This is the Notes on Contributors for IDS Bulletin 55.1

Considerable progress has been seen in Ugandan women’s collective advocacy for their rights since independence. Notably, women activists’ efforts in the early 1990s culminated in the institutionalisation of gender equality in Uganda’s constitution and a subsequent resurgence of the women’s movement. Despite these efforts, certain egalitarian and inclusive policy reforms have been postponed, stripped of clauses that question patriarchal power, watered down, bureaucratically frustrated, or outrightly rejected. This article draws on ongoing contestations around the stalled Sexual Offences Bill, 2019 to address the following questions: How do we understand the current and recent swell of anti-feminist backlash? What motivates backlash against gender equity reforms? And what will it take to counter these oppositional forces? The article reveals overt and covert forms of backlash in the sexual offences legislative process, the ways in which gender justice actors countered these, and the implications for understanding and countering backlash in Uganda and beyond.

This article addresses the backlash against reproductive rights during Jair Bolsonaro’s government, focusing on access to legal abortions. Although access to abortion is quite restricted in Brazil, under Bolsonaro it was further curtailed through institutionalised spaces of power. This was met by counter-backlash actions, with an intensification of feminist activism in an attempt to secure an agenda of hard-won reproductive rights. To address this struggle for reproductive rights and against restrictions, we focus our analysis on the high-profile media case of an 11-year‑old girl, pregnant after being raped.

India is facing a period of seismic backlash against feminist and progressive politics and the pace of change, particularly over the last ten years, has been breakneck with serious consequences for women’s equality and human rights. Drawing on an examination of the reversals and pushbacks against women’s rights in three areas – the citizenship rights of Muslim women, the rights of domestic workers, and the impacts of restrictions on foreign funding on women’s rights organising – this article seeks to contribute not just to an understanding of the nature of the backlash faced by women’s rights in India, but also to the wider debates on backlash from global South feminist perspectives.

Este artículo resume lo aprendido a partir de una investigación dirigida por el Sur Global y diseñada para influir en la respuesta a la pandemia de Covid-19. Los estudios de casos proceden principalmente del programa Covid-19 Responses for Equity (CORE), financiado por el Centro Internacional de Investigaciones para el Desarrollo (IDRC). El artículo examina lo siguiente: (1) las características de la disposición de las organizaciones de investigación locales en tiempos de crisis; (2) la forma y la función del conocimiento apto para su aplicación en situaciones de emergencia; y (3) los procesos de conocimiento y las estrategias de participación para una movilización rápida. La disposición de las organizaciones dependía de la fuerza de las redes de las instituciones de investigación, del acceso a los principales responsables de la toma de decisiones o a las comunidades afectadas y de los recursos y capacidades que les permitieran movilizarse rápidamente. El conocimiento hiperlocal, combinado con metodologías de investigación inclusivas, facilita el posicionamiento de la investigación para su uso en emergencias. La pandemia ha demostrado que las organizaciones de investigación locales y nacionales están bien situadas para llevar a cabo investigaciones de gran impacto, ya sea como colaboradores críticos del gobierno o como agentes externos que abogan por el cambio.

يتناول هذا المقال الفرص والتحديات التي تواجه عملية إنتاج المعرفة وسن السياسات القائمة على الأدلة، والهادفة إلى إرساء نظم حماية إجتماعية أكثر شمولية وعدالة في المنطقة العربية. ويستند المقال إلى تجارب الباحثين/ات والناشطين/ات بعد جائحة كوفيد-19، ويناقش التحديات التي واجهوها خلال تلك الفترة. كما يتعمّق في الأسباب الجذرية لهذه التحديات والمرتبطة بعمليات جمع البيانات وتحليلها وربطها بالوقائع، إلى جانب المنهجيات والطرق المتبعة لإجراء البحوث، والتصنيف النمطي للباحثين/ات والمواضيع البحثية والممارسين/ات والناشطين/ات والمخرجات البحثية، بالإضافة إلى التوصيات السياسية الناتجة عنهم، والمساحات العامة التي يتفاعلون معها عند محاولة كسب التأييد والمدافعة لإجراء الإصلاحات الضرورية. ويقترح المقال حلولًا لدعم المناهضة ضد نهج "عنف الحداثة" المسيطر على عمليات صنع السياسات، مع اقتراح فكرة الابتعاد عن النماذج النمطية لإنتاج المعرفة وللمناصرة من أجل الحقوق الاجتماعية والاقتصادية في البلدان العربية لتصبح نماذجا أكثر محلية وإرتباطاً بخصوصية هذه البلدان.

At the onset of the Covid-19 pandemic, Women in Informal Employment: Globalizing and Organizing (WIEGO), a global research–action–policy network, collaborated with membership-based workers’ organisations and non‑governmental organisations to conduct a mixed methods, longitudinal study with nearly 2,000 informal workers across 11 cities in the global South and North. The research process underpins three of WIEGO’s core research principles, which include centring informal workers’ lived experience and knowledge, fostering collective ownership over the research process, and producing actionable evidence for advocacy. Drawing from the insights of researcher-activists, this article considers how WIEGO’s institutional readiness, highly nuanced and contextualised analyses, and attention to trust and care enabled a co-productive research process. Moreover, the article seeks to understand how these factors can potentially shape the broader objectives of research as both a capacity-building and mobilising tool and as a medium for translating knowledge for advocacy locally, nationally, and internationally.

Matopiba’s agricultural frontier has been at the centre of political and scientific debates since its establishment in 2015. However, the impact of agribusiness expansion and intensification on land distribution in the region has yet to be studied. How has the establishment of Matopiba affected commodity crop production and agrarian reform in the region? This article analyses historical trends in soybean and corn production, and recent developments across Matopiba microregions. These are then juxtaposed with data on agrarian reform at microregion level. The findings help to clarify the ways in which agricultural frontier expansion has been reliant on government support and reveal conflicting agricultural development at work in Matopiba. While commodity crop production has increased in Matopiba as expected, agrarian reform has halted. The few agrarian reform settlements that have been created are in areas with lower agricultural potential within the limits of Matopiba’s frontier.

This article explores how the agricultural frontier in Brazil is conceived and how it has been historically shaped by broader socioeconomic changes. It considers the planning process linked to the Cerrado occupation during the military dictatorship (1964–85). The article analyses understandings of the frontier that connected it to concerns about ‘demographic gaps’ and shaped an agenda of state-led ‘national integration’ that neglected local populations. This analysis is linked to recent transnational real estate activities in Matopiba to document how control over the territory persists but is now driven by different protagonists and logics. We document how Brazilian agribusinesses, in association with transnational capital, have created transnational agricultural real estate companies and acquired land in frontier areas such as Matopiba. Although the violence of expropriation and deforestation persists, there are new financial mechanisms that condition the agricultural frontier and exert control over territory, quite unlike previous forms of state-led occupation.

In this article, we reflect on the work of contemporary Brazilian indigenous artists and philosophers who have developed an Amerindian critique of the Anthropocene and the climate emergency. Based on research co-produced by the Another Sky research project, poetry, performance, and orality are discussed as routes of an emergent epistemological turn in the face of the inevitable challenges that lie ahead. Through indigenous thought expressed in aesthetic manifestations, we discuss critical analysis of the current situation, as well as imaginaries of future social and ecological conditions needed for climate justice, epistemiological justice, and protection of life in the broadest sense.