State feminism, global feminist waves and democratic backsliding: global and cross-national perspectives

Global waves of activism are powerful social forces shaping - and shaped by- policy and politics worldwide. Such waves are constituted not by a single movement or campaign but rather comprise national, local and transnational organizations and networks of activists. We lack the conceptual underpinnings necessary to fully capture the impact of such a diffuse and complex phenomenon. This prevents scholars from fully grasping the ways that waves shape and are shaped by national and transnational campaigns and their interactions, the ways that core ideas become embedded in national and international institutions, and the ways that core ideas develop and change. In this paper, we propose understanding global feminism as a global wave as a way to develop some insight into these processes.We elaborate this concept and give a brief overview of the development of the global feminist wave, showing the ways that transnational networks serve as mechanisms for linking activists to global governance and also to activists in other countries, strengthening global civil society. These organizational forms contribute to the development of global feminism, a set of ideas that motivate action and become embedded in an evolving set of international norms. Though global feminism is sometimes associated with a particular set of ideas from second wave feminism of the 1960s and 70s, we argue that it has its roots in the abolitionist and suffrage movements of the late 1800s.The roots of global feminism in the struggles of racialized and colonized women illuminates its potential as a source for gender justice today.We sketch the way that the global feminist wave interacts with different kinds of regimes, showing how domestic regimes and global norms evolve together focussing on the issue of gender-based violence against women. We suggest that different regime types channel waves differently, with neoliberal regimes paradoxically producing more openness to global waves while social democratic regimes- particularly those with weak civil society- channel waves through established institutional channels. A stronger connection to global civil could advance gender justice for intersectionally-marginalized women. We illustrate this argument with a brief application to Canada.

In this introductory essay to the special issue of Law & Policy, “Global Perspectives on Judicial Politics and Democratic Backsliding,” we critically examine the paradoxical role of courts during episodes of democratic backsliding. Despite operating without direct democratic accountability—relying instead on legal precedents and doctrinal interpretations—courts are pivotal in defending democratic integrity during episodes of backsliding. This issue, featuring 10 articles by 15 scholars, offers a comprehensive and nuanced analysis of judicial politics of autocratization. Half of the articles deal directly with the U.S. judiciary, highlighting its unique standing that allows it to both enable and resist democratic backsliding. The other half of the issue explores case studies from Europe, Southeast Asia, and Latin America, highlighting a great deal of variability of tactics, approaches and outcomes. Published during a critical electoral year in 2024, this collection emphasizes the need for ongoing research into the judiciaries' dual capacity to both safeguard and undermine democratic norms.

Indonesia's digital sphere is increasingly shaped by a convergence of moral governance, algorithmic control, and populist nationalism. While formally democratic, the state now governs online life through soft authoritarian practices that are moralised and normalised. This commentary examines how digital moralism grounded in Pancasila ideology underpins laws like the Electronic Information and Transactions Law, the draft Broadcasting Bill, and recent practices of removing online content. Rather than employing explicit censorship, these laws invoke religious values, national heritage, and social solidarity in defence of digital regulation. Buzzers reinforce this moral frame by portraying dissent as a threat to public virtue. In contrast to coercive models seen in China or Russia, Indonesia's approach builds legitimacy through culturally embedded narratives of protection and decency. By unpacking Indonesia's model of digital piety, this commentary offers a Global South perspective on how democratic backsliding can unfold through values-based governance, making repression appear lawful, familiar, and even morally justified.

By the end of the second decade of the twenty-first century, populists have taken charge in Turkey, India and Israel, all previously heralded as exceptional democracies in difficult regions. This moment offers a unique opportunity to explore populism in power outside Europe and the Americas, in three states shaped by deep social, ethnic and religious divisions. This article locates Turkey, India and Israel within a global wave of electorally successful populist movements. It explores how populism can jeopardize democratic choice in deeply divided societies and whether Erdoğan’s capture of democracy in Turkey offers a blueprint for the political strategies employed by Modi and Netanyahu. In unravelling parallels between the three administrations, our analysis uncovers a common populist playbook of neoliberal economic policies, the leveraging of ethnoreligious tensions as well as attempts to denigrate independent news media, by portraying it as the “enemy of the people”. Although their position on the spectrum between democracy and authoritarianism differs, our analysis reveals striking continuities in the erosion of democracy in Turkey, India and Israel as a result of these policies, thus highlighting the vulnerability of political systems, particularly those of deeply divided societies, to democratic decay.

