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This book explores the emergence of an alternative repertoire among women working in the growing informal sectors of the global South: the weapons of organisation and mobilisation. The book offers accounts of how women working on farms, as sex workers, maids and waste pickers, in fisheries and factories, have come together to carve out new identities for themselves, define what matters to them, and develop collective strategies of resistance and struggle. …

This pack of 20 vibrantly drawn cards provides a clear and very accessible entry into some of Pathways’ research findings and recommendations. The cards feature research from Bangladesh, Brazil, Egypt, Ghana, Pakistan, Palestine, and Sierra Leone, across the four Pathways themes of: conceptualising empowerment, empowering work, building constituencies and changing narratives of sexuality.  …

This bulletin is devoted to exploring what the quota has meant as a motorway to women's accession to political power. It draws on research findings from Pathways, as well as presentations given at a special seminar held in the Brazilian National Congress. The bulletin raises the questions of who are the women who are best positioned to benefit from the quota as a fast track option, what are they enabled to do once in office via the quota seats, and what kind of gender agendas does the critical mass of women who have come to power via the quota espouse and advocate? …

This bulletin arises from a conference of the same title that was held at the Institute of Development Studies in July 2007 in collaboration with Birkbeck College. It sets out to provoke reflection on the now ubiquitous notions of 'empowerment' and 'agency' within neoliberal development discourses on gender. It also seeks to raise broader questions about the politics and political economy of Gender and Development. …

This special issue of 'Development' originates from a workshop held at the Institute of Development Studies in 2008. It seeks to explore the linkages between sexuality and the development industry and to uncover the impacts of development on sexuality and how to move towards a more constructive engagement. …

The research investigated the definition of empowerment in Palestinian women's organisations and contextualised it in Palestinian practices of mobilisation and resistance. …

This bulletin highlights the profound inequities of access both globally and nationally to safe abortion, and the importance of global and national movements for reform to address this. Contributions focus in particular on policy reform and what can be learned from struggles in different parts of the world to obtain or retain safe abortion services. …

This research looked at resurgent Islam and its influence on the formation of female identities and sexualities in Bangladesh. The aim was to see whether the new forms of Islam in fact open up new spaces thereby ‘permitting’ women greater sexual rights than has been popularly perceived, and what might be learnt by the secular women’s movement from women’s organising in these new spaces. …

This research explored how and why women organise in religious groups and its political implications. The preliminary studies found that women's religious groups in Bangladesh are diverse in terms of composition, political objectives and interpretation of women's role in society/politics, and they have their own visions of women's empowerment. …

This book explores the ways in which positive, pleasure-focused approaches to sexuality can empower women. Gender and development has tended to engage with sexuality only in relation to violence and ill-health. Although this has been hugely important in challenging violence against women, over-emphasising these negative aspects has dovetailed with conservative ideologies that associate women’s sexualities with danger and fear. On the other hand, the media, the pharmaceutical industry, and pornography more broadly celebrate the pleasures of sex in ways that can be just as oppressive, often implying that only certain types of people - young, heterosexual, able-bodied, HIV-negative - are eligible for sexual pleasure. …

In June 2009, the Egyptian parliament passed a new quota law adding 64 additional seats, for which only women can compete in the 454-seat parliament. This project looked at the various instruments to support women's political participation in Egypt, including the National Council for Women’s political empowerment training programme, and asked how effective these have been in challenging power hierarchies and empowering women politically? …

To celebrate their 25th anniversary, the Nucleus of Women’s Interdisciplinary Studies based at the Federal University of Bahia, Salvador held a National Symposium on Women and the Constitution from the 16 to 17 October 2008. The meeting provided feminist reflections on the legal legacy of the Brazilian feminist movement’s political lobby – also known as the ‘lipstick lobby’, twenty years after it was originally formed. The meeting was supported by the National Secretariat for Women’s Policies. …

Cairo has been blessed by an effervescence of protest and openness since Hosni Mubarak resigned and on 8 March 2011 a variety of demonstrations took place in the city. March 8 also marked the centenary of International Women’s Day, but sadly, despite the new optimism for reform since the revolution, the women’s peaceful commemoration of the day was the only group which was attacked, ridiculed, shouted down and chased from the square. …

This morning I ran into some of my oldest friends. We chatted as old friends do, hugged, commented on new looks, graying hair, weight gained and lost as friends always do. We met on the steps of Egypt’s State Council (Majgis el Dawla)*; a grand building in a very busy part of greater Cairo. Upon these steps stood a hundred or so men and women who, like myself, had been alerted by text and e-mail messages to the decision by feminist advocacy groups to stage a protest against the near unanimous decision taken by the general assembly of the highest level of state council judges to ban women from entering the administrative judiciary as judges. …