ABSTRACT Contemporary scholarship on Russian war-induced migration often identifies migrants as middle class, marked by higher education, civic engagement, and modern liberal values – seen as signs of political agency and democratic potential. This article challenges that view through discourse analysis of interviews with Russian migrants, embedding a relational class subjectivity framework within a lens informed by Foucault’s biopolitics and Ong’s concept of flexible citizenship. The findings suggest that under Russia’s authoritarian neoliberal order, class distinctions are articulated through moralized and depoliticized differentiation. The middle class is symbolically reproduced via moral and cultural distancing from a perceived civilizational ‘Other’. Viewed through processes of internal orientalization aligned with global liberal norms, this dynamic constructs migrants as an imagined community detached from national belonging. These dynamics, shaped by the Soviet legacy and neoliberal biopolitical integration into global regimes, reflect broader post-socialist identity patterns and illuminate limits on middle-class political agency and democratic subjectivity.

ABSTRACT The consequences of climatic changes in mountain environments largely reshape human-environment interactions, differently impacting women. Recognising these disparities, gendered approaches to climate change have emerged as a perspective for promoting community-led sustainable development. This paper aims to provide an alternative to the prevailing dominant narrative of women as victims of climate change, but instead as solution-oriented change makers. It discusses the transformative nature of women-led initiatives that are driving regenerative farming. It focuses on the Garhwal Himalayas, specifically on Marrora Forest Farms. Thus, it promotes sustainable livelihoods, forest management, and combating climate change. It employs a qualitative approach, incorporating ethnographic fieldwork, in-depth interviews, and participant observations. A blended theoretical framework of Feminist Political Ecology and Community-Based Natural Resource Management provides a lens to understand gendered relations, socio-ecological change, and collective resource management. This paper illustrates the role of traditional ecological awareness and sustainable livelihoods. The findings contribute to broader discussions on the gender–climate nexus and nature-based solutions in mountains.

This article offers a historically grounded analysis of the evolution of feminism in India, tracing its trajectory from nineteenth-century social reform movements to the complex feminist politics of the present. Using historical analysis and thematic synthesis, we map how feminist concerns shifted across distinct periods, from early reform efforts and Brahminical feminism to nationalist mobilizations, post-independence state-led organizations, ecofeminist and autonomous movements and the rise of fundamentalist feminism. The study challenges longstanding misconceptions that portray feminism as Western, homogeneous or detached from local socio-political realities. Instead, it shows how feminist politics in India has been shaped by caste, class, religion, region and colonial as well as postcolonial state structures. We advance three archetypes of Indian womanhood: Traditional Emancipated De-sexualized Women, Autonomous yet Marginal Women and Global Consumerist Detached Women, which illuminate the varied modes of agency and constraint experienced by Indian women across time. Finally, we employ a strengths, opportunities, aspirations and results (SOAR) framework to interpret how these historical trajectories inform contemporary strengths, opportunities, aspirations and outcomes for feminist mobilization. Together, these contributions provide a comprehensive, context-sensitive account of Indian feminism’s past, present and future.

ABSTRACT This article situates the everyday liberation politics of community activist Vesta Smith within the recent historiography that recovers the overlooked contributions of black women in South Africa’s anti-apartheid struggles, participating in ongoing efforts to restore epistemic justice. It expands this scholarship by broadening the study of protest politics beyond formal organisations and after 1994. Born in Johannesburg and forcibly displaced to the coloured area of Noordgesig (Soweto) in 1941, Vesta remained there for life, a life that itself became a praxis of resistance rooted in her community. During the Soweto uprisings, Ma Vesta or Ma Vee, as she came to be known, was recognised as a senior activist for her earlier participation in the signing of the Freedom Charter and the Women’s March. Operating primarily outside organisational politics, she was a key figure in connecting banned movements and youth-led protests and sustaining multiple anti-apartheid networks across generations, ideologies, and townships. The article foregrounds Vesta’s lifelong commitment to non-racialism, non-sectarianism, and social justice – principles grounded in her Christian faith – and highlights her continued engagement with the social, economic, and political challenges of the post-apartheid period.

Growth patterns: Pathology vs. Normal variation.

