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This paper is based on a three‐year research project entitled Minority Women Negotiating Citizenship. Conceived of in the aftermath of Gujarat 2002, the project studied 75 life‐history narratives of Muslim women survivors of communal violence in Gujarat, Hyderabad and Mumbai, in order to map their everyday experiences of negotiating survival, marginalisation and exclusion. While analysing our material we found that our preliminary organising or analytic categories – victim, agent, Muslim, woman, class, location – could not contain the negotiations and fluid ‘subjects’ of the narratives. The most useful analytic concepts and tools were those being used by the women themselves in their narratives, such as bahar nikalna and sambhalna. …

Lydia Alpı´zar Dura´n was invited to address the annual session of the Commission on the Status of Women (CSW). She shares her reflections as someone who joined the women’s movement in the midst of the Beijing preparations as a youth activist. She discusses the importance of the development community focusing on the implementation of the Beijing Platform for Action and going beyond the Millennium Development Goals. She presents key insights from the work on advancing women’s rights and gender equality over the last 15 years along with a review of some relevant current trends and concludes with a set of action-oriented recommendations. …

The Beijing Declaration and Platform for Action (BPfA), celebrated by feminist activists as a triumph for women's rights, is 20 years old. The world that it once described has changed profoundly in some respects, and yet in others remains surprisingly similar. This IDS Bulletin reflects on those changes and continuities, tracing the trajectories of the Beijing conference in different policy arenas, national settings and domains of practice. …

In preparing for the twenty-year review of the Beijing Platform for Action on women’s economic empowerment, both formal policy documents and media coverage in developed countries such as the Netherlands resonate with the rhetoric of choice between work and care. In this article, my central argument is that framing the combination of work and care as a matter of personal choice stands in the way of economically empowering women. For policy makers to take responsibility in these matters, both policy documents and media coverage should promote win-win instead of zero sum solutions in combining work and care, for both men and women. …

Report in Bangla on the research which interrogated the significance and relative impact of donor funding on women organising at global, national and local levels. The researchers did not assume that successful organising by women required external funding, but rather sought to clarify the conditions under which external financial support to women's organisations and groups had a positive impact on women's empowerment as well as the conditions in which successful mobilising is achievable without such support. This was a comparative research with Ghana, where one of the components examined the role of international development agencies in supporting women's organisations. …

This chapter uses rhetorical analysis to analyse the Clitoraid campaign, an American initiative started by the believers of the Raelian religion that set out to raise funds to build a ‘pleasure hospital’ in Burkina Faso that would perform operations to ‘restore’ the capacity of excised women for clitoral orgasm. …

This report focuses on the application of the Maria Da Penha Law within the legal framework and structures put in place in Brazil, such as the Special Women's Police Stations (DEAMS) and the federal and district level domestic violence family courts, following the law's implementation in 2006. …

Social protection is the right to survive. It is the right to a basic income, shelter, health, food and information, all of which enables people to survive, support their dependents and find a way out of need and destitution. The right to social protection exists for all people, regardless of age, sex or ethnicity. The existence of this right should give people a sense of security even when they are not claiming it. …

This seminar held in Dhaka on 21 January 2008, brought together work and discussions around concepts of empowerment, among academics, practitioners and activists, both within and outside the Pathways of Women’s Empowerment RPC. There were researchers and activists from Sierra Leone, Ghana, Palestine, Egypt, and Brazil present. The day’s programme was arranged around three themes: livelihoods and labour, political spaces and institutions, and civil society discourses. The discussions addressed common questions and the presenters applied them to their individual experiences. …

This is a preliminary report of research on domestic violence and women’s access to justice in Brazil conducted under the coordination of NEIM - the Nucleus of Interdisciplinary Women’s Studies of the Federal University of Bahia, in partnership with OBSERVE-the Observatory for Monitoring the Application of Maria da Penha Law, and the Pathways of Women’s Empowerment Research Program Consortium. The study is intended to provide subsidies as a country case study to UNIFEM’s Progress of the World’s Women and Access to Justice Report. It focuses primarily on specialized police stations for women in Brazil as a means of access to justice for women in situations of domestic violence. …

Brazil’s Maria da Penha Law was put in place to prevent and combat domestic and family violence against women. A project, backed by the Pathways of Women's Empowerment RPC, called the Maria da Penha Law Observatory Consortium (OBSERVE), was launched in order to ensure the adequate and efficient implementation of the law. This case study briefly describes the research that the OBSERVE team undertook and the preliminary research findings which indicated that a number of problems obstruct the desired application of the law. …

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. …

Social protection is the right to survive. It is the right to a basic income, shelter, health, food and information, all of which enables people to survive, support their dependents and find a way out of need and destitution. The right to social protection exists for all people, regardless of age, sex or ethnicity. The existence of this right should give people a sense of security even when they are not claiming it. …

The Beijing Declaration and Platform for Action (BPfA) is 20 years old. This introduction looks at the promises of the Beijing conference and reflects on how these have materialised amidst broader changes in the political economy of development. Most significant is the shift in the role of the state, with the entry of new development actors into the development policy and practice arena and growing private sector engagement. One consequence of this is that in the enthusiasm of corporate campaigns promoting women and girls as self-actualising individuals who can lift their communities out of poverty, effective implementation of progressive policies is getting lost. …

This article questions whether affirmative action and training of women politicians leads to effective voice and change on issues that are relevant for women. The authors examine the case of Bangladesh, which has an affirmative action policy for women in government, and consider the barriers that women in politics continue to face, as well as the doors that are opened to them through their role in politics. The Bangladesh case shows that the advent of direct elections has established a direct link between the constituency and women members. This, in turn, has given women a stronger voice and more legitimacy as political actors. …