The global diffusion of #MeToo has sparked case studies and scholarly discussions (Fileborn and Loney-Howes 2019; Lee and Murdie 2020; Noel and Oppenheimer 2020), but the East Asian experience remains understudied, especially from a comparative perspective within and outside the region. The internet hashtag movement emerged from quality investigative journalism, and the movement has done what the law could not (MacKinnon 2018). Examining tweets that include the English version of the hashtag, Lee and Murdie (2020) found that women are more likely to engage in #MeToo in countries where their political rights are better protected. This finding, however, does not seem to fit East Asia's experience. The region's earliest and longest democracy, Japan, had a much milder movement than neighboring South Korea. Many South Korean women publicly named their perpetrators, but Japanese women, when sharing their experience of being harassed, mostly remained anonymous (Hasunuma and Shin 2019). Moreover, Taiwan, arguably the most gender-equal country in this region—if measured by women's political representation (42% in the national legislature) or by policies toward sexual minorities (it was the first Asian country to legalize same-sex marriage)—has had virtually no #MeToo movement.

Extensive research has affirmed the potential of gender quotas to advance women's political inclusion. When Kenya's gender quota took effect after a new constitution was promulgated in 2010, women were elected to the highest number of seats in the country's history. In this article, we investigate how the process of implementing the quota has shaped Kenyan women's power more broadly. Drawing on more than 80 interviews and 24 focus groups with 140 participants, we affirm and refine the literature on quotas by making two conceptual contributions: (1) quota design can inadvertently create new inequalities among women in government, and (2) women's entry into previously male-dominated spaces can be met with patriarchal backlash, amplifying gender oppression. Using the ongoing process of quota implementation in Kenya as a case to theoretically question inclusionary efforts to empower women more generally, our analysis highlights the challenges for implementing women's rights laws and policies and the need for women's rights activists to prioritize a parallel bottom-up process of transforming gendered power relations alongside top-down institutional efforts.

Maciej Górecki provides a detailed and interesting discussion of our analysis regarding women's electoral success in the Polish open-list proportional representation (PR) system and the impact of a gender quota implemented in 2011. In essence, he claims that it remains an open question whether the gender quota had a ‘paradoxical’ effect (i.e., whether the introduction of the gender quota had a negative impact on female candidates) due to ‘debatable’ methodological choices in our analysis. In this article, we respond to Górecki's critique. First, we demonstrate that we do not necessarily disagree on the paradoxical impact of the gender quota but rather on the strength of the paradoxical effect. Second, we discuss some drawbacks of using the raw number of votes cast for a candidate as the dependent variable. Finally, we respond to the critique of including the ballot position in the regression model. We emphasize that even if one agrees with Górecki's critique that the ballot position is endogenous, excluding this variable leads to a severely misspecified model that does not allow one to reliably identify the effect of gender.

The hijab has been the subject of public and academic debates that have polarized scholars, politicians, and activists. Opinions on veiling range widely: while some view veiling as an oppressive practice, others regard veiling as an expression of women's agency and empowerment. Solidarity practices, such as movements against compulsory veiling or actions encouraging non-Muslim women to temporarily wear the hijab, are some of the ways in which activists have tried to show solidarity with Muslim women. In this qualitative study, data from the content analysis of the online platforms of two media campaigns, together with in-depth interviews with Iranian women living in Belgium, were triangulated. Women's perceptions of two solidarity campaigns were explored: the anti–compulsory veiling movement My Stealthy Freedom and the pro-acceptance World Hijab Day campaign. The findings raise questions about the effectiveness of transnational feminist campaigning in solidarity with Muslim women and, more generally, how the notion of solidarity is conceptualized in feminist scholarship.

