Women’s rights advocates and movements play an important role during political transitions, shaping feminist outcomes following these transitions. Women are also often at the forefront of many pro-democratic mobilizations and struggles for political change (Baldez Reference Baldez2002; Goetz Reference Goetz2009; Viterna and Fallon Reference Viterna and Fallon2008; Waylen Reference Waylen2007; Reference Waylen, Krook and Mackay2011). Yet this participation is not without costs, and one core cost remains undertheorized in the literature: targeted violence against women precisely because of their gender and political engagement.
This essay sheds light on the violence that women face as political actors during moments of political transition, as well as in related processes such as postconflict reconstruction, institutional reform, and constitution-making. Recognizing the applicability of violence against women in politics and activism (VAWIP-A), I argue that scholars would benefit from distinguishing between the broader political violence that often accompanies transitional periods — characterized by uncertainty, contestation, and institutional fragility — and the specifically gendered forms of violence directed at politically active women. Such violence is not merely a by-product of political upheaval or authoritarianism. Rather, it is strategically deployed to exclude women from political participation and decision-making, particularly at critical junctures when political institutions and governance structures are being negotiated with enduring consequences for the eventual distribution of power and rights.
VAWIP-A is a particularly useful analytical framework, as violence against politically active women during transitional moments is not confined to elected officials or political candidates. Rather, it encompasses a broad spectrum of women engaged in shaping the transition, including journalists, human rights defenders, lawyers, academics, as well as women seeking or holding political office. This broader lens is significant in transitional — and pending transitional — contexts precisely because the struggle is not only over who wins office, but over who can speak, organize, make claims, and set the agenda for future democratic governance. Feminist scholars therefore need to pay closer attention to the strategic use of violence against politically active women during periods of political transition, as well as to the consequences of overlooking the gendered dimensions of such violence.
Women and Political Transitions: Feminist Mobilization and Violent Backlash
Although feminist activists and women’s rights advocates are often at the forefront of pro-democratic mobilization, they operate within deeply patriarchal and authoritarian political and institutional structures.Footnote
1 Their demands for transformative change challenge entrenched power relations and threaten established political interests, making them prime targets of resistance and backlash from actors determined to preserve existing hierarchies or advance competing agendas that run counter to feminist aspirations (Brechenmacher, Jones, and Zihnioğlu Reference Brechenmacher, Jones and Zihnioğlu2024). Thus, transitions and pending transitions can intensify VAWIP-A since violence is utilized as an instrument of political exclusion at a time of intense political contestation and negotiation. Importantly, even oppositional political groups during transitions may converge over their rejection of gender-egalitarian ideals and women’s political agency.
Such gendered political violence manifests in both offline and online arenas, generating important short- and long-term consequences for women’s political participation and influence. Like other forms of political violence, this violence takes multiple forms, ranging from the arrest, intimidation, and physical targeting of women political activists to reputational attacks, sexualized harassment, doxxing, threats against family members, and coordinated online abuse. Perpetrated by diverse actors, including both state and nonstate actors, a key objective of such violence is to deter women’s political participation and engagement, disrupt coalition-building efforts, and delegitimize feminist agendas, thereby weakening the transformative potential of women’s efforts for democracy and equality.
At present, several Muslim-majority countries are experiencing either transitional moments or what I call “pending transitions” — periods in which pro-democracy advocates have clearly contested the legitimacy of the authoritarian regime, while laying the groundwork for democratic change. Women have played prominent roles in these pro-democratic mobilizations, reflecting both their political agency and their interest in shaping their political realities, including efforts to usher in transitions away from authoritarian regimes that have long relegated them to second-class citizenship. However, women’s sustained resistance and political organizing have been met with extensive gendered backlash. As a scholar of gender and politics in Muslim contexts, I approach these dynamics with attention to how religion, nationalism, or narratives around “moral order,” “peace,” or “unity” are instrumentalized to limit women’s political authority — without treating Islam as a causal explanation for violence.
To illustrate these dynamics, I briefly draw on two cases from Bangladesh and Iran, where women’s active participation in pro-democracy protests and mobilization has been met with high levels of online harassment and offline intimidation, ultimately aimed at sidelining them from the political sphere. Women’s political participation during such pivotal historical moments, while welcomed by diverse sections of their respective societies, has nonetheless threatened longstanding patriarchal power structures, provoking reactive backlash against women and their ideals. The unprecedented levels of violence directed at women seeking transformative democratic change help explain why women-led protests and transitions often fail to produce gender-equitable outcomes in the posttransition period. Thus, VAWIP-A works to suppress meaningful democratic transition by preemptively facilitating women’s political exclusion while also hindering effective coalition building around feminist agendas at precisely the moment when women’s political action can shape democratic outcomes.
