Background

AWID’s Resisting and Challenging Religious Fundamentalisms initiative is an advocacy-research project that seeks to strengthen the responses of women’s rights activists to the rise of religious fundamentalisms across regions and religions. It aims to contribute to greater strategic thinking, dialogue and advocacy on religious fundamentalisms, and to develop more knowledge and resources on the issue. It also hopes to foster a deeper and shared understanding of the way fundamentalisms work, grow and undermine women’s rights, and to share strategies that have been used by women’s rights activists to resist and challenge religious fundamentalisms.

The initiative responds to the need for strategic knowledge on fundamentalisms that spans regions and religions, and for more international and inter-regional dialogue toward the development of coherent global responses. In 2008, we published a series of special reports on the key characteristics and impacts of religious fundamentalisms, drawing on the results of a global survey of over 1,600 women’s rights activists, as well as interviews with 51 key experts. Presenting the research findings served to open up dialogue and debate on the issue at several strategic international venues. In 2009, our research focused on fundamentalist strategies and feminist counter-strategies, culminating in a report on the workings of religious fundamentalist movements, as well as an anthology of regional case studies documenting a broad range of feminist strategies. In the year ahead, the initiative will continue to explore what women’s rights, human rights and development actors can do to mount a stronger and more effective challenge to the global rise of religious fundamentalisms.

Outcomes:

– Develop and strengthen joint strategies and advocacy efforts that are transnational, and across religions and regions to confront religious fundamentalisms and their negative impacts on women’s rights.

– Create strategic spaces and the necessary conditions to build common platforms across religions and regions to foster more global responses to the global challenge of religious fundamentalisms.

– Produce new and strategic knowledge, tools and frameworks on the issue and disseminate to women’s rights movements and organizations and allies in other progressive social movements, in order to strengthen advocacy.

– Build greater understanding and awareness of religious fundamentalisms and women’s rights among key actors in women’s rights movements and organizations and other progressive social movements.

Activities in 2010:

– Create strategic venues and virtual spaces for critical dialogue and exchange by women’s rights activists across religions, regions and sectors;

– Engage and mobilize a broader audience of women’s rights activists, as well as activists in the human rights and development sectors, on the issue of religious fundamentalisms;

– Analyze, document and disseminate fundamentalist strategies and feminist counter-strategies across a range of religious and regional contexts, including a specific analysis of the Latin American context and the international level;

– Explore the nexus between religious fundamentalisms and women’s rights, plural legal orders, neoliberal economics, secularity and funding through short publications on these issues; and

– Strengthen and expand the initiative’s online resources to include relevant news, updates and analysis on fundamentalisms in English, French and Spanish, as well as a periodic newsletter.

Strategic initiative team

Cassandra Balchin – Lead Research and Program Consultant

Deepa Shankaran – Research Associate

Juan Marco Vaggione – Research Consultant

Saira Zuberi – Programme Coordinator

Shareen Gokal – Strategic Initiative Manager

The Association for Women’s Rights in Development (AWID)