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The international women's movement has always focused on discrimination against women, but only in the past few decades have activists been focusing on violence against women, and within this framework, domestic violence. Global feminist activism found common ground in protecting women from physical, sexual, and emotional abuse. This framework traveled to Eastern Europe with the advent of regime changes there. In post-communist Europe, it took only a decade and a half for the Polish, Czech, Slovak, Hungarian, and Slovene governments to react to domestic and global pressures and establish new definitions and policies regarding domestic violence. However, the feminist NGOs’ definitions and policy recommendations met with limited success. Feminist-inspired norms, such as specific domestic violence courts and distancing ordinances, diffused to a mediocre level of half-hearted official responses in Central and Eastern Europe (CEE). This middle-of-the-road approach attempted to de-gender and thus to de-politicize feminists’ fundamental gender-sensitive claims. A norm diffusion to reach the middle ground took place through a complex set of interactions that involved various types of political actors ranging from international governmental organizations, such as the UN and the EU, governments, international and local NGOs. Analyzing the process of these multiple-level and manifold interactions sheds light on the partially deterritorialized nature of globalization. The development of norms and their difffnousion regarding domestic violence policy also inform us about how democratic processes, efforts to achieve gender equality, and the global context interact in CEE.

The discourse of the “poor oppressed other woman” has been reinvigorated by the conservative turn in international politics. Thus, the Bush administration's deployment of her to justify the war in Afghanistan has been roundly criticized by feminist theorists (Braidotti, 2005; Youngs, 2006, p. 9). In this light, this chapter's criticism of another figure of “the third world woman”, the apparently more positive “super heroine” of women's liberation (see Ram, 1991) or worthy recipient of development might seem churlish and misplaced. However, the super heroine of development is also constrained by and assimilated within the dominant discourses of emancipation and development (as Mohanty, 1991, so famously argued): women are “objectified as beneficiaries and victims” (Youngs, 2006, p. 9).

African feminist scholars and activists have made major contributions to our understanding of gender-based violence. This is especially the case in southern Africa, which has a long history of high rates of violence against women and girls. Their rates of gender-based violence are among the very highest in the world. While there are many forms of gender-based violence, this chapter will explore the important contributions of African gender scholars and activists to our knowledge concerning domestic violence and rape. These issues will be interrogated using Zimbabwe and South Africa as case studies, with some reference to Namibia. In the region, domestic violence and sexual assault have deeply rooted structural explanations linked to the long history of colonialism, apartheid and white minority rule, political transition, economic crises and adjustment, changes in expected gender roles and the HIV/AIDS pandemic. In the past 25 years, Zimbabwe and South Africa attempted to address violence against women through the development of laws as well as the creation of non-governmental organizations. Although these important efforts have not resulted in a major decrease in violence against women, they clearly demonstrate the long history of African women’s actions in resisting state power and patriarchy. African women as citizens, scholars and activists are responsible for bringing to the fore the critical importance of reducing gender-based violence in order to establish strong, just and sustainable societies in southern Africa.

We consider Brazilian society as a case and evidence for a noteworthy transformation — albeit not unique to Brazil — toward gender equality that has resulted from an evolving interplay of transforming gender relations and women’s participation in feminist as well as in a wide range of other organizations and social movements, enabled by national as well as global contexts. We claim that the transformations of gender and feminisms in Brazil in the last four decades have been intertwined and closely linked to changes in socio-economic structures and political regimes. Gender equality processes advancing institutional, economic, social, and cultural changes have unequivocally resulted from women’s active role in the social and political movements engaged in fighting the military regime in the 1970s, in the transition to democracy in the 1980s (which we call the second wave), and in the democratization of the country in the 1990s (the third wave), as well as from the ongoing processes of growing institutionalization and policymaking (the fourth wave). Throughout the last four decades, feminism has increasingly spread horizontally, creating “horizontal fluxes of feminism,” or, in other words, a perspective that highlights the continuity of gender discrimination, but goes beyond that to equally value the principle of non-discrimination based on race, ethnicity, generation, nationality, class or religion, among others. In fact, we argue that this is a case of increasingly “intersectional feminism.”