Bangladesh’s Stalled Transition: From Street Protests to Electoral Exclusion
In late 2025, I arrived in Dhaka, Bangladesh, in the early morning hours to take part in a transnational convening organized by the transnational feminist solidarity network Women Living Under Muslim Laws (WLUML). The meeting was meant to create space for feminist exchange during transitional moments, particularly on how to translate feminist grassroots organizing for democracy and equality into meaningful gains in formal politics and lawmaking.
Coinciding with my arrival, however, a violent mob had set fire to the offices of the country’s two major independent newspapers, Prothom Alo and The Daily Star. By the next day, several feminist activists we were meant to meet were in hiding. Over the phone, women’s voices cracked as they said plainly what the attack communicated: this was intentional, and it was not safe to gather — certainly not to talk about feminist politics and transition. We postponed, and then — because women insisted — we reconvened a few days later with women journalists, activists, bloggers, scholars, and lawyers.
That room became a map of violence against women in politics outside formal office: a snapshot of VAWIP-A in real time. Women journalists described coordinated harassment and intimidation that was plainly gendered — many were targeted not for what they wrote, but for being women in public-facing political work (Transparency International Bangladesh 2025). While the arson attack on the newspaper offices was not explicitly gendered, women journalists described how it nevertheless became gendered in its effects since their families grew hesitant to let them continue what was now framed as “unsafe” work, raising the personal costs of staying visible.
Minoritized women described an even narrower margin of safety. Indigenous women, in particular, spoke about how identity itself became a trigger for political punishment. One participant told us: “Indigenous women participated in the July protests alongside everyone else in Bangladesh… we paid the price too. But now I am targeted merely because of my identity as an indigenous woman activist. The right-wing has effectively succeeded in silencing me and my sisters.” What she was naming was not only fear but enforced withdrawal — an effort to decide who gets to remain visible in the new political order.
The “July protests” she referred to were the July 2024 uprising that toppled Sheikh Hasina after more than a decade in power. Women — especially university students and garment workers — were at the forefront of the street protests and the broader pro-democracy mobilization. Hasina did not leave without unleashing terror in the final weeks of her rule, but her departure still opened a familiar transitional script: a dictator falls, an interim government is formed (led by Nobel laureate Muhammad Yunus), and elections are promised as the mechanism for democratic repair. Those elections were scheduled for February 2026.
Yet this opening stalled in a way that is also familiar: women helped make the transition possible, and then the transition entailed violence that worked to sideline women from the political sphere. What unfolded in the months that followed was organized, strategic intimidation aimed at politically active women across roles — activists, journalists, student leaders, bloggers, and aspiring candidates and party women. Even women who were involved in the interim government, such as members of the Women’s Affairs Reform Commission, were not spared from violence, forcing some into hiding as a result of their efforts.
The perpetrator landscape was mixed. Religious conservative forces and parties — most prominently Jamaat-e-Islami — mobilized a familiar gender order to rebuild authority, using conservative religious discourse to cast women’s political presence as social disorder and instruments of foreign intervention. But the backlash did not come only from expected places (Tasnine Anna Reference Tasnine Anna2026). In personal interviews, young women activists described hostility from young men too — including university students who had marched alongside them in the 2024 protests to topple the dictatorship. Instead of recognizing women as equal political partners and compatriots, this transitional moment — when coalition-building, exchange, and dialogue should have deepened — was marked by unprecedented attacks on women in public, often justified through policing women’s access to the public sphere as well as their dress (Das Reference Das2025; Saha Reference Saha2026). Such violence had a chilling effect on women’s political participation, as many felt that the transition and its aftermath represented a radical departure from their democratic ideals.
Such a chilling effect became visible during the February 2026 elections, when only seven women were elected to parliament — an unmistakable defeat given women’s central role in the 2024 protests. Women composed less than 4% of the total candidates (78 out of 1,981), with many resigning from candidacy shortly prior to the elections largely because of violence or the intentional sacrificing of women’s demands for political gains.Footnote
2 For instance, a glimmer of hope for young women activists was the newly established National Citizen Party (NCP) that had emerged directly from the 2024 student-led uprisings, and in which various women student leaders played critical roles and became outspoken about their democratic ambitions for Bangladesh. During the campaigning period, however, the party’s male leadership not only failed to support women’s candidacy but also prioritized strategic electoral gains over its own women constituents.