While immigrants are still predominantly choosing urban areas to locate to, there is now increasing evidence of immigration to rural areas which poses its own challenges for those relocating, from the scarcity of high quality jobs to the provision of public and private services. Addressing the shortcomings in current research, this book employs an innovative approach by exploring this relationship from a cross-national, comparative, global perspective. It draws lessons from case studies across a range of geographical and political contexts, including Canada, the USA, Ireland, Scotland, Greece and Russia. Bringing together migration experts from a range of academic disciplines, International Migration and Rural Areas contributes to conceptual developments and also identifies policy concerns which can be pursued at national, sub-national and supra-national levels. As such, it will appeal to policy makers, as well as scholars across a range of disciplines, including geography, politics, demography, social policy, sociology and anthropology.

The introduction to the special issue Socialist Women in the East-South Interaction of the Global Sixties provides an overview of the four featured contributions and situates them within a larger historical context of feminist exchange between Eastern Europe and the Global South. The goal of the special issue is to recover the rich, yet overlooked, history of left feminist networks that developed during the Cold War – proceeding and in many ways anticipating - the rise of second wave feminism in the West and its transnational endeavors. It highlights the important connections between the movements of the Global Sixties and the earlier leftist, antifascist, and anticolonial struggles. These East-South feminist interactions took many forms, from formal conferences to the transnational circulation of discourses and imaginaries of women’s emancipation and anticolonial solidarity across Cold War borders. These different encounters contributed to shaping the era’s visions of gender equality and anticolonial transnational solidarity. Challenging the conventional views of Eastern European women’s organizations as mere representatives of “state feminism,” the Introduction underlines the importance of recognizing women’s agency, including under authoritarian regimes, and calls for a redefinition of both Second and Third World feminists as key actors forging new understandings of women’s rights and advancing the international commitment to gender equality and anticolonialism.

Amidst a global wave of democratic regression, civil society has often been the last line of defence against campaigns to undermine liberal rights and freedoms. In many cases, society activists have been able to mitigate, or even arrest, anti-democratic initiatives launched by political elites with a host of vested interests. But some countries have recently seen a weakening of this democracy defence potential embedded in civil society. Using Indonesia – the world's third largest democracy – as a case study, this article shows how escalating polarization can split civil society along primordial and ideological lines, eroding its ability to offer a united pro-democracy front. In the Indonesian case, the executive also used this polarization to justify increasingly illiberal measures. In combination, polarization and increased executive illiberalism have reduced Indonesian civil society's activist resources, accelerating the country's democratic backsliding in the process.

Information pollution poses a significant threat to democracy worldwide, and Mexico provides a critical case study of this growing problem. This study presents and applies a holistic analytical framework to detect the enabling and driving factors of information pollution, investigating its impact on democratic quality during the administration of Andrés Manuel López Obrador (2018–2024). Drawing on 20 expert interviews, findings reveal that structural socio-economic inequalities, weak institutional transparency, and media concentration indirectly enabled information pollution, while divisive populist rhetoric and a post-factual political style directly drove its rise. These dynamics contributed to affective polarisation, eroded trust in democratic institutions, and reduced press freedom. The study concludes that combating information pollution requires legal reforms, media literacy initiatives, and enhanced transparency. By focusing on a non-English speaking, deficient democracy, the study broadens the empirical base of understanding disinformation’s role in the global wave of autocratisation.

Jason Brownlee and Kenny Miao deftly question widespread views about the connections between democratic backsliding, democratic breakdown, and a global wave of autocratization. This brief response highlights the practical political questions that emerge from their findings and from the structural arguments they use to justify their relatively positive forecasts. The questions involve: backsliding's breadth, location, and assessment; backsliding's connections with the military; how recent changes in capitalism and party competition affect democratic resilience and, most important, why democracy's defenders succeed or fail. Tracing and naming trends is useful, but the comparative study of how individual countries resist or reverse backsliding is essential.

This is a book that sheds light on social work education and its development in 42 countries across the globe. The book documents the status of social work education and examines context-specific challenges faced by the profession in both developed and developing economies. This book, which targets social work educators in an international context, aims at developing a global perspective in social work education and collaboration in teaching and research. It is written at a time when social work education across the globe is in transition and facing several challenges such as professionalism, accreditation, curriculum content, sharp focus, and field education. It provides cross-national perspectives on how the challenges faced by social work education are addressed in countries across the globe. In doing so, we intend to bring international social work educators together to learn from each other and to develop some standard ways in which to address specific social work education challenges.

