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This ongoing study has been carried out by NEIM since the 1980s, focusing on feminisms and women’s movements in Brazil. It is the study that underpins the Pathways Latin America programme, in that the feminist movement has set the stage for the specific struggles and campaigns examined in the other projects. Pathways Latin America's research has been conducted from a feminist perspective, sustaining a “liberating empowerment” approach and, as such, their primary focus is on collective action as a pathway of women’s empowerment. …

This project has identified and worked with feminist activists working within international development organisations that are shaping discourse and policy action – it explored their strategies and strengthened capacity to bring about change. …

This bulletin explores how religion has been used in an instrumental manner by global, local and national actors as a means of engaging with gender issues in Muslim communities. …

This research aimed at monitoring and evaluating progress made so far on the implementation of UN Resolution 1325. So far the efforts undertaken by various organisations at implementing the Resolution have been geared towards popularising, sensitising and building human and institutional capacity on the resolution, but not a critical assessment of the gap between policy formulation and programme implementation. …

This project concerned the significance and impact of official external financing for women’s organising at global, regional and national levels. It used participatory methods of critical reflection involving both donor staff and representatives of women’s rights organisations and networks in Bangladesh and Ghana as well as at regional and global levels. …

This bulletin is devoted to exploring what empowerment means in the everyday lives of women in different situations and circumstances. …

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 research examined the complexity of gendered subjectivity in the Gaza Strip and how it is reshaped in a contradictory manner in the context of livelihood crisis and insecurity caused by the full siege imposed on the Gaza Strip by the Israeli occupation and the international community. The research is unique because it attempted to deal with the reality of women’s everyday life and avoided any standardised framework of gender analysis. It focused on the contextualisation of the concept of women’s agency based on the narration of women’s stories and life experiences. …

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. …

This bulletin addresses a theme that mainstream development has persisently neglected: sexuality. Drawing on a workshop held at the Institute of Development Studies in 2005, it seeks to show why sexuality matters. It features papers from the workshop which provide diverse accounts of sexual rights conceptions, mobilisation, and new approaches to implementation. …

This project examined the discourses of empowerment used by specific actors, particularly in relation to understandings of women’s disempowerment, and explored the effects of these discourses on efforts to bring about gender equality. …

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. …

Representations of men as perpetrator and patriarch have profoundly shaped the terms of gender and development’s engagement with masculinities discourse and practice. Many of those working in the field have remained hesitant, tentative, often hostile to the notion that men might be potential allies in the struggle for gender justice. This work explores what role there should be for men in women's empowerment. …