The eastern Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) is facing a complex humanitarian crisis with significant health implications. This paper aims to provide an understanding of the cascade of humanitarian challenges in eastern DRC, stemming from decades of prolonged armed conflict. A qualitative research method was used to investigate challenges faced by humanitarian workers in the North and South Kivu regions of the DRC. This study employs a Feminist Political Economy of Health and the Responsibility to Protect framework to address the humanitarian challenges in Eastern. The findings revealed that the Armed conflict has devastated millions of lives, disrupted health systems, displaced populations, and led to food insecurity and human rights abuse, including sexual and gender-based violence. Therefore, the study recommends a holistic approach that effectively addresses these humanitarian challenges. This study deepens understanding of the difficulties that humanitarians face in delivering services in conflict zones.

ABSTRACT This article examines the cultural impact of the 2020 Black Lives Matter protests on Feminist CCIs (feminist creative and cultural organisations). Through contextualising these responses within pandemic precarity in London, this paper shows how the heightened digital character of BLM generated new pressures for Feminist CCIs to show they were responding to the global events, and in the right ways. By foregrounding a conjunctural analysis of how feminist organisations responded to these digital and branded landscapes, this paper brings scholarly research on digital feminist activism, intersectionality, and practices of monetisation into conversation with debates around woke-washing, BLM performativity, and corporate activism. The paper shows how the wider cultural conditions of “cancel culture” intensified the digital practices of Feminist CCIs, and how incentives to present “good” intersectional feminist politics, as well as fears of “getting it wrong,” governed these online activities. Further, this analysis homes in on the commercial pressures for Feminist CCIs to monetise their work during the wake of BLM and pandemic precarity. The article shows how Feminist CCIs simultaneously critique but also engage with— and indeed economically benefit from—corporations and brands in relation to anti-racism and social justice.

The relationship between climate change and food security underscores the urgent need to both manage associated risks and harness emerging opportunities. Globally, it is widely recognised that addressing gender disparities in agriculture is key to reducing hunger and poverty. Women are central to agricultural production, serving as primary food providers and land stewards who sustain their families through farming. In Africa and many other regions, their vital role is shaped by historical, cultural, and socio-economic factors yet their heightened vulnerability to climate impacts often goes unaddressed. Despite their indispensable contributions, women remain underrepresented in climate related policy and decision-making spaces, and their voices are largely absent from critical dialogues on food security and climate response. To address this gap, the paper employs a desktop-based literature review and applies an integrated conceptual framework drawing from Feminist Political Economy, the Sustainable Livelihoods Framework (SLF), and Resilience Thinking to critically examine women’s roles in agricultural transformation and sustainability. The findings reveal that gender responsive climate strategies are not only necessary for equitable food systems but also for enhancing adaptive capacity and resilience at the community level. The paper advocates for the full inclusion of women in the design and implementation of climate policies, emphasising their leadership as essential to building just and sustainable agricultural futures.

With the attainment of independence across Africa, liberation movements transformed into ruling regimes. They employed various strategies, including the utilisation of liberation heritage to maintain a grip on political power. Victory against colonial rule became a justification for former liberation movements to hold on to power. Using case studies from across Africa, we argue that there is a politics of entitlement among former liberation movements, whereby liberation credentials are mobilised to legitimise political hegemony. We used a neo-patrimonialism framework to explain how liberation movements in Africa leverage historical legitimacy to build personal political capital, promote patronage systems, and justify their entitlement to state resources. Observation and media analysis, blended with an examination of secondary written texts, were used to gather data that addressed questions on how historical legitimacy is employed to entrench neo-patrimonialism. We discovered that despite the uniqueness of individual countries’ geopolitics, the behaviour of liberation movements exhibits striking similarities across Africa, entrenched in the belief that dislodging colonialism justifies perpetual political legitimacy. While there is extensive literature on postcolonial African politics, this study is unique as it contributes to the historiography of African liberation politics by analysing the methods used by former liberation movements in utilising liberation heritage as political capital.

