Introduction
Saskia Brechenmacher, Erin Jones, and Özge Zihnioğlu
The world is beset by what analysts frequently call a democratic recession, marked by democratic erosion in old and new democracies in every region of the world. Yet against this troubling backdrop, people all over are pushing back against authoritarian practices. Their resistance often has taken the form of large-scale, sustained protests against stolen elections, repression by security forces, and moves by incumbent leaders to undermine democratic institutions—whether in Belarus, Brazil, Iran, Myanmar, Poland, or elsewhere. New civil society initiatives have formed to defeat autocratic leaders at the polls and prevent illiberal restrictions on citizens’ basic rights.
Women have been at the forefront of these prodemocratic movements in many countries. Millions of women mobilized against President Donald Trump in the United States in 2017 and against President Jair Bolsonaro in Brazil in 2018, viewing these leaders as dual threats to both women’s rights and their countries’ democracy. In Poland, women took to the streets during the COVID-19 pandemic to protest the ruling Law and Justice Party, their activism catalyzed by the government’s aggressive rollback of reproductive rights. In Belarus and Myanmar, women have spearheaded nonviolent civil resistance movements against authoritarian power grabs, mobilizing at great risk to their safety. Women in India, Iran, and Sudan similarly have fronted mass protests against antidemocratic and exclusionary regimes.
This pattern is striking, particularly given women’s global underrepresentation in electoral politics and leadership. Yet so far, women’s prodemocratic movements have received limited analytic and policy attention. The bulk of existing analysis on democratic erosion has focused on diagnosing the problem and illuminating its varied symptoms and causes. Less common have been efforts to chart responses, whether by citizens within backsliding countries or by interested international actors. And within that domain, cross-country analysis of women’s agency and roles in mobilizing against democratic erosion has been noticeably absent. Although scholars have documented women’s involvement in past movements against military and communist dictatorships, studies of the current moment of democratic decline and resistance often have been gender-blind.1
Yet the power of women’s political mobilization has not gone unnoticed by autocratic and illiberal leaders. In recent years, several autocratic and far-right populist governments have cracked down ferociously on women’s activism and doubled down on conservative gender hierarchies. These leaders have framed progressive gender norms as a radical ideology that destroys traditional families and cultural traditions.2 Others have sought to co-opt women’s movements by bringing them into state-controlled channels and implementing top-down women’s rights reforms.3
To help address the lack of analysis on this topic, this compilation examines women’s diverse roles in and influence on popular movements against democratic erosion around the world. It asks why women mobilize for democracy and how they do so, and assesses whether their participation—as individual activists and leaders or as part of organizations—shapes the goals, tactics, and coalitions of democratic resistance. It further analyzes how autocratic and backsliding regimes and their allies in civil society have responded to women’s mobilization for democracy.
The compilation does not assume that women are a homogenous group. Nor does it seek to portray them as inherently democratic actors. Instead, it aims to shed light on the various factors driving women to mobilize for democracy and the diverse priorities and perspectives they bring into broader antiauthoritarian movements. Several case studies also emphasize women’s roles in illiberal or antidemocratic regimes and networks; all of them highlight how women’s cross-cutting political, ethnic, and religious identities structure their political engagement. This diversity underscores the need for a more nuanced understanding of women’s political roles during periods of democratic erosion.
Mobilization for Democracy vs. Gender Equality
Our focus on women’s agency raises the question of how we conceptualize the relationship between women’s prodemocratic mobilization and their activism for gender equality. In this compilation, we define prodemocracy movements or prodemocracy mobilization as citizen action to resist—or remove from office—leaders and parties that seek to entrench themselves in power, weaken checks and balances on the executive, and shut down avenues for political participation and dissent. This form of activism typically is aimed at defending civil rights and liberties, free and fair elections, and the rule of law.
Mobilization for gender equality, by contrast, encompasses a broader set of objectives that extend far beyond the political realm. For more than a century, women around the world have advocated for equal rights and against gender-based violence and discrimination, in both democratic and nondemocratic nations. They have challenged and, in some cases, dismantled the barriers that impede their full participation in society, in areas including education, religious institutions, family law, employment, and politics.
These two forms of mobilization often intersect. The struggle for women’s suffrage in the nineteenth and first half of the twentieth century, for instance, sought to advance gender equality while also deepening democracy. Women’s push for political representation similarly seeks to realize democratic principles of equal rights and participation. Yet in some cases, women’s rights activists have distanced themselves purposefully from struggles for democracy to maintain space for action and reform even in restrictive political settings. Some movements for democratic change, moreover, have not prioritized women’s rights and inclusion or have treated gender equality issues as discrete policy struggles. We therefore argue that it is useful to keep women’s mobilization for gender equality and their activism for democracy analytically separate and examine how they are related in different countries.
Overview of the Compilation
Within the wide and growing domain of women’s prodemocracy mobilization, this compilation focuses on nine case studies that span multiple regions. It covers countries at various stages of democratic backsliding.
