What's theory got to do with it? The making of a call to action

The Gender, Women and Democracy team at the National Democratic Institute for International Affairs (NDI), and Dr Mona Lena Krook (Associate Professor of Political Science, Rutgers University), have spent the last year working collaboratively on moving the discussion on violence against women in politics, from discrete regional conversations to a global call to action. This paper will describe the opportunities, challenges and risks of such an iterative process of applied policy design. Along the way NDI and Mona Lena have walked a path which had to be 'theoretically rigorous and politically convincing'. They drew an arc from defining and analysing the problem; to naming it in all its manifestations - discrimination, harassment, physical and sexual assault (animate and online); to supporting the sharing and documenting of experiences; to the development of strategies to prevent, treat and punish this violence; and the inauguration of a global network of change-makers committed to addressing the manifestations and causes of this backlash against politically active women. This collaboration has involved a series of different activities including a two-day experts' roundtable in Washington DC in December 2015; the '#Not The Cost' international conference in the margins of the Commission of the Status of Women in New York in March 2016 which saw the launch of an international call to action and a global network of activists, politicians, practitioners and researchers committed to taking action on the issue.