Amid the global #MeToo movement, the #MeToo movement in China started in early 2018. For over a year, several influential cases, broad civic participation and engagement, as well as extensive discussions shocked and shook the whole country, creating a sociopolitical dynamic that was unusual in the context of persistent suppression of civil society and strict restrictions on freedom of speech. As feminist activists and researchers—Jing living and working in China, Dušica doing her fieldwork in Taiwan at the time—we were astounded by the powerful challenge that #MeToo has posed to misogynistic societies around the globe. What we have been trying to understand is how the #MeToo movement emerged and grew even as so many other social movements were suppressed in China, and what strategies the survivors, volunteers, and activists in the #MeToo movement used to break through the overwhelming censorship and restrictions.

Domestic violence is the predominant form of violence against women in most countries in Africa and Latin America. Scholars have theorized the adoption of domestic violence laws and policies in both regions. However, policy implementation is understudied and under theorized. Therefore, we compare how international organizations and women's nongovernmental organizations have influenced the implementation of domestic violence policies by police officers in Liberia and Nicaragua. We introduce the concept of the transnational implementation process and describe how international organizations and women's organizations have employed training, institutional and policy restructuring, and monitoring to influence police behavior at the street level. The effects of these strategies have been conditional on the political environment. We identify two patterns of international and domestic influence on street-level implementation: internationally led and domestically supported implementation in Liberia, with domestically led and internationally supported implementation in Nicaragua.

In October 2015, the United Nations Security Council adopted Resolution 2242 calling on member states to work toward the greater integration of the women, peace, and security (WPS) agenda with efforts to counter terrorism and violent extremism. While the rapprochement between counterterrorism and WPS may appear to be a step forward, particularly for those seeking to increase women's participation in areas traditionally dominated by men, it is also potentially dangerous. This article makes a significant contribution to the larger debate on the WPS agenda by studying the impact and unintended consequences of linking WPS with countering violent extremism on the ground in Kenya. Based on original research in the field, including key informant interviews, I argue that in the Kenyan context, connecting WPS with violent extremism has had several damaging consequences for women and their communities. Far from advancing the WPS agenda, this new policy shift has caused tension between local and international priorities, precipitated the redirection of donor funding away from important gender initiatives and toward countering violent extremism, and resulted in women's additional stigmatization, insecurity, and exclusion.

Research on state-level suffrage associations points to women's greater participation in the public sphere—higher education, the professions, and civic organizations—as a significant predictor of a state's suffrage association succeeding in securing woman suffrage prior to passage of the Nineteenth Amendment. This finding raises the question of how women gained access to those areas of public life that had formal barriers to entry—higher education and the professions. Specifically, did women's participation in civic organizations play a role in helping women gain access to these areas of the public realm? Using event history analysis, this study explores the role of the Literary Club movement and the Suffrage movement in influencing a state's policy regarding women's right to practice law. I employ the concept of institutional logics to argue that Clubwomen and Suffragists exploited contradictions in the logics of traditional gender roles and of the American political system to press for expanded opportunities for women in the public realm. Their success in these efforts, however, was influenced by their organizations’ deference to the dictates of traditional gender roles.

Why are civil society organizations so often unable to make a difference during the transition to peace? I argue that the contributions of local civil society organizations and women's organizations to postconflict peacebuilding should be understood in terms of the networks that emerge during the peacebuilding process. Horizontal network conditions are essential for successful postconflict reconstruction. Yet external actors often implement policies that strengthen hierarchical links at the expense of such horizontal networks. To explore the types of networks that emerge in postconflict reconstruction, I use semistructured interviews conducted in Liberia. The evidence suggests that emerging horizontal networks are more robust in areas where local communities and women have a tradition of organizing. However, these networks remain fairly unstable. The assistance is mostly channeled centrally, strengthening hierarchical ties and leading to distortions in the distribution of resources.

The #MeToo movement in Hong Kong emerged in late 2017, subsequently converged with the Anti-Extradition Law protest in 2019, and evolved into the #ProtestToo campaign against police violence and sexual assult. This essay traces the development of the #MeToo movement and analyzes the collaboration among the government, civil society, and the media in fostering the movement to combat sexual violence. It argues that whether the collaborative model succeeds or fails depends upon sociocultural and political circumstances: the failure of existing measures in preventing, investigating, and prosecuting the alleged sexual assaults inflicted on protesters in 2019 reveals how a shift to authoritarian governance may cripple the established anti–sexual violence collaboration.