The annual sessions of the United Nations Commission on the Status of Women offer many opportunities for feminist social change despite challenges of access and space. Commission sessions focus on producing an outcome document, the Agreed Conclusions, that sets global norms for governmental behavior toward women and girls. Feminist advocates can influence the norms-setting process through written and oral statements, side events, briefings, and direct communications with UN member states. In addition to official meetings that are open to non-governmental organizations with accreditation to the United Nations, a parallel conference of events takes place that is open to all. The parallel conference allows feminist advocates to raise issues such as violence against women, make connections to understand the dynamics of gender inequality, promote feminist language, and learn to use UN tools to advance the well-being of women and girls. In the ferment of discussion and interaction, a global feminist collective consciousness is formed, nurtured, and promulgated. This paper will discuss the feminist origins of the UN Commission on the Status of Women, practices of Commission sessions, and limitations to non-governmental participation in the Commission negotiating process. It will offer suggestions for a more democratic United Nations that opens up sessions to feminist advocates and expands space available for Commission and non-governmental events.

In this chapter, we examine the multifaceted challenges that feminist labor organizations face in decommodifying the lives and labor of poor and working-class women. Using an in-depth case study of domestic worker organizing in South Korea, we find that non-governmental organizations (NGOs) such as the National House Managers Cooperative and the Korean Women Workers Association became entangled in hegemonic state projects that linked support for women’s basic livelihoods to the proliferation of part-time, informal domestic work in the context of widespread crises. To challenge the discriminatory and market-driven logics of state-driven social protection efforts, these NGOs have advanced an emancipatory agenda to improve the working conditions, labor rights, and social dignity of domestic workers through consciousness-raising grassroots organizing methods and contentious policy advocacy campaigns. Their social movement transformation goals, however, have been constrained by the relative organizational isolation and limited organizational capacity of feminist labor NGOs in a broader context of neoliberal precaritization and gender-stratified labor markets. The myriad dilemmas facing domestic worker organizing in an era of global hegemonic market rule highlight the need to develop new political imaginaries to contest gender and economic injustice.

The international women's movement has always focused on discrimination against women, but only in the past few decades have activists paid special attention to domestic violence. In post-communist Europe, it took even longer but the Polish, Czech, Slovak, Hungarian, and Slovene governments eventually reacted to domestic and global pressure and established new definitions and norms dealing with domestic violence. Analyzing the process of norm development on domestic violence in Central Europe can direct us toward determining to what extent political and economic processes and decisions in Europe are driving globalization, or are being driven by globalization.

As triumphantly announced in journals and magazines, a la Fukuyama, late capitalism and its contingent logic of neoliberalism (ostensibly) reigns supreme, exploiting each site it encounters with precision. According to this fantasy of capitalism's seamless and ultimate triumph, domination is produced as inevitable, social struggle and revolution, a utopian dream. Yet, what many have seen since the 1990s is that this narrative requires military mobilizations of different kinds (i.e., “the war on terror” has become of late the reason thousands are being killed daily in Afghanistan and Iraq).

Three main claims have generally been made regarding the beneficial impact of increased global integration on local women's movements. First, increased global integration is said to create opportunities for local movements to participate in international conferences and partnerships with international organizations (Gray, Kittilson, & Sandholtz, 2006; Sassen, 1998, pp. 96–97). Second, it is said to help local movements participate in transnational networks that work together on global issues such as trafficking or domestic violence and are able to exert pressure both on transnational organizations such as the UN and the European Union and on national states to adopt policies that support norms of equality for women (Keck & Sikkink, 1998; Moghadam, 2000). Third, it is argued that both these forms of cross-border contact create opportunities for learning feminist framing strategies that focus on gender equality and freedom of choice and are superior to local forms of activism that are organized around motherhood or “parochial” identities (Sassen, 1998).