The 11th International AWID Forum which took place in Cape Town, South Africa in November last year was the largest ever with over 1900 people participating. The theme of the Forum was “The Power of Movements. Srilatha Batliwala, AWID Associate Scholar delivered the final address summarising the main ideas and debates of the Forum. This article covers Srilatha’s address which highlights some prominent threads running through feminist movement building today.
South Africa's Woman's Legal Centre (WLC) has documented 12 cases of South African women, most of them HIV-infected, who claim to have undergone what the health world calls "coerced sterilisation". Promise Mthembu, a Wits University researcher based in Durban, who is helping compile the cases, said coerced sterilisations were happening "in very large areas" of South Africa.
Earlier this month, a group of 58 law-makers introduced a parliamentary resolution calling for the creation of a committee of inquiry into the wearing of the burqa and niqab on French territory. According to the authors of the resolution, the wearing of the burqa represents "an attack on the dignity of women," because when a woman wears it "her very existence is repudiated.
The new architecture of "global governance" raises serious problems of accountability due to the further erosion of the post-colonial state's monopoly over policy-making for its citizens. Non-state actors have increasingly begun to shape the formulation and implementation of soft law and policy. The talk will address the consequences of a proliferation of sub-national and supra-national actors and arena of norm production using empirical material on shifts in population policy and programmes in India.
The Youth Development Network (YDN) seeks to appoint an individual with research experience to be their Programme Coordinator.