Under what conditions are voters likely to invoke gender-trait stereotypes and ethnic biases when they evaluate the performance of local political leaders? We test arguments from role congruity and social identity theories and employ intersectional analysis to explore voter reliance on gender-trait stereotypes and ethnic biases across four diverse Russian regions. We find that the structure of the regional economy matters for the reduction of gender-trait stereotypes, while spatial and labor market integration matters for the dissipation of ethnic favoritism in leader evaluation. Our findings have important implications for policy makers aiming to reduce political biases in diverse contexts. On the one hand, we encourage scholars to pay careful attention to stereotypes of underrepresented social groups and evaluate how they can translate into understanding the traits associated with good leadership. On the other hand, we demonstrate that the roots of social biases stem from complex structural phenomena, such as limited labor opportunities for women and minorities, and thus require transformative political and economic changes.

Over the last two decades, Latin America has witnessed a massive expansion of resource extraction. One of the most significant countermovements to emerge out of this context in Ecuador features a strong base and leadership of indigenous women from the Amazon. In their collective effort to resist extractivism, Amazonian women have drawn from elements of ecofeminist discourse and, in the process, situated their own claims within the broader indigenous territorial struggle. Ecofeminism has been transformed through this allyship as well, becoming more inclusive of indigenous women's perspectives. To shed light on these complex relationships, this article applies the framework of “partial connection” from feminist anthropology. It shows how postcolonial encounters between the state, missionaries, environmental activists, and indigenous communities in the Amazon carved out unique spaces for indigenous self-organization and politics. The historical analysis of such spaces, I argue, is crucial for grasping the allyship between Amazonian women and ecofeminists today. Rooted in a combination of positions that are partially, asymmetrically, and ambiguously connected, the allyship between Amazonian women and ecofeminists is best understood as a form of partially connected relationship.

The #MeToo movement has shaken Korea over the last two years (Hasunuma and Shin 2019). Prosecutor Seo Ji-hyun's public testimony in January 2018 charged a former Ministry of Justice official with sexual harassment and catalyzed the #MeToo movement. Hundreds of Korean women came forward and spoke up about being sexually abused by powerful men. Social media platforms were flooded with hashtags such as #WithYou to support the movement and to express solidarity with victims of sexual violence. Women have taken to the streets for months demanding government action to prevent and punish sexual violence.

The #MeToo movement gained global prominence after Hollywood celebrities came forward with their experiences of sexual violence and encouraged others to do the same. This was by no means the first time a woman had told the world of her experience of sexual violation, but this time, the powerful were paying attention: “Women have been saying these things forever. It is the response to them that has changed” (MacKinnon 2020, 7). High-quality investigative journalists vetted the women's accounts and provided more stories of sexual abuse and predation. Many survivors have since come forward with their own names and their perpetrators’ names, leading some prominent men to be deprived of their fame and positions of power. The #MeToo movement makes two things matter and count: what the victims say and what the perpetrators did. It has raised the perpetrators’ accountability and the victims’ credibility and reversed the scenario of sexual violation: making the perpetrator, not the victim, pay for the sexual harm.

Countries around the world adopt different types of gender equality principles in government action plans, and these principles play a critical role in determining public policies regarding gender issues. International actors may prod countries in this direction; these actors include regional international parliaments. However, the power of regional international parliaments varies, allowing us to investigate the extent to which they have an impact on national governments’ adoption of policy frameworks for gender equality. This study analyzes the impact of regional international parliaments on governments’ gender equality policy frameworks. A three-dimension scale was developed to measure the degree to which governments have developed policy frameworks for gender equality. In multivariate modeling using a broad range of control variables, the study finds that the strength of regional international parliaments has a robust impact on governments’ policy frameworks for gender equality.