Enda Verde and Chandan Kumar write about how women are leading the resistance against the unconstitutional Citizenship Amendment Act in India. Enda Verde is a Ph.D. candidate working in both Europe and India. Chandan Kumar is a labor rights activist based in Pune, India, and part of a citizen’s movement against the Citizenship Amendment Act called “Hum Bharat Ke Log.”

Guest post by Allison Corkery and Ignacio Saiz of the Center for Economic and Social Rights Last month, to coincide with the annual Davos meeting, tens of thousands of people took to the streets as part of the Global Protest to #FightInequality. What are the implications for human rights advocates? Leading human rights figures are increasingly acknowledging the threat posed by inequality. But, for

Vanessa Daza Castillo is a young Colombian lawyer working as an environmental justice researcher at Dejusticia, a human rights think tank, and a fellow at the Climate and Environmental Justice Media program with FRIDA – The Young Feminist Fund in partnership with OpenGlobalRights. This piece was published as part of this partnership, by OpenGlobalRights. Social media and school striking are not the

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If you don’t receive ‘This Week in Africa’, check it out – it’s an amazing and wide-ranging round up of links put together by Jeff (American) and Phil (Zimbabwean) and hosted by the University of San Francisco. And their annual version is even better. Their 2019 summary is way too long for a blog, so I’ve cut it down by

Last week I went along to the launch of  People Power Under Attack 2019, the latest output of the Civicus Monitor project on the state of civil society organizations around the world. Afterwards, I picked the brains of two of the speakers, Dom Perera of Civicus, and Tonu Basu of Open Government Partnership. Here are a few of their insights

In a new Carnegie Endowment paper, “Defending Civic Space: Is The International Community Stuck?”, Saskia Brechenmacher and Thomas Carothers take stock of and argue for bolstering transnational efforts to push back against the global trend of closing space for civil society. During the past five years, the international aid community has woken up to the disturbing global trend of governments

As part of Power Shifts, I have started highlighting more grounded perspectives from activists, doers and thinkers around the world that speak to the question of ‘being a feminist in difficult places’. As a mini-series of sorts, I am hoping this conversation highlights how feminism, as well as backlashes against it – although diverse in both approach and outcome – ,

Save the Children’s José Manuel Roche has a book he wants you to read. So, it turns out that nowadays democracy seldom dies through violent coup d’état. More commonly (and insidiously), democracy slides gradually into authoritarianism. By the same token, democracy survives when democratic leaders fight for it. This is part of the main thesis behind the insightful book How

Lately, I’ve enjoyed learning about the development and status of women’s rights movements and the feminist agenda in the Balkan countries, which in many ways sit uncomfortably within geopolitical and developmental binaries like Global South/Global North, developed/developing. Here is a compilation of some stand-out contributions from four of the most prominent women’s rights activists in the Balkans.

I thought I’d enliven the summer by posting some of the top blog posts from this year’s students in my LSE class on ‘Advocacy, Campaigning and Grassroots activism‘. Their individual assignment was to design a campaign strategy for a cause close to their hearts, and write a blog about it. First up, Monica Moses on the plight of the sewer

This post first appeared on the Urgent Action Fund Africa site, under a Creative Commons License. Within women human rights activist circles, the recent rape and murder of Viktoria Marinova, journalist covering EU corruption, is all too familiar to circumstances surrounding the killing of Brazil’s Marielle Franco. And similar yet to the murder of Berta Caceres, a well-known environmental and human rights activist killed her