Connecting, Contesting, and Consolidating

Three Cs for resisting the rollback of women’s rights and LGBTQI+ rights.

This briefing is based on a rapid scoping review of anti-rollback actors and activities post-2015, in 14 countries: Argentina, Brazil, Egypt, Ghana, India, Indonesia, Kazakhstan, Kenya, Mexico, Nigeria, Pakistan, the Philippines, South Africa, and Türkiye. Our review included organisations, movements, groups, and projects active since 2015 that focus on sexual orientation and gender identity (SOGI), sexual and reproductive health and rights (SRHR), gender-based violence, and women’s public participation.

Key messages

Policymakers can support anti-rollback actors and actions through the 3 Cs:

• Connecting: connections across spaces and levels are central to anti-rollback strategies. Rollback occurs alongside other retrogressive projects, and counter-rollback efforts must be intersectional.
• Contesting: rollback is rooted in retrogressive framings of gender, kinship/family, community, belonging, national identity, and security. Both the discourses and mechanisms of rollback must be contested.
• Consolidating: resisting rollback entails strengthening existing rights and justice frameworks, ensuring enforcement and accountability, and nurturing vibrant feminist and lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer, intersex, and more (LGBTQI+) movements.

Sustainable, resilient, and effective counter-rollback efforts need multiple entry points.

Research approach

This was a desk-based review of peer-reviewed grey literature and media/blog sources, with a core research team of four people (one for each theme), and an extended team of nine (five researchers with region- or country-specific expertise conducted data collection based on an adaptable preset template, and authored the Country Briefs). We had an advisory board, and an external expert review process for each of our outputs. The extended team met throughout the data collection process to troubleshoot, share findings and analysis, and ensure quality through ongoing peer review.

Background

The transnational rollback of women’s rights and LGBTQI+ rights is the result of intentional, systematic, and organised opposition to advances towards gender and sexual justice. This opposition is not new, but rollback actors have recently gained in strength and impact alongside a rise in democratic backsliding or de-democratisation (Zaremberg, Tabbush and Friedman 2021; Birchall 2020; Roggeband and Krizsán 2020; Jobes, Fraser and Vlahakis 2019). Rollback is also referred to as ‘backlash’ (Flood, Dragiewicz and Pease 2021; Goetz 2020; Rowley 2020; Townsend-Bell 2020; Corredor 2019; Jordan 2016; Faludi 1991), ‘pro-family politics’ (McEwen and Narayanaswamy 2023), ‘gender-restrictive politics’ (Martínez, Duarte and Rojas 2021), ‘heteroactivism’ (Browne and Nash 2020), and ‘anti-gender politics’ (Graff and Korolczuk 2022). We use the term ‘gender-restrictive’ (Martínez et al. 2021) because it challenges the way that the term ‘gender’ is framed by groups attacking women’s rights and LGBTQI+ rights.

Findings and analysis

Even within deeply repressive contexts, there is counter-rollback activism. Organising towards rollback has been a long-term and well-funded undertaking. Attempts to counter it need to be rooted in the existing LGBTQI+ and feminist movements, which provide the ‘soil’ for this resistance. It is increasingly clear that securing rights is not a linear or finite task, and LGBTQI+ and feminist movements need ongoing support to be able to constantly resist rollback, while also having space to imagine, and work towards, just futures.

Rollback is experienced and resisted very differently by people in different geographical contexts, and in different social, political, and economic positions. Rollback is also often associated with broader projects of social and political exclusion, and so there are multiple fronts, including gender, on which resistance is needed. This exclusion may also disadvantage certain individuals and collectives, and constrain their capacity to resist rollback, but it may also present opportunities for organising across social and political agendas.

Recognising ‘effectiveness’ in relation to countering rollback is complicated. What might seem like failure to an external audience, may be interpreted as success by those with a better understanding of the context. For example, a transgender rights activist in Pakistan ran for office, and although she lost the election, she regarded her ability to contest it – and the respect she garnered during the process – as a win. Evidencing the impacts of protest is not straightforward but, with other awareness and advocacy efforts, it is crucial both for creating an affirmative environment for activists and for precipitating the discursive shifts that create more enabling environments for policy reform and implementation. Legislative gains are often recognised (and rewarded/supported) as ‘wins’. However, they are easily reversible and, even when legislation is in place, it relies on supportive social norms, political will, and functioning institutions for effective implementation.

Sustainable, resilient, and effective counter-rollback efforts need multiple entry points. Some of the counter-rollback work we explored will not have outcomes that are immediate, or measurable, but these efforts remain invaluable for maintaining individuals and organisations at the frontline of counter-rollback activism, in a context where these crucial efforts are significantly under-resourced. Across the four thematic areas of work in our study (SOGI, SRHR, gender-based violence, and women’s public participation), we documented six broad strategy categories: (1) public awareness and norm change; (2) protest-based strategies; (3) legal reform, strategic litigation, and policy advocacy; (4) coalition building; (5) service provision; and (6) skills training and capacity building.