For more than a decade, a sizable contribution to the theory of neo-republicanism has attempted to critique domination in capitalist society. Within this emergent ‘radical republicanism’, theorists have attempted to assimilate Marx’s critique of political economy by arguing that capitalist society is typified by dependency on arbitrary power —a form of domination— that is also systematic, impersonal, and structural. However, in purporting to critique capitalist domination through neo-republican means, these attempts fail to grasp the specifically capitalist character of domination. By theorizing capitalist domination as dependency on arbitrary will between individual subjects, radical republicanism regresses to a subjectivistic and decidedly liberal social theory that renders invisible Marx’s emphasis on the peculiar social and objective dimensions of capital’s compulsion for surplus labor as a form of domination. While capitalist society is unthinkable without human subjects, it cannot be understood subjectively – as the product of willful actions and decisions – because it obtains a peculiar autonomy and objectivity as a force of human-made (second) nature impelling human subjects to reproduce a form of society that is antagonistic to them. Marx’s critique of capital as a specific form of domination becomes apparent in his analysis of the ‘real subsumption of labor under capital’. This concept explains how the compulsion for surplus labor is transformed by capital into a form of ‘objective social domination’ wherein society confronts us as an alien power through a series of subject-object inversions.

Political theorists have suggested that democracy is at odds with liberalism. Moreover, with fears about the recent rise in populism, there is growing skepticism about whether liberalism and democracy can continue to survive. In her recent work, Democracy Tamed: French Liberalism and the Politics of Suffrage, political theorist Gianna Englert argues that voters’ political capacity—rather than democratic political rights—kept nineteenth-century French liberalism open to democracy while fostering citizens’ capacity for democracy. The theorists she discusses anticipated the problems we face today, including citizens being manipulated by unscrupulous and unqualified influencers. Thus, the concern over an uninformed public in democracy is not new. In the meantime, students of comparative politics have found that people can rely on elite cues to make reasoned choices “as if” they had sufficient information, even when they are uninformed and inattentive. However, with social media overtaking traditional media as the primary source of information for many people, this democratic safeguard no longer functions as it should. In this article, to tackle the age-old challenge of ensuring that citizens in democracies are well informed enough to make reasoned choices, we first summarize the problems identified by the nineteenth-century French liberal theorists with the capacity of non-elites to make sound political judgments. We then explore how the comparative politics literature has responded to concerns about an uninformed public in democracy, suggesting that the same mechanism would not work if people get information from social media. We examine the impact of social media on the rise of anti-democratic leaders by manipulating public opinion, which has allowed illiberal, populist politicians to come to power.

ABSTRACT On April 27, 2024, Iraq’s National Assembly, established after the country’s 2003 transition to democracy, passed a controversial anti-LGBTQIA+ law. This development raises critical questions about public support for such policies in a democratic system expected to protect sexual minority rights. Why has intolerance toward LGBTQIA+ individuals increased alongside democratization? Is this trend linked to the political system itself or independent of regime type? Using a survey experiment, this paper examines the conditions under which anti-LGBTQIA+ legislation gains support in Iraq, where Islamism has grown increasingly influential in politics since democratization. The study tests two hypotheses. The doctrinal faith hypothesis proposes that Iraqis with strong Islamic values are more likely to support anti-LGBTQIA+ laws, while the liberal values hypothesis suggests that those who prioritize universal human rights are less likely to support them. The findings strongly support the doctrinal faith hypothesis. In a context where Islamist actors have gained power through democratic processes, policies that restrict sexual minority rights tend to receive broad public backing, contributing to a significant erosion of human rights norms.

The latter part of 2025 witnessed an intense discourse on India's social media around a campaign dubbed #ProudRandi, which rapidly swept across platforms, drawing significant attention to the politics of appropriation and the effectiveness of reclamation. This movement, started by a female psychologist, influencer and content creator, Divija Bhasin, stirred an intense debate around gendered slurs and reignited the discourse on the deep-rooted cultural misogyny ingrained in the Indian popular cultural psyche. The campaign made a valiant attempt to reappropriate one of the deeply misogynistic Hindi slurs, Randi, literally meaning prostitute, a derogatory term historically used to shame prostitutes, often casually used to sexualise, and insult women in general, and those who are nonconforming in particular. The campaign once again exposed the usual tension between women's empowerment narratives and the resistance they face from multifarious quarters, historically conditioned and often emboldened by the dominant narratives of the times. It also became a site of conflict between digital feminist narratives and the opposition they face from the old-age and new-age self-proclaimed custodians of morality and culture, reinforcing the idea that online spaces provide platforms for both challenging and fortifying gendered power dynamics, albeit with varying degrees of overall impact. Not surprisingly, the engagement it drew from the underage female community, who overwhelmingly expressed solidarity with the campaign, led to the filing of cases against the instigator under various sections, including POCSO. Ironically, this campaign was even accused of reinforcing the very misogynistic structures that it intended to challenge and dismantle. Combining the approaches of critical discourse analysis, social media content analysis, and public sentiment mapping, this research investigates how the aforementioned hashtag circulated, negotiated its connotations, and navigated backlashes. It examines why this movement generated significant support and how certain undercurrents in neo-liberal times propel such 'mini-revolutions'. The study maps this campaign onto broader debates on linguistic reclamation to understand how online gender politics, digital activism, and the reappropriation of gendered slurs play out in the current socio-political landscape. It presents a critical interpretation of the new-age dynamics of feminist politics in contemporary India, which is constrained by the structural and narratological paradigms of social media-driven discourse.