In an interview, a young woman NCP parliamentary candidate and student leader told me that her initial excitement about running for office and delivering change had turned into disillusionment, given her party’s failure to support and protect her. Just days before our meeting, a fellow woman NCP candidate had died by suicide, understood by her colleagues as the result of organized cyberbullying, doxxing, and gendered online attacks (Prothom Alo Reference Alo2025). These attacks are especially harmful to women, for whom reputation and family honor raise the personal and social costs of political participation in ways men rarely face. While the party leadership publicly condemned the attacks that preceded the suicide, my interviewee said she no longer felt safe campaigning for her parliamentary seat. Her main source of support had become her husband, who — aware of the orchestrated attacks and violence against politically active women — refused to leave her side (personal interview, December 2025).
Just weeks before the elections, several high-profile NCP women candidates resigned from the party and chose to run as independents, drastically decreasing their chances of being elected in Bangladesh’s party-dominated electoral environment. The women stated publicly that their resignations were linked to male leaders’ political alignment with religious fundamentalist Jamaat-e-Islami — an alliance read as trading away feminist demands for electoral gains and effectively sidelining women and their priorities. Bangladesh’s transition, while marked by various important gains, has had deeply gendered implications for its women. It is an example of a stalled transition when violence and intimidation narrow who can safely convert street presence into meaningful political representation.
Fearing “Woman, Life, Freedom”: Anti-Egalitarian Convergence in Iran
As in Bangladesh, women in Iran have also played exemplary roles in pro-democracy uprisings. One of the most significant was the 2022–23 “Woman, Life, Freedom” protests, which marked a watershed moment in Iran’s contemporary history. It was the first time that large segments of Iranian society — led largely by women and youth — poured into the streets demanding radical democratic change and an end to decades-long theocratic rule. The democratic and egalitarian aspirations of the protesters, and the movement’s progressive slogan, resonated globally as they confronted authoritarianism and directly challenged a state built on institutionalized gender discrimination.
While Iran, as of this writing, has yet to enter a formal transition, feminists and other pro-democracy forces have been preparing the ground for one since at least the 2022 mass protests, with intentional activism aimed at designing new institutional structures and frameworks.Footnote
3 Precisely because women’s political agency carries transformative potential for a future Iran, influential women have faced sustained gendered violence and intimidation from a wide range of actors (Chenoweth and Marks Reference Chenoweth and Marks2022). The intentional targeting of women activists has taken a recognizable VAWIP-A form aimed at increasing the costs of women’s active participation and curtailing their leadership at an influential moment of Iran’s political history. Various forms of violence have been perpetrated by state and nonstate actors both online and offline against some of the country’s most outspoken and politically active women.
Elsewhere, I have argued that the women-led protests of 2022 in Iran were met with extensive state backlash, even as feminists sought new ways to resist (Tajali Reference Tajali2024; Reference Tajali2025). State backlash and securitization of women’s rights movements have been central to the Islamic Republic’s political toolkit for years. This reflects the ruling elite’s limited tolerance of politically active women — including human rights lawyers, journalists, and activists — and its efforts to suppress dissent and public outspokenness (Berkeley Human Rights Center 2025; Tajali Reference Tajali2022).
Yet the forms of VAWIP-A that have emerged in recent years extend beyond longstanding dynamics of state repression. Rather, they reflect a convergence of anti-egalitarian forces that, despite their ideological differences, share an interest in limiting women’s political influence and sidelining feminist demands. This dynamic is evident not only among regime supporters but also within segments of the secular opposition. For example, some elements of the Iranian pro-monarchy groups have demonstrated a limited commitment to women’s political leadership and feminist demands, which they consider to be too divisive or not the right time, hindering “unity for regime change” (Keshavarzian and Stewart Reference Keshavarzian and Stewart2025, 167). Reza Pahlavi, the exiled son of Iran’s last monarch and a prominent opposition figure, removed the slogan “Woman, Life, Freedom” from his social media accounts to erase the feminist vision that has animated Iran’s pro-democracy movement (Fakhravar Reference Fakhravar2026).
