Struggles for women’s rights and empowerment in politics

This section focuses on the struggles for gender equality, women’s rights and empowerment in a broadly defined political sphere. It brings together analyses of conventional forms of women’s participation in party politics and parliaments with studies of a wide range of extra-parliamentary activities, including social movements, expert bodies and cultural production. The papers explore the role of women and gender in politics, the claims they raise and the effects of these efforts, paying attention to positionality and networks of various actors in pushing the boundaries of institutional and social change. The goal is to enrich our empirical knowledge of these struggles but also to contribute to theoretical reflections on the relation between political structures and collective and individual agency by acknowledging the actors’ constrained choices and contexts.