Abstract To uphold classical liberal values in the 21st century, it is crucial to recognize that the classical liberal tradition itself emerged as a profound response to the crisis of pluralism triggered by the breakdown - during the Protestant Reformation- of a unified and coherent worldview centered around the Catholic Church. Any attempt to address contemporary challenges by drawing on the lessons, insights, and intellectual tools of the liberal tradition must begin with a thorough examination of this foundational reality. Specifically, we must revisit the issues of deep social heterogeneity, incommensurability, and the pluralism of worldviews, values, and beliefs among individuals, communities, and societies. This paper will first identify and explore these aspects before shifting the discussion to the governance structures necessary for managing such complexities. The analysis will emphasize three key principles or features of a governance system designed to address the challenges of pluralism, heterogeneity of views, values, and lifestyles, and the resulting tensions and trade-offs: polycentricity (E. and V. Ostrom), catallaxy (F. A. Hayek), and modus vivendi (B. Williams).

Women’s political participation remains limited across the West African sub-region despite regional and global commitments to gender equality and inclusive governance. This study examined the gender dynamics shaping women’s political participation in selected West African countries. Guided by Feminist Political Theory, the study analyzed how structural and institutional barriers, socio-cultural norms, legal frameworks, civil society interventions, political context, and economic factors influence women’s engagement in political processes. The study employed thematic analysis to analyze the collected qualitative data. Findings revealed that while women demonstrate high participation as voters, their involvement in party activities, electoral contests, and leadership positions remains low. Education emerged as a significant enabler of political participation, while socio-cultural norms, financial constraints, male-dominated party structures, and limited access to resources constituted major barriers. Legal and affirmative action frameworks were found to exist but remain moderately effective due to weak enforcement and limited political will. Civil society and advocacy programs positively influenced women’s participation by building capacity, confidence, and awareness, although their impact varied by education level and context. The study concluded that women’s political participation in West Africa is shaped by the interaction of multiple structural, social, and institutional factors. It recommended integrated strategies that strengthen education, enforce gender-responsive laws, reform political party practices, expand civil society interventions, and address socio-cultural constraints. By combining descriptive and substantive perspectives, the study contributed to a deeper understanding of gender dynamics and offers evidence-based insights for policy and practice aimed at enhancing women’s political participation in the sub-region.

Women’s political participation remains limited across the West African sub-region despite regional and global commitments to gender equality and inclusive governance. This study examined the gender dynamics shaping women’s political participation in selected West African countries. Guided by Feminist Political Theory, the study analyzed how structural and institutional barriers, socio-cultural norms, legal frameworks, civil society interventions, political context, and economic factors influence women’s engagement in political processes. The study employed thematic analysis to analyze the collected qualitative data. Findings revealed that while women demonstrate high participation as voters, their involvement in party activities, electoral contests, and leadership positions remains low. Education emerged as a significant enabler of political participation, while socio-cultural norms, financial constraints, male-dominated party structures, and limited access to resources constituted major barriers. Legal and affirmative action frameworks were found to exist but remain moderately effective due to weak enforcement and limited political will. Civil society and advocacy programs positively influenced women’s participation by building capacity, confidence, and awareness, although their impact varied by education level and context. The study concluded that women’s political participation in West Africa is shaped by the interaction of multiple structural, social, and institutional factors. It recommended integrated strategies that strengthen education, enforce gender-responsive laws, reform political party practices, expand civil society interventions, and address socio-cultural constraints. By combining descriptive and substantive perspectives, the study contributed to a deeper understanding of gender dynamics and offers evidence-based insights for policy and practice aimed at enhancing women’s political participation in the sub-region.