As in other politically volatile contexts, social media has become a double-edged space for Iranian women: it fosters coordination and awareness-raising but is also a primary arena for tech-facilitated gender-based violence (TFGBV). TFGBV is a key modality of VAWIP-A precisely because it is scalable, fast, public, and often anonymous. In recent years, politically active women in Iran have been subjected to unprecedented levels of online attacks, ranging from doxxing to sexualized smear campaigns, threats, and coordinated harassment, aimed at discrediting women’s activism and deterring others from joining. Mhajne, Tabor, and Traves (Reference Mhajne, Tabor and Traves2025) show that this violence comes not only from pro-regime actors; it is also waged by anti-regime networks, including secular monarchists. As they argue, regime supporters and monarchists pursue different political projects while employing similar strategies to silence and delegitimize women. While men are also targeted online, the attacks against women are distinct in form and intensity — sexualized, reputation-focused, and informed by the social costs women disproportionately bear (Mhajne, Tabor, and TravesReference Mhajne, Tabor and Traves2025).
One example that captures how TFGBV and offline coercion work together is the case of prominent feminist activist Mahdieh Golroo. Following her arrest for activism in Iran, Golroo posted a video statement in 2020 describing threats made by the hardline Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps. In it, she described how Iranian officials warned that if she refused to cooperate with them, they would release private photos and videos to shame and discredit her. She refused the blackmail and made explicit what many women experience but cannot safely name: “I have seen many women in prison being pressured, by means of threatening to publish a personal video, a photo or chat, to confess to something they had not done.” She framed the threat as both political and gendered — an attack on reputation that carries different consequences for women than for men. “Publishing private videos does not destroy us,” she wrote, “but further shows the obscenity and filth of the Islamic Republic” (Shahrabi Reference Shahrabi2020).
State violence forced Golroo into exile, where she has continued her pro-democracy and feminist work. Yet displacement did not end the attacks; it widened the fronts on which she was targeted. Her outspoken feminism — and her refusal to subordinate women’s demands to narrower projects of regime change — made her a focal point not only for state-aligned repression but also for misogynistic harassment from parts of the opposition ecosystem, including pro-monarchy networks. The trolling and attacks on her online — especially gendered slurs and the circulation of unflattering, demeaning images — reflect a repertoire typical of VAWIP-A.
Unfortunately, countless other politically active women committed to democratization and freedom have faced similar violence from ideologically diverse sets of actors, all of whom converge in their interest in sidelining women and the egalitarian changes they represent. The consequence of such violence is not only personal harm to the individual women activists, but also a structural narrowing of the political field in a moment of potential transformation. Because this violence is often anonymous, easily scalable, and rarely sanctioned on social media platforms in the current climate, it becomes especially effective at deterrence — signaling to other women activists that public-facing political work may be too costly for their personal lives or political ambitions.
Conclusion
This essay highlights the implications of gendered violence targeting politically active women during moments of political transition — an understudied dynamic in the VAWIP literature. Because these moments are volatile and contested, with multiple actors competing for power and pursuing divergent interests, the violence women face is often overlooked — treated as expected unrest rather than recognized as a gendered strategy of political exclusion. The literature on gendered backlash suggests that this violence is often reactive: it intensifies precisely because women take on prominent roles in democratization efforts and advance transformative demands that threaten historically patriarchal and unequal institutions (Mansbridge and Shames Reference Mansbridge and Shames2008). Thus, a clear impact of VAWIP-A in democratization processes is that it closes the space between street politics and institutional politics, making women’s public participation costly at every step of the pipeline.
Feminist activists and pro-democracy agents, however, are not silent in the face of such gendered violence. The same advocates, ranging from lawyers to feminists and human rights defenders, are actively seeking to raise awareness and equip women and their allies to respond to and curb such violence, recognizing the negative implications of such violence for democracy and freedom. For instance, women’s rights organizations and many international bodies offer training to politically active women, including candidates running for office, on how to protect themselves from such gendered violence, whether occurring online or offline.
Given the ineffectiveness of social media platforms in removing or sanctioning such targeted abuse, various countries and regional organizations such as the European Union have also adopted policies to criminalize and address TFGBV (Better Politics Foundation 2025; Restrepo Sanín Reference Restrepo Sanín2018). Notably, Bangladesh adopted a Cyber Security Ordinance (CSA) in 2024 that punishes sexual harassment and revenge porn with up to five years in prison alongside a fine (Bangladesh Legal Aid and Services Trust [BLAST] 2025). The Bangladesh Police Headquarters has also established the Police Cyber Support Centre for Women that provides a hotline for women to report cases of TFGBV. Between 2020 and 2024, more than 42,000 complaints of cyber harassment were filed, though it is unclear to what extent such reports yielded punishment or sanctioning (Sharma Reference Sharma2026). Thus, although there remains a long road ahead in addressing such extensive and targeted violence, feminist scholars, activists, and legal advocates are already documenting it, naming it, and building strategies to prevent it and secure redress.
