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Machine generated contents note:1.Legal Reform, Women's Empowerment and Social Change: The Case of Egypt /Mulki Al Sharmani --2.Quotas: A Pathway of Political Empowerment? /Ana Alice Alcantara Costa --3.Advancing Women's Empowerment or Rolling Back the Gains? Peace Building in Post-Conflict Sierra Leone /Hussaina J. Abdullah --4.Education: Pathway to Empowerment for Ghanaian Women? /Akosua K. Darkwah --5.Paid Work as a Pathway of Empowerment: Pakistan's Lady Health Worker Programme /Ayesha Khan --6.Steady Money, State Support and Respect Can Equal Women's Empowerment in Egypt /Hania Sholkamy --7.Changing Representations of Women in Ghanaian Popular Music /Awo Mana Asiedu --8.Subversively Accommodating: Feminist Bureaucrats and Gender Mainstreaming /Rosalind Eyben --9.Reciprocity, Distancing and Opportunistic Overtures: Women's Organizations Negotiating Legitimacy and Space in Bangladesh /Maheen Sultan --10.Empowerment as Resistance: Conceptualizing Palestinian Women's Empowerment /Eileen Kuttab --11.Crossroads of Empowerment: The Organization of Women Domestic Workers in Brazil /Terezinha Goncalves --12.Women's Dars and the Limitations of Desire: The Pakistan Case /Neelam Hussain --13.The Power of Relationships: Money, Love and Solidarity in a Landless Women's Organization in Rural Bangladesh /Lopita Huq --14.Women Watching Television: Surfing between Fantasy and Reality /Samia Afroz Rahim --15.Family, Households and Women's Empowerment through the Generations in Bahia, Brazil: Continuities or Change? /Cecilia M.B. Sardenberg.

Whilst international policy between the mid-1990s and mid-2010s gave some hope for progress on gender equality, events since then – including conflicts, climate change, the pandemic, and an increasingly insecure world – have thrown these hopes into doubt. Far from steady progress on gender equality, we now face backlash against gender and sexual rights. This article introduces our IDS Bulletin which explores understandings of backlash from a primarily global South perspective. Articles from Bangladesh, Brazil, India, Kenya, Lebanon, Uganda, and the UK detail examples of anti-gender backlash in different contexts, and the actors, interests, and tactics involved. This introduction groups the issues into three themes: voice and tactics, framings and direction, and temporality and structure. It also briefly touches on the tactics gender activists have used in countering backlash. In conclusion, the article calls for an increased analysis of backlash from more diverse settings to develop better strategies for resistance and reclaiming gender justice.