Liberal theories of justice offer strong normative frameworks; they often struggle to fully engage with the lived social hierarchies—such as those embedded in caste structures—that shape the experience of respect and recognition in a democratic society. Using the lens of Rawls’s original position, this article critically interprets the concept of respect for persons in an Indian democratic society. This work deciphers Rawls’s imagination through Ambedkar’s concepts of constitutional morality, graded inequality and the ethics of active citizenship to construct a more socially grounded understanding of social respect. Combining conceptual analysis with illustrative empirical reference as methodology, it theorizes that social respect constitutes a foundational condition of human freedom, transforming formal justice into lived equality. Engaging with contemporary Dalit scholarship and Sen’s capability approach, it conceptualizes social respect as a participatory conversion capability—a moral and social resource enabling and expressing an individual’s standing as free and equal participant in a society.

This article explores feminist theorising about menopause in the world’s largest online menopause forum, r/menopause. Building on earlier feminist Internet research on menopause, it conceptualises this online theorising as a form of epistemic insurgency in relation to biomedicine. It analyses forum users’ comments about medical misogyny, menopausal hormone therapy and rage to demonstrate how their subjective experiences of menopause inform a vernacular feminist politics with its own unique configuration of the relationship between bodies, gender, biomedicine and biotechnology. Distinct from the postfeminist healthism which dominates media representations of menopause, this vernacular feminism parallels other feminist projects but is not reducible to them. The implications for feminism include the urgent need to address both these women’s alienation from biomedicine and recent problematic albeit well-intentioned feminist public health messaging.

This article examines women’s exclusion from irrigation governance in Tajikistan, with a focus on their participation in Water User Associations (WUAs) in the Vaksh River Basin. Applying a Feminist Political Ecology (FPE) lens, the study explores how legal frameworks, institutional dynamics, and socio-cultural norms interact to constrain women’s agency in water governance. While Tajikistan has introduced semi-formal WUAs under national law to encourage participatory management, women’s involvement remains largely symbolic, undermined by weak institutional enforcement and entrenched patriarchal norms. To deepen the analysis, the study uses a Most Similar Systems Design (MSSD) to compare Tajikistan with Afghanistan, another agrarian and patriarchal society but one governed through customary systems. In Afghanistan, irrigation governance is shaped by male-dominated mirab networks and rigid honor-based codes, which severely restrict women’s public participation, even when they own land or meet eligibility criteria. Methodologically, the article relies on qualitative analysis of secondary data, including policy documents, legal frameworks, and prior research. The comparative lens highlights how distinct governance structures and normative pressures create different but overlapping patterns of gendered exclusion. This study addresses the gap on why the feminization of agriculture in Tajikistan has not translated into women’s representation in irrigation governance. The findings demonstrate that without enforceable institutional support and cultural transformation, legal inclusion alone is insufficient to achieve gender-equitable irrigation governance. This article is based on secondary data analysis, enriched by comparative insights from the author’s prior fieldwork in Afghanistan, and contributes to advancing theory-driven understanding of gendered exclusion in irrigation governance.

ABSTRACT This article examines the fragmented solidarities between women’s organizations and Syrian migrant women in Turkey, focusing on İstanbul, Gaziantep, and İzmir, the cities with the highest concentrations of Syrian migrants. Drawing on semi-structured interviews conducted with representatives from 25 women’s organizations, the study investigates why feminist solidarity has remained elusive despite the shared gendered vulnerabilities of migrant women and Turkish women. The findings reveal that women’s organizations are divided in their approaches to migrant women due to differing conceptualizations of the state, intersectionality, and traditional gender roles, as well as the cultural and socio-economic heterogeneity of Syrian women. These divisions are further compounded by structural constraints that limit opportunities for engagement and reinforce exclusionary attitudes. By situating these dynamics within the broader context of transnational feminist debates, the article argues that feminist solidarity is not a given but a contested and context-dependent process that requires active efforts to bridge divides. The study contributes to scholarship on migration and feminist solidarity by foregrounding the intersecting dimensions of gender, class, ethnicity, and state–civil society dynamics, emphasizing the need for rights-based, transformative solidarities over charity-based approaches. The article concludes with implications for feminist politics, migration policy, and pathways for future research, offering insights into fostering inclusive solidarities in global migration contexts.