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Women’s rights advocates and movements play an important role during political transitions, shaping feminist outcomes following these transitions. Women are also often at the forefront of many pro-democratic mobilizations and struggles for political change (Baldez Reference Baldez2002; Goetz Reference Goetz2009; Viterna and Fallon Reference Viterna and Fallon2008; Waylen Reference Waylen2007; Reference Waylen, Krook and Mackay2011). Yet this participation is not without costs, and one core cost remains undertheorized in the literature: targeted violence against women precisely because of their gender and political engagement.
This essay sheds light on the violence that women face as political actors during moments of political transition, as well as in related processes such as postconflict reconstruction, institutional reform, and constitution-making. Recognizing the applicability of violence against women in politics and activism (VAWIP-A), I argue that scholars would benefit from distinguishing between the broader political violence that often accompanies transitional periods — characterized by uncertainty, contestation, and institutional fragility — and the specifically gendered forms of violence directed at politically active women. Such violence is not merely a by-product of political upheaval or authoritarianism. Rather, it is strategically deployed to exclude women from political participation and decision-making, particularly at critical junctures when political institutions and governance structures are being negotiated with enduring consequences for the eventual distribution of power and rights.
VAWIP-A is a particularly useful analytical framework, as violence against politically active women during transitional moments is not confined to elected officials or political candidates. Rather, it encompasses a broad spectrum of women engaged in shaping the transition, including journalists, human rights defenders, lawyers, academics, as well as women seeking or holding political office. This broader lens is significant in transitional — and pending transitional — contexts precisely because the struggle is not only over who wins office, but over who can speak, organize, make claims, and set the agenda for future democratic governance. Feminist scholars therefore need to pay closer attention to the strategic use of violence against politically active women during periods of political transition, as well as to the consequences of overlooking the gendered dimensions of such violence.
Women and Political Transitions: Feminist Mobilization and Violent Backlash
Although feminist activists and women’s rights advocates are often at the forefront of pro-democratic mobilization, they operate within deeply patriarchal and authoritarian political and institutional structures.Footnote 1 Their demands for transformative change challenge entrenched power relations and threaten established political interests, making them prime targets of resistance and backlash from actors determined to preserve existing hierarchies or advance competing agendas that run counter to feminist aspirations (Brechenmacher, Jones, and Zihnioğlu Reference Brechenmacher, Jones and Zihnioğlu2024). Thus, transitions and pending transitions can intensify VAWIP-A since violence is utilized as an instrument of political exclusion at a time of intense political contestation and negotiation. Importantly, even oppositional political groups during transitions may converge over their rejection of gender-egalitarian ideals and women’s political agency.
Such gendered political violence manifests in both offline and online arenas, generating important short- and long-term consequences for women’s political participation and influence. Like other forms of political violence, this violence takes multiple forms, ranging from the arrest, intimidation, and physical targeting of women political activists to reputational attacks, sexualized harassment, doxxing, threats against family members, and coordinated online abuse. Perpetrated by diverse actors, including both state and nonstate actors, a key objective of such violence is to deter women’s political participation and engagement, disrupt coalition-building efforts, and delegitimize feminist agendas, thereby weakening the transformative potential of women’s efforts for democracy and equality.
At present, several Muslim-majority countries are experiencing either transitional moments or what I call “pending transitions” — periods in which pro-democracy advocates have clearly contested the legitimacy of the authoritarian regime, while laying the groundwork for democratic change. Women have played prominent roles in these pro-democratic mobilizations, reflecting both their political agency and their interest in shaping their political realities, including efforts to usher in transitions away from authoritarian regimes that have long relegated them to second-class citizenship. However, women’s sustained resistance and political organizing have been met with extensive gendered backlash. As a scholar of gender and politics in Muslim contexts, I approach these dynamics with attention to how religion, nationalism, or narratives around “moral order,” “peace,” or “unity” are instrumentalized to limit women’s political authority — without treating Islam as a causal explanation for violence.