July/August 2004 · Historically Speaking promisingnewinsights, particularlysince differentregional studies still applyrather divergentmethodologies to related historical phenomena . For example, historians ofEurope and East Asia tend to apply different sets of questions to 20th-centurytransformations of political cultures in bothworld regions. However , both in Europe and East Asia certain developments such as the advent of mass media, mass mobilization, and political radicalism were indeed related to similar structural transformations and influences. A methodological synthesis can thus produce more than a coherent frameworkfor a global analysis—it can lead to cross-fertilizations between area-specific research approaches. But there is a price to payfor experiments with genuine group research. For example, there is the question of historical narrative and especially the problem ofauthorship. A derivative issue, which may even be of central concern for younger scholars who have notyet established themselves, is that the academic reward system does nottrulyacknowledge collective efforts. In that way, coauthored publications can only remain a byproduct ofsome personal research project. But even strictly personal research projects can aim atsketchingoutglobal constellations byfocusing on two or three regions as probes of a wider constellation. In other words, a small number of national or cultural cases could be studied making use of primary source material and then related to other regional experiences, forwhich the historian would necessarily have to rely on secondary literature. Such studies could provide an important bridge between the disparate disciplines ofhistorical comparison and the historiography ofintercultural relations, transfers , or encounters. Theyembed the detailed analysis of a limited number of cases into a larger, global perspective. Certainly the study of global processes blurs previouslyestablished academic boundaries , and many projects with a global scope will be interdisciplinary in nature. However, different academic fields are likely to retain some aspects of their disciplinary cultures, and historiographycan certainlyadd its own elements to the rapidly expanding study of global flows and structures in the widest sense. Historiographycan contribute a narrative tradition, which tends to be filled with less academic jargon than the literature of other fields and is less captive to rigid theoretical frameworks. And it can provide meticulous source work and an appreciation oflocal details, which are essential for understanding global dynamics and constellations in their full complexity. Dominic Sachsenmaier is assistantprofessor ofglobalhistory in the GlobalandInternationalStudiesprogram at the University of California, Santa Barbara. He is a member ofthe New GlobalHistory Initiative basedat HarvardandM.I.T. Hisaward-winning Ph.D. thesis, Die Aufnahme europäischer Inhalte in die chinesische Kultur durch Zhu Zongyuan (Institute Monumenta Serica , 2001), waspublished in Germany. He is abo the main editor o/Reflections on Multiple Modernities: European, Chinese, and Other Perspectives (Brill, 2002). Globalization and World History Robbie Robertson Globalization is often regarded as a very modern condition. It is not. Humans have experienced at least threeverydistinctwaves ofglobalization during the last five centuries. These waves have each transformed the context in which humans live, and the ways that humans view themselves and theirworld. In particular, they have made possible the developmentofglobal consciousness. Itis likely that human futures will be increasingly linked to the evolution ofglobal perspectives and their applications. Understanding Globalization Traditionally, historians have not engaged in debates on globalization as much as academics in other disciplines. This has been unfortunate . The lack ofhistorical depth in many studies on globalization weakens their claims to validity and limits our understanding of globalization. Ifwe are to strengthen global awareness, we must contextualize globalization historically. To contextualize globalizationhistorically is not an easymatterbecause we are still captive toways ofthinkingthatderived from earlier responses to globalization. These earlier responses stressed nationalism and the role ofthe state in national development. In addition , perspectives developed bytransnational entities increasingly now monopolize our views on globalization. Theystress that globalization is veryrecent (a result oftheir activities ) and economicallydriven. Historical perspectives , however, enable moreinclusive and richer meanings ofglobalization. In my recent book, The Three Waves of Globalization, I describe globalization as the outcome of human interconnections. Human-interconnections-as-globaUzationis a very different beast from its corporate brand. This globalization is about human empowerment and democratization, a focus that for the historian can rescue the human story from the parochialisms ofthe past and provide glimpses ofhumanity's common history and shared interests. World history can have no greater goal...

Policy and Implementation in the Processes of China’s Higher Education Development and De-Sovietization: Reflections from Global, Cross-National, and Institutional Perspectives

