Routledge Women's Movements in the Global Era: The Power of Local Feminisms

This book provides a path-breaking study of the genesis, growth, gains, and dilemmas of women's movements in countries throughout the world. Its focus is on the global South, where women's movements have engaged in complex negotiations with national and international forces. It challenges widely held assumptions about the Western origins and character of local feminisms. The authors locate women's movements within the terrain from which they emerged by exploring their relationships with the state, civil society, and other social movements.This fully revised second edition contains six new chapters by leading scholars of women and gender studies, on both individual countries and on several major regions of the world?Europe, Africa, Latin America, and the Maghreb. This balanced coverage enables readers to identify regional patterns and also learn from in-depth case studies. Women's Movements in the Global Era is essential reading for anyone interested in the global scope and implications of feminism. Review "Amrita Basu has done it again. She has created, with her fine contributors, a book that is accessible, worldly, nuanced and analytically smart. Every country study here and all of them read together reminds me why we have to be grittily specific when we talk about women's activism and why we always need to watch how feminist thinking and activist strategizing constantly inform each other. This book should be assigned to students at all levels." --Cynthia Enloe, author of Nimo's War, Emma's War: Making Feminist Sense of the Iraq War "In our increasingly interconnected world, women's movements, which for many years have played a key role in the struggle for gender justice, are evolving--retaining their local roots, but also joining transnational networks and responding dynamically to new alliances. This outstanding set of thirteen nation-based studies provides a rich resource for anyone trying to understand this evolution. Amrita Basu, one of the foremost scholars in this area, provides a superb Introduction: analytically sophisticated, lucid, and bold." --Martha Nussbaum, the University of Chicago "In this fine collection, Basu and her contributors provide sweeping analyses of diverse feminist and women's movements and organizations in major world regions. Highly recommended." -- Choice "Women's movements have been critical actors in spearheading social change and shaping policy. They have been ubiquitous and diverse, progressive and reactionary, liberal and illiberal, yet scholarship has remained relatively sparse, with great gaps in our understanding of these political phenomena. Amrita Basu's Women's Movements in the Global Era follows the success of her first edition with this exciting new collection. She has brought together a fine set of case studies from around the world to bring new insights to this important field of study. This book will be essential reading across a wide range of disciplines." --Maxine Molyneux, University College London Institute of the Americas "In the fifteen years since the first edition of this book commemorated the Fourth World Conference on Women, held in Beijing in 1995, the panorama of gender politics and women's movements across the globe has been dramatically reconfigured. Bringing together a broad array of richly detailed, analytically exacting, and often provocative case studies, this new edition offers fresh insights into how changing global and local forces have impacted women's lives and feminist activism. Written by scholars from all major world regions deeply immersed in the processes they analyze, this volume exhaustively documents how the global gender policy agenda consolidated since Beijing has been translated and transformed by activists and policy makers on the ground. It will surely be a vital resource for feminist rights advocates and scholars alike." --Sonia E. Alvarez, University of Massachusetts, Amherst Amrita Basu has done it again. She ha