) fail to escape conceptualisations and categorisations that are based on binaries and uniform understandings of terms such as ‘religious’  ‘secular’ or ‘tradition’ and ‘modernity?’ …