Women’s struggles across the world have sought to redistribute power to achieve equality between women and men. Many of these have seen some real and hard-won successes. These gains have ranged from changing the discourse around feminist demands and the quest for equality, to changes in laws, policies, and implementation. They have also included changes in social norms that have shifted how different genders engage with each other, and enabled women to claim (or re-claim) more public space, both physical and virtual.

A more subtle yet quite explicit form of backlash is the vilification and stigmatisation of women activists, and their words and actions.

However, backlash against feminist gains is also now a visible phenomenon around the world1, and especially in South Asia. Backlash is often a reaction against specific moments of gains by women – shifts in power have consequences2 3 – or it may be more structural.4 It may be a response to real changes in power dynamics between women and men, or it may even be a response to perceived changes, or even the threat of change. It is always, however, an attempt by men (and women) to re-assert and maintain patriarchal privileges and controls.

Backlash may be expressed in different ways and have various motivations (see this blog on how our various vocabularies for it in South Asia speak to the varieties of backlash). In its most extreme and recognisable form, backlash takes the form of violence or the threat of violence. This includes violent attacks on women’s rights activists; intimate partner violence; making explicit threats of violence (including sexual) against those active in public spaces; intimidating women, and creating a sense of insecurity and unsafe public and private spaces for women. A non-violent but equally aggressive and visible form of backlash is the passing of regressive laws and harmful administrative reforms that undermine women’s struggles, restrict women’s rights organisations and mobilisation strategies, and limit, if not outright reverse, progress towards equality. Laws that limit women’s political participation or make it tokenistic; limit decisionmaking spaces for women or put decisions that are pertinent to them in the hands of men; and the creation of womenunfriendly official procedures are all forms of backlash that limit women’s equal citizenship.

Part of the challenge of recognising and documenting backlash is that it is very often expressed in less obvious forms than these. A more subtle yet quite explicit form of backlash is the vilification and stigmatisation of women activists, and their words and actions. Their behaviour may be depicted as inappropriate, unacceptable, pushing the bounds of social norms – all aimed at creating discourse around the ‘wrong’ type of woman compared to an idealised ‘good’ type that upholds social and religious values. Struggles may also be delegitimised in the process, leading to a lack of recognition of the group or the issue as being relevant to larger society or ‘other types’ of women. In yet more subtle forms, the agendas of women’s struggles may be co-opted, appropriated, and thus subverted by reactionary groups led by both men and women. Conservative groups may publicly support the same equality project as women activists and their allies, but with ‘tweaks’ made to make the agendas more palatable to social contexts. This is usually targeted at maintaining rather than changing the status quo. Vilification, delegitimisation, and co-option can be particularly powerful forms of backlash because they seek to polarise public discourse on gender equality.

The programme is studying 16 struggles in Bangladesh, India, Nepal and Pakistan.

Together with types of backlash, it is also important to understand the reasons for such backlash against women’s demands for equality. There is older literature that suggests that larger macro-economic, political, and social forces generate backlash against women’s advances.5 6 There is a need to update this literature to establish whether backlash has indeed intensified (or simply become more visible), and the particular current configurations of economic, political and social change that are producing it.

The variety and magnitude of current backlash can make the successes of feminist struggles look tenuous to both those inside and outside the struggles. It speaks to the very real contemporary challenge that women face of sustaining gains in the face of this backlash, and how they must collectivise and strategise to not just sustain what they have gained, but to push it further and gain newer ground. Observing, documenting, and allying with women’s struggles as they forge new paths in the face of backlash is an area of investigation that promises to help us understand what works in defending women’s rights, and what does not.

The interplay between these factors – from success and gains; to backlash; to strategies to counter backlash – defines the framework for an ongoing ESRC-funded programme we call SuPWR (mostly because it is about superwomen, but more formally because it spells Sustaining Power for Women’s Rights). The programme is studying 16 struggles in Bangladesh, India, Nepal and Pakistan. Watch this space for more as we address one of the greatest challenges of all times – ensuring equality between women and men.

Shandana Khan Mohmand is a Research Fellow at the Institute of Development Studies at the University of Sussex, where she leads its Governance research cluster and the IDS Pakistan Hub. Her main area of research is inequality and inclusive politics.