Recommendations to support anti-rollback actors and actions

Based on our findings and secondary literature, we suggest three broad strategy approaches for policymakers to support anti-rollback actors and actions: connecting, contesting, and consolidating. These have been disaggregated across three levels of intervention: domestic, regional, and international policy; knowledge production; and supporting movements and collective action.

Connecting

Rollback is an internationally connected, extensively networked movement, and connections across levels need to be central to anti-rollback strategies. Rollback also occurs alongside other retrogressive projects, and counter-rollback efforts need to be intersectional in their alliances and strategies.

Domestic, regional, and international policy

• Forge progressive coalitions of organisations and agencies engaging in multilateral spaces (including within United Nations (UN) systems), and engage diplomacy and foreign policy structures to instigate actions with progressive partners locally, regionally, and transnationally.
• Strategically engage key powerholders at local and regional levels (such as government officials, religious leaders, community figures, and private sector actors) to build a critical mass of support for anti-rollback efforts, and influence decision-making at multiple levels.

Knowledge production

• Support research that draws on and amplifies the voices and efforts of diverse groups contesting rollback from different geographical, socioeconomic, and sociocultural locations.
• Fund efforts to build knowledge on best practices through national, regional, and global convenings, recognising the connections between gender-restrictive rollback and other retrogressive projects.

Supporting movements and collective action

• Play brokering, funding, and convening roles in bringing together activists and movements at regional and international levels, as such platforms are crucial to sustaining activists and collectives, especially those operating in highly restrictive contexts.
• Focus on bringing together actors across issue areas, facilitating new and broader alliances, intersectional solidarities, and cross-movement learning, resource-sharing, and strategising.
• Ensure that these platforms create space for, but also put centre stage, the voices and experiences of those most affected by rollback.

Contesting

Rollback is rooted in retrogressive framings of gender, kinship/family, community, belonging, and national identity and security. A key rollback strategy is positioning SOGI, SRHR, and women’s and LGBTQI+ rights as ‘foreign’, ‘Western’, or ‘colonial’. It is vital to leverage international platforms and frameworks and to support women human rights defenders (WHRDs) and LGBTQI+ activists and researchers to recognise, expose, and contest these cynical framings. Both the frames/discourses/logics underpinning rollback, as well as the mechanisms of rollback, must be contested.

Domestic, regional, and international policy

• Use global rights frameworks and agreements to push back against broader democratic backsliding and curtailment of civil liberties as well as direct erosion of women’s and LGBTQI+ rights at multilateral platforms, including UN bodies, and the G7 and G20 structures (contesting mechanisms).
• Challenge efforts to reframe ‘gender’ and related categories at these platforms, drawing on research, especially from the global South, to contest framings of women’s rights and LGBTQI+ rights as ‘Western’ or ‘colonial’ (contesting frames).

Knowledge production

• Fund decolonial research and advocacy work that develops an evidence base to challenge gender-restrictive discourses. Include archives documenting the historical existence and resistance of women and sexual/gender minorities across different contexts to establish their rootedness within indigenous cultures, and work that challenges framings of gender, kindship/family, and the nation, often used by rollback actors.
• Support and amplify research efforts that interrogate and complicate narrow framings of ‘effectiveness’ in relation to anti-rollback efforts to capture the full range of work contributing to both resisting rollback and entrenching and advancing gender and sexual justice.

Supporting movements and collective action

• Use locally embedded grant-making mechanisms that facilitate participatory, in-country decision-making with communities directly involved in implementation. This will help guard against allegations that anti-rollback efforts are furthering Western/colonial/foreign-funded agendas.
• Challenge demands for measurable, metricised outcomes that assume linear notions of change, and dominant attributions of success and failure in order to recognise and support a broad range of counter-rollback strategies in a non-hierarchical manner.

Consolidating

Resisting rollback entails protecting and strengthening existing rights and justice frameworks, ensuring enforcement and accountability, and nurturing vibrant feminist and LGBTQI+ movements. As activists and collectives face existential threats, countering rollback must invest in the care and sustenance of these individuals and their spaces, creating the conditions necessary to imagine and enact just futures.

Domestic, regional, and international policy

• Leverage global frameworks and agreements, such as the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women (CEDAW), the Yogyakarta Principles, and relevant UN treaties, to reinforce international commitments and pressure governments to uphold gender and sexual justice.
• Establish or strengthen accountability and enforcement mechanisms at local, regional, and multinational levels to ensure compliance, and to help translate legal and policy frameworks into meaningful rights protections.
• Ensure that these commitments are effectively translated into domestic policy for consistency, alongside protecting the rights of civil society groups to organise, protest, and mobilise.

Knowledge production

• Support the production and circulation of accessible knowledge on what works to counter rollback across contexts. Fund work that translates theoretical insights into practical, activist-relevant messaging, as well as efforts to understand how to translate and transport strategies across contexts in ways that are attentive to local specificities.
• Introduce frameworks to ensure that researchers are attentive to questions of power and marginality, considering issues of safety, security, wellbeing, and representational justice in both data collection and dissemination efforts.

