The pandemic and post-pandemic context further threatens the creation and implementation of women’s rights laws at a time when they are most needed. Violence against women has skyrocketed while social and political upheaval diverts domestic and international resources away from managing this crisis. The articles in this virtual special issue from Politics & Gender offer diverse ways of conceptualizing and measuring implementation across issue areas and regions. The authors show that sustained advocacy efforts are needed to improve women’s rights policies and laws.Implementing them requires increasing commitment, capacity, and funding that has become increasingly scarce.

In “International Organizations, Nongovernmental Organizations, and Police Implementation of Domestic Violence Policies in Liberia and Nicaragua,” Peace A. Medie and Shannon Drysdale Walsh develop the concept of the transnational implementation process and employ it to identify two patterns of international and domestic influence on implementation in Liberia and Nicaragua.

Lenita Friedenvall and Madeleine Ramberg’s “Implementing Gender Mainstreaming in Swedish Model Municipalities” demonstrates obstacles to implementing gender mainstreaming in Sweden, namely, the lack of political will, perceptions that it is not necessary, and competition between gender equality perspectives and other perspectives.

Nana Akua Anyidoho, Gordon Crawford, and Peace A. Medie’s “The Role of Women’s Movements in the Implementation of Gender-Based Violence Laws,” focuses on Ghana to explore the effects of social movements on the implementation of women’s rights laws, namely, on the country’s 2007 Domestic Violence Act.

In “Implementing Inclusion: Gender Quotas, Inequality, and Backlash in Kenya,” Marie Berry, Yolande Bouka, and Mothoni Kamuri highlight the unintended consequences of quota laws, specifically, patriarchal backlash in response to women’s entry into previously male-dominated spaces in Kenya.

In “Women and Postconflict Security: A Study of Police Response to Domestic Violence in Liberia,” Peace A. Medie provides insights into the post-conflict response to violence against women and shows how police reform efforts after the Liberian conflict have shaped police performance.

Celeste Montoya’s article, “International Initiative and Domestic Reforms: European Union Efforts to Combat Violence against Women” reveals that, while limited local capacity can stunt the implementation of women’s rights laws, it can be improved through efforts including international organizations that engage in capacity-building strategies, such as resource distribution and the facilitation of transnational networks.

Soumita Basu, in “The UN Security Council and the Political Economy of the WPS Resolutions,” analyzes the most salient themes in the political economy of the women, peace, and security resolutions, namely funding, economic rights of women, and neoliberal peacebuilding, and the materiality of the Security Council, arguing that more resources are needed to implement the women, peace, and security resolutions.

In “A Law on Paper Only: Electoral Rules, Parties, and the Persistent Underrepresentation of Women in Brazilian Legislatures,” Kristin Wylie and Pedro dos Santos show how party dynamics and electoral rules together undermined the effectiveness of Brazil’s gender quota, arguing that reform efforts should target both electoral rules and subnational party structures in order to enhance women’s political representation.

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- Peace Medie (University of Bristol) and Shannon Drysdale Walsh (University of Minnesota Duluth) 

We are grateful for the support of the American Political Science Association for funding a workshop on women’s rights and implementation that enabled collaboration among authors for some of these articles.

This collection is available free of charge until the end of February 2021.