Within the realm of troubled but still politically competitive democracies, Marisa von Bülow traces women’s roles in resisting Bolsonaro’s presidency in Brazil and highlights the challenge of centering women’s voices once the most overt threats to democracy have been overcome. Also in the Americas, Saskia Brechenmacher and Erin Jones detail women’s mobilization against Trump as well as broader threats to democracy in the United States and assess how escalating attacks on reproductive rights are influencing the U.S. prodemocracy movement. In Central and Eastern Europe, Paweł Marczewski contrasts Polish women’s mass protests against the Law and Justice Party’s attacks on reproductive rights with women’s more limited antigovernment mobilization in Hungary.
Three additional contributions focus on countries further down the path of democratic erosion. Vijayan MJ examines how women-led movements for social, economic, and environmental justice are revitalizing the progressive resistance against Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s Hindu majoritarian agenda in India. Özge Zihnioğlu probes the recent uptick in Turkish women’s mobilization against President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s government and its conservative gender policies. She outlines the effects of their activism on Turkish opposition parties as well as the persistent limits of women’s political influence. Houda Mzioudet, by contrast, explores how Black Tunisian women have challenged entrenched racial and socioeconomic hierarchies in Tunisian society following the country’s fragile democratic opening—and describes how their activism has been met with increasing illiberal backlash since President Kais Saied’s ascent to power in 2019.
Finally, three authors examine fully autocratic regimes where citizens are nevertheless resisting exclusionary governance. Katsiaryna Shmatsina analyzes women’s prominent roles in the 2020 postelection protests in Belarus and their continuous leadership in the exiled opposition, despite the regime’s brutal crackdown. Tharaphi Than details the diversification of women’s activism after the 2021 military coup in Myanmar, where some women have joined the armed resistance and others contest the military dictatorship using nonviolent means. Finally, drawing on her own experience running for parliament in Zimbabwe, Maureen Kademaunga reflects on the emergence of a new generation of female democracy activists in the country and their relationship to established women’s rights and democracy movements.
The case studies affirm women’s pivotal roles in democratic resistance movements around the world. Particularly in countries where illiberal or autocratic leaders have attacked women’s rights and embraced deeply conservative gender norms, women have spearheaded mass protests that have energized broader antiauthoritarian coalitions, even if they did not immediately achieve their political aims. Democratic erosion also has pushed some women’s rights organizations to become more involved in prodemocracy activism, giving rise to new cross-issue alliances. In addition, women in several countries have used their voting power to help defeat backsliding governments and have successfully diversified the candidates running for and elected to political office.
The compilation also highlights how women are reshaping prodemocracy movements through their advocacy priorities, tactics, and broader political vision. Across different countries, women’s participation “on the front lines” has challenged traditional gender norms and placed gendered concerns higher on the opposition agenda. However, the extent to which women democracy activists have emphasized gender equality issues has varied, as has the responsiveness of typically male-dominated opposition parties.
Beyond gender equality, however, women’s political advocacy has often emphasized substantive equality and democratic inclusion. Women—and especially minority women—have linked their struggle for democracy to other movements for economic justice, minority rights, antiracism, gender equality, and environmental protection, rather than embracing a narrower, procedural understanding of democracy. In several countries, women’s groups and leaders have emphasized the need to model inclusionary practices within prodemocracy movements and protests.
Their varied forms of activism inevitably have triggered backlash, ranging from state repression and state-sponsored countermobilization to more diffuse threats and harassment from extremist nonstate actors. Women have not only confronted the overall closing of civic and political space; they have also had to contend with targeted, gendered threats and abuse as well as patriarchal norms within their own political coalitions. The chapters in this compilation thus tell a story of women’s grassroots mobilization power and their resilience in the face of significant adversity and violence.
The Carnegie Endowment thanks the Charles Stewart Mott Foundation and the Ford Foundation for generous support that helps make the work of the Civic Research Network possible. The views expressed in this publication are the responsibility of the authors alone.
Notes
1 See, for example, Lisa Baldez, Why Women Protest: Women’s Movements in Chile (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2010); Sonia E. Alvarez, Engendering Democracy in Brazil: Women’s Movements and Transition Politics (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1991); and Georgina Waylen, Engendering Transitions: Women’s Mobilization, Institutions, and Gender Outcomes (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007).
2 Emil Edenborg, “Anti-Gender Politics as Discourse Coalitions: Russia’s Domestic and International Promotion of “Traditional Values,” Problems of Post-Communism 70, no. 2 (2023): 175–84, https://doi.org/10.1080/10758216.2021.1987269; and Alexandra Stevenson, “China’s Male Leaders Signal to Women That Their Place Is in the Home,” New York Times, November 2, 2023, https://www.nytimes.com/2023/11/02/world/asia/china-communist-party-xi-women.html.
3 Daniela Donno, “Autocratic Backsliding in ‘Gender-Washing’ Regimes,” The Loop (blog), European Consortium for Political Research, June 7, 2023, https://theloop.ecpr.eu/autocratic-backsliding-in-gender-washing-regimes.