Supporting movements and collective action

• Transform funding models to provide long-term, flexible support that strengthens movements beyond short-term, project-based funding. Feminist and LGBTQI+ organisations operate in high-risk, under-resourced contexts, requiring financial support that enables agility, resilience, and strategic adaptation.
• Invest in activists’ care, security, and rest. Activists face high levels of burnout, trauma, and violence; it is necessary to support their online safety, physical security, and mental wellbeing, with funding but also skills training.
• Resource and support spaces that allow for creative and imaginative strategising to ensure that counter-rollback is not purely reactive, but also generative.

Policymakers must invest in connecting progressive actors and agendas, contesting discourses and rollback mechanisms, and consolidating rights and justice frameworks and feminist and LGBTQI+ movements.

References

Birchall, J. (2020) Rollback on Gender Equality and Women and Girls’ Rights in International Fora Since 2016, K4D Helpdesk Report 933, Brighton: Institute of Development Studies (accessed 20 March 2025)

Browne, K. and Nash, C. (2020) ‘Heteroactivism’, Lambda Nordica 25.1: 72–80, DOI: 10.34041/ln.v25.616 (accessed 20 March 2025)

Corredor, E. (2019) ‘Unpacking “Gender Ideology” and the Global Right’s Antigender Countermovement’, Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 44.3: 613–38 (accessed 20 March 2025)

Faludi, S. (1991) Backlash: The Undeclared War against Women, New York NY: Crown Publishing

Flood, M.; Dragiewicz, M. and Pease, B. (2021) ‘Resistance and Backlash to Gender Equality’, Australian Journal of Social Issues 56.3: 393–408, DOI: 10.1002/ajs4.137 (accessed 20 March 2025)

Goetz, A.M. (2020) ‘The New Competition in Multilateral Norm-Setting: Transnational Feminists and the Illiberal Backlash’, Daedalus 149.1: 160–79, DOI: 10.1162/daed_a_01780 (accessed 20 March 2025)

Graff, A. and Korolczuk, E. (2022) ‘Anti-Gender Campaigns as a Reactionary Response to Neoliberalism’, European Journal of Women’s Studies 29.1.suppl: 150S–157S, DOI:  10.1177/13505068211065138c (accessed 20 March 2025)

Jobes, K.; Fraser, E. and Vlahakis, M. (2019) Evidence on Global Rollback of Women’s Rights, VAWG Helpdesk Report 230, London: VAWG Helpdesk (accessed 20 March 2025)

Jordan, A. (2016) ‘Conceptualizing Backlash: (UK) Men’s Rights Groups, Anti-Feminism, and Postfeminism’, Canadian Journal of Women and the Law 28.1: 18–44 (accessed 20 March 2025)

Martínez, J.; Duarte, A. and Rojas, M. (2021) Manufacturing Moral Panic: Weaponizing Children to Undermine Gender Justice and Human Rights, Elevate Children Funders Group and Global Philanthropy Project (accessed 20 March 2025)

McEwen, H. and Narayanaswamy, L. (2023) The International Anti-Gender Movement: Understanding the Rise of Anti-Gender Discourses in the Context of Development, Human Rights and Social Protection, UNRISD Working Paper 2023-06, Geneva: United Nations Research Institute for Social Development (accessed 20 March 2025)

Roggeband, C. and Krizsán, A. (2020) Democratic Backsliding and the Backlash against Women’s Rights: Understanding the Current Challenges for Feminist Politics, UN Women Discussion Paper 35, background paper prepared for the Expert Group Meeting on the 25th anniversary of the Beijing Platform for Action, to inform the 64th session of the Commission on the Status of Women, New York: UN Women (accessed 20 March 2025)

Rowley, M.V. (2020) ‘Anything but Reactionary: Exploring the Mechanics of Backlash’, Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 45.2: 278–87 (accessed 20 March 2025)

Townsend-Bell, E. (2020) ‘Backlash as the Moment of Revelation’, Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 45.2: 287–94 (accessed 20 March 2025)

Zaremberg, G.; Tabbush, C. and Friedman, E.J. (2021) ‘Feminism(s) and Anti-Gender Backlash: Lessons from Latin America’, International Feminist Journal of Politics 23.4: 527–34, DOI: 10.1080/14616742.2021.1956093 (accessed 21 March 2025)

Credits

This Briefing was written by Tessa Lewin, Priya Raghavan and Chung Ah Baek and edited by Kathryn O’Neill. It was supported by the project Rapid Scoping Review – The Nature of Feminist and LGBT+ Movements in a Range of Selected Countries, funded by UK International Development from the UK government. The views expressed are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect those of IDS or the UK government’s official policies.

© Institute of Development Studies 2025. This is an Open Access briefing distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International licence (CC BY), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original authors and source are credited and any modifications or adaptations are indicated.