476 Feminist Studies 41, no. 2. © 2015 by Feminist Studies, Inc. Wang Zheng Detention of the Feminist Five in China On March 6 this year, just before International Women’s Day, the Chinese police in Beijing arrested five young women who had engaged in activism to protest sexual harassment on public transportation. The month-long detention of these five young feminists has changed the landscape of Chinese feminism. The global feminist mobilization that emerged to appeal for their release also presents a fascinating example of a successful feminist response to authoritarianism. In this short piece, I open with a few personal snapshots to briefly illustrate the history of Chinese feminist engagement with sexist sexual norms. Next, I will situate the five young feminists’ actions within this historical context in order to illustrate significant changes in Chinese feminist practices as well as in Chinese society. Finally, I will discuss the political implications of the detention of the so-called Feminist Five as well as the global mobilization for their release. In 1985 I came from Shanghai to study US history at the University of California, Davis. I made quite a few American friends in the graduate program. They were very curious about my life in China, and I was very proud of being a liberated woman from socialist China. I acted like an ambassador, talking to different groups about the great accomplishments of women’s liberation under socialism in China. As a young, urban woman I enjoyed equal education, equal employment, equal pay, and equal opportunity for promotion. I had never experienced gender News and Views 477 inequality, I thought. One day I was telling my friends about how I once confronted a thief who had just snatched my wallet on a crowded bus in Shanghai and how I forced him to drop my wallet. My friends were very impressed: “Wow! You were so brave,” they said. A few days later, I happened to mention that on the same crowded Shanghai buses, men would frequently grope women, and my friend asked instantly, “How did you respond to them?” I replied without thinking, “What could I do? I just tried my best to move to another spot to avoid such rascals.” My friend then raised a question that shattered my self-perception as a brave and liberated woman: “Why did you dare to confront a thief but not a sexual harasser?” I answered, “Oh, I would be so ashamed if people around me noticed.” Immediately, I realized that my reply was highly problematic. That conversation set in motion a process of soul searching . Why would a liberated woman still continue to observe the patriarchal value of chastity? Why would women of my generation—the liberated Chinese women in socialist China—have no consciousness of the serious problems contained within these sexual norms? It was not only a personal reflection. From this point, I embarked on a long review and contemplation of women’s liberation in socialist China. I realized that in the realm of sexuality, while state feminists were able to transform the sexual double standard to a single standard for the general public (although some top male leaders continue double standards and engage in extramarital sexual relationships without being punished), puritanical sexual morality did not shake deeply entrenched masculinist cultural values of women’s chastity and virginity. As a result, a liberated woman such as myself could internalize such sexist values with no consciousness , let alone action, focused on changing such sexist culture. In 1992, I attended a conference by the Shanghai Women’s Federation . When a US feminist scholar asked if there were any cases of sexual harassment in China, the Chinese women participants all replied, “No, no, we don’t have sexual harassment.” I stood up and named things that happened to women every day on Shanghai buses as sexual harassment. By then I had long been empowered by my study of feminist history and theories. In 1995, at the NGO forum at the Fourth UN Conference on Women held in Beijing, feminists from inside and outside China openly challenged pervasive sexist sexual norms. Sexual violence and sexual harassment were clearly defined as violations of women’s human rights...

Feminist activism in the Middle East has spanned a century of engagement by women, sometimes men, and increasingly trans and non-binary people in projects of social and legal change. The dialogical relationship between these movements and other social movements in each historical period is evident. This chapter analyzes these efforts utilizing the concept of waves to chronicle the genealogy from the late nineteenth century to the present. The feminist waves of the Middle East have had distinctive characteristics that responded to or interacted with particular historical developments. The four waves can be categorized under these large headings: “Beginnings of the Feminist Consciousness” from the late 1800s to the early 1930s; “Feminism in the Public Sphere” as countries struggled for independence and began to form states; “Legal, Civic, and State Feminism” as feminists worked for legal change and built solidarity globally; and finally “Radical Intersectional Feminism: The Body Again,” spanning the first two decades of the twenty-first century.

Globalization has significantly reshaped economic landscapes worldwide, with e-commerce emerging as a critical driver of value creation, particularly in developing economies. The economies of scale that emerge as a result of globalization are meant to encourage sustainable development and value creation like employment. Unfortunately, there tends to be a gap in the waves of globalization and e-commerce transactions in Nigeria due to many factors and the acquaintance of Nigerians with the traditional offline market. This paper aims to explore the impact of globalization on E-commerce in Nigeria as a strategy for sustainable value creation. Through the review of the relevant kinds of literature and empirical data, the study highlights how Nigerian e-commerce platforms have leveraged global networks to enhance product offerings, optimize supply chains, and expand market reach. The study made use of some excerpts of the theory of post-colonial states to buttress the challenges of adoption and implementation of new technologies as faced by the developing nations in their quest to embrace globalization. The findings underscore the importance of embracing globalization while addressing the unique challenges faced by the Nigerian e-commerce industry to ensure sustainable value creation thereby enhancing wider reach, higher transaction rates, bigger profits, and sustainability. Amongst other recommendations, the study projects the need to indigenous technology development that will take cognizance of traditional commerce and blend it into e-commerce to create sustainable value creations in logistics and communication. The paper concludes by discussing the potential of e-commerce as a tool for economic development in Nigeria, emphasizing the need for strategic policies that support local innovation and global competitiveness. It also inferred that E-commerce has the potential to open up vistas of opportunities in the traditional open markets when used strategically.