Book review: The Struggle for Freedom from Fear: Contesting Violence Against Women at the Frontiers of Globalization

Abstract

Book review of: Alison Brysk, The Struggle for Freedom from Fear: Contesting Violence Against Women at the Frontiers of Globalization. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2018, 386pp. ISBN 9780190901516386 (hardcover). In The Struggle for Freedom from Fear: Contesting Violence Against Women at the Frontiers of Globalization, Alison Brysk presents a vast and thorough examination of the prevalence, patterns, and drivers of violence against women throughout the world. She accomplishes this through an analysis of international and national treaties and legal reforms, public policy, social justice campaigns, and norm changes across a variety of rapidly globalizing countries. Framing violence against women as a 'gendered form of human rights abuse' (p. 27), Brysk's goal is to 'map pathways of response' to this violence for countries that fall into what Brysk labels 'semi-liberal gender regimes' (p. 6), in order to better understand how to reduce and prevent gendered violence and other human rights abuses. The book is largely successful in this ambitious endeavor. [...]