To illustrate these dynamics, I briefly draw on two cases from Bangladesh and Iran, where women’s active participation in pro-democracy protests and mobilization has been met with high levels of online harassment and offline intimidation, ultimately aimed at sidelining them from the political sphere. Women’s political participation during such pivotal historical moments, while welcomed by diverse sections of their respective societies, has nonetheless threatened longstanding patriarchal power structures, provoking reactive backlash against women and their ideals. The unprecedented levels of violence directed at women seeking transformative democratic change help explain why women-led protests and transitions often fail to produce gender-equitable outcomes in the posttransition period. Thus, VAWIP-A works to suppress meaningful democratic transition by preemptively facilitating women’s political exclusion while also hindering effective coalition building around feminist agendas at precisely the moment when women’s political action can shape democratic outcomes.
Bangladesh’s Stalled Transition: From Street Protests to Electoral Exclusion
In late 2025, I arrived in Dhaka, Bangladesh, in the early morning hours to take part in a transnational convening organized by the transnational feminist solidarity network Women Living Under Muslim Laws (WLUML). The meeting was meant to create space for feminist exchange during transitional moments, particularly on how to translate feminist grassroots organizing for democracy and equality into meaningful gains in formal politics and lawmaking.
Coinciding with my arrival, however, a violent mob had set fire to the offices of the country’s two major independent newspapers, Prothom Alo and The Daily Star. By the next day, several feminist activists we were meant to meet were in hiding. Over the phone, women’s voices cracked as they said plainly what the attack communicated: this was intentional, and it was not safe to gather — certainly not to talk about feminist politics and transition. We postponed, and then — because women insisted — we reconvened a few days later with women journalists, activists, bloggers, scholars, and lawyers.
That room became a map of violence against women in politics outside formal office: a snapshot of VAWIP-A in real time. Women journalists described coordinated harassment and intimidation that was plainly gendered — many were targeted not for what they wrote, but for being women in public-facing political work (Transparency International Bangladesh 2025). While the arson attack on the newspaper offices was not explicitly gendered, women journalists described how it nevertheless became gendered in its effects since their families grew hesitant to let them continue what was now framed as “unsafe” work, raising the personal costs of staying visible.
Minoritized women described an even narrower margin of safety. Indigenous women, in particular, spoke about how identity itself became a trigger for political punishment. One participant told us: “Indigenous women participated in the July protests alongside everyone else in Bangladesh… we paid the price too. But now I am targeted merely because of my identity as an indigenous woman activist. The right-wing has effectively succeeded in silencing me and my sisters.” What she was naming was not only fear but enforced withdrawal — an effort to decide who gets to remain visible in the new political order.
The “July protests” she referred to were the July 2024 uprising that toppled Sheikh Hasina after more than a decade in power. Women — especially university students and garment workers — were at the forefront of the street protests and the broader pro-democracy mobilization. Hasina did not leave without unleashing terror in the final weeks of her rule, but her departure still opened a familiar transitional script: a dictator falls, an interim government is formed (led by Nobel laureate Muhammad Yunus), and elections are promised as the mechanism for democratic repair. Those elections were scheduled for February 2026.
Yet this opening stalled in a way that is also familiar: women helped make the transition possible, and then the transition entailed violence that worked to sideline women from the political sphere. What unfolded in the months that followed was organized, strategic intimidation aimed at politically active women across roles — activists, journalists, student leaders, bloggers, and aspiring candidates and party women. Even women who were involved in the interim government, such as members of the Women’s Affairs Reform Commission, were not spared from violence, forcing some into hiding as a result of their efforts.
The perpetrator landscape was mixed. Religious conservative forces and parties — most prominently Jamaat-e-Islami — mobilized a familiar gender order to rebuild authority, using conservative religious discourse to cast women’s political presence as social disorder and instruments of foreign intervention. But the backlash did not come only from expected places (Tasnine Anna Reference Tasnine Anna2026). In personal interviews, young women activists described hostility from young men too — including university students who had marched alongside them in the 2024 protests to topple the dictatorship. Instead of recognizing women as equal political partners and compatriots, this transitional moment — when coalition-building, exchange, and dialogue should have deepened — was marked by unprecedented attacks on women in public, often justified through policing women’s access to the public sphere as well as their dress (Das Reference Das2025; Saha Reference Saha2026). Such violence had a chilling effect on women’s political participation, as many felt that the transition and its aftermath represented a radical departure from their democratic ideals.
Such a chilling effect became visible during the February 2026 elections, when only seven women were elected to parliament — an unmistakable defeat given women’s central role in the 2024 protests. Women composed less than 4% of the total candidates (78 out of 1,981), with many resigning from candidacy shortly prior to the elections largely because of violence or the intentional sacrificing of women’s demands for political gains.Footnote 2 For instance, a glimmer of hope for young women activists was the newly established National Citizen Party (NCP) that had emerged directly from the 2024 student-led uprisings, and in which various women student leaders played critical roles and became outspoken about their democratic ambitions for Bangladesh. During the campaigning period, however, the party’s male leadership not only failed to support women’s candidacy but also prioritized strategic electoral gains over its own women constituents.
In an interview, a young woman NCP parliamentary candidate and student leader told me that her initial excitement about running for office and delivering change had turned into disillusionment, given her party’s failure to support and protect her. Just days before our meeting, a fellow woman NCP candidate had died by suicide, understood by her colleagues as the result of organized cyberbullying, doxxing, and gendered online attacks (Prothom Alo Reference Alo2025). These attacks are especially harmful to women, for whom reputation and family honor raise the personal and social costs of political participation in ways men rarely face. While the party leadership publicly condemned the attacks that preceded the suicide, my interviewee said she no longer felt safe campaigning for her parliamentary seat. Her main source of support had become her husband, who — aware of the orchestrated attacks and violence against politically active women — refused to leave her side (personal interview, December 2025).
Just weeks before the elections, several high-profile NCP women candidates resigned from the party and chose to run as independents, drastically decreasing their chances of being elected in Bangladesh’s party-dominated electoral environment. The women stated publicly that their resignations were linked to male leaders’ political alignment with religious fundamentalist Jamaat-e-Islami — an alliance read as trading away feminist demands for electoral gains and effectively sidelining women and their priorities. Bangladesh’s transition, while marked by various important gains, has had deeply gendered implications for its women. It is an example of a stalled transition when violence and intimidation narrow who can safely convert street presence into meaningful political representation.
Fearing “Woman, Life, Freedom”: Anti-Egalitarian Convergence in Iran
As in Bangladesh, women in Iran have also played exemplary roles in pro-democracy uprisings. One of the most significant was the 2022–23 “Woman, Life, Freedom” protests, which marked a watershed moment in Iran’s contemporary history. It was the first time that large segments of Iranian society — led largely by women and youth — poured into the streets demanding radical democratic change and an end to decades-long theocratic rule. The democratic and egalitarian aspirations of the protesters, and the movement’s progressive slogan, resonated globally as they confronted authoritarianism and directly challenged a state built on institutionalized gender discrimination.
While Iran, as of this writing, has yet to enter a formal transition, feminists and other pro-democracy forces have been preparing the ground for one since at least the 2022 mass protests, with intentional activism aimed at designing new institutional structures and frameworks.Footnote 3 Precisely because women’s political agency carries transformative potential for a future Iran, influential women have faced sustained gendered violence and intimidation from a wide range of actors (Chenoweth and Marks Reference Chenoweth and Marks2022). The intentional targeting of women activists has taken a recognizable VAWIP-A form aimed at increasing the costs of women’s active participation and curtailing their leadership at an influential moment of Iran’s political history. Various forms of violence have been perpetrated by state and nonstate actors both online and offline against some of the country’s most outspoken and politically active women.
Elsewhere, I have argued that the women-led protests of 2022 in Iran were met with extensive state backlash, even as feminists sought new ways to resist (Tajali Reference Tajali2024; Reference Tajali2025). State backlash and securitization of women’s rights movements have been central to the Islamic Republic’s political toolkit for years. This reflects the ruling elite’s limited tolerance of politically active women — including human rights lawyers, journalists, and activists — and its efforts to suppress dissent and public outspokenness (Berkeley Human Rights Center 2025; Tajali Reference Tajali2022).
Yet the forms of VAWIP-A that have emerged in recent years extend beyond longstanding dynamics of state repression. Rather, they reflect a convergence of anti-egalitarian forces that, despite their ideological differences, share an interest in limiting women’s political influence and sidelining feminist demands. This dynamic is evident not only among regime supporters but also within segments of the secular opposition. For example, some elements of the Iranian pro-monarchy groups have demonstrated a limited commitment to women’s political leadership and feminist demands, which they consider to be too divisive or not the right time, hindering “unity for regime change” (Keshavarzian and Stewart Reference Keshavarzian and Stewart2025, 167). Reza Pahlavi, the exiled son of Iran’s last monarch and a prominent opposition figure, removed the slogan “Woman, Life, Freedom” from his social media accounts to erase the feminist vision that has animated Iran’s pro-democracy movement (Fakhravar Reference Fakhravar2026).
As in other politically volatile contexts, social media has become a double-edged space for Iranian women: it fosters coordination and awareness-raising but is also a primary arena for tech-facilitated gender-based violence (TFGBV). TFGBV is a key modality of VAWIP-A precisely because it is scalable, fast, public, and often anonymous. In recent years, politically active women in Iran have been subjected to unprecedented levels of online attacks, ranging from doxxing to sexualized smear campaigns, threats, and coordinated harassment, aimed at discrediting women’s activism and deterring others from joining. Mhajne, Tabor, and Traves (Reference Mhajne, Tabor and Traves2025) show that this violence comes not only from pro-regime actors; it is also waged by anti-regime networks, including secular monarchists. As they argue, regime supporters and monarchists pursue different political projects while employing similar strategies to silence and delegitimize women. While men are also targeted online, the attacks against women are distinct in form and intensity — sexualized, reputation-focused, and informed by the social costs women disproportionately bear (Mhajne, Tabor, and TravesReference Mhajne, Tabor and Traves2025).
One example that captures how TFGBV and offline coercion work together is the case of prominent feminist activist Mahdieh Golroo. Following her arrest for activism in Iran, Golroo posted a video statement in 2020 describing threats made by the hardline Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps. In it, she described how Iranian officials warned that if she refused to cooperate with them, they would release private photos and videos to shame and discredit her. She refused the blackmail and made explicit what many women experience but cannot safely name: “I have seen many women in prison being pressured, by means of threatening to publish a personal video, a photo or chat, to confess to something they had not done.” She framed the threat as both political and gendered — an attack on reputation that carries different consequences for women than for men. “Publishing private videos does not destroy us,” she wrote, “but further shows the obscenity and filth of the Islamic Republic” (Shahrabi Reference Shahrabi2020).
State violence forced Golroo into exile, where she has continued her pro-democracy and feminist work. Yet displacement did not end the attacks; it widened the fronts on which she was targeted. Her outspoken feminism — and her refusal to subordinate women’s demands to narrower projects of regime change — made her a focal point not only for state-aligned repression but also for misogynistic harassment from parts of the opposition ecosystem, including pro-monarchy networks. The trolling and attacks on her online — especially gendered slurs and the circulation of unflattering, demeaning images — reflect a repertoire typical of VAWIP-A.
Unfortunately, countless other politically active women committed to democratization and freedom have faced similar violence from ideologically diverse sets of actors, all of whom converge in their interest in sidelining women and the egalitarian changes they represent. The consequence of such violence is not only personal harm to the individual women activists, but also a structural narrowing of the political field in a moment of potential transformation. Because this violence is often anonymous, easily scalable, and rarely sanctioned on social media platforms in the current climate, it becomes especially effective at deterrence — signaling to other women activists that public-facing political work may be too costly for their personal lives or political ambitions.
Conclusion
This essay highlights the implications of gendered violence targeting politically active women during moments of political transition — an understudied dynamic in the VAWIP literature. Because these moments are volatile and contested, with multiple actors competing for power and pursuing divergent interests, the violence women face is often overlooked — treated as expected unrest rather than recognized as a gendered strategy of political exclusion. The literature on gendered backlash suggests that this violence is often reactive: it intensifies precisely because women take on prominent roles in democratization efforts and advance transformative demands that threaten historically patriarchal and unequal institutions (Mansbridge and Shames Reference Mansbridge and Shames2008). Thus, a clear impact of VAWIP-A in democratization processes is that it closes the space between street politics and institutional politics, making women’s public participation costly at every step of the pipeline.
Feminist activists and pro-democracy agents, however, are not silent in the face of such gendered violence. The same advocates, ranging from lawyers to feminists and human rights defenders, are actively seeking to raise awareness and equip women and their allies to respond to and curb such violence, recognizing the negative implications of such violence for democracy and freedom. For instance, women’s rights organizations and many international bodies offer training to politically active women, including candidates running for office, on how to protect themselves from such gendered violence, whether occurring online or offline.
Given the ineffectiveness of social media platforms in removing or sanctioning such targeted abuse, various countries and regional organizations such as the European Union have also adopted policies to criminalize and address TFGBV (Better Politics Foundation 2025; Restrepo Sanín Reference Restrepo Sanín2018). Notably, Bangladesh adopted a Cyber Security Ordinance (CSA) in 2024 that punishes sexual harassment and revenge porn with up to five years in prison alongside a fine (Bangladesh Legal Aid and Services Trust [BLAST] 2025). The Bangladesh Police Headquarters has also established the Police Cyber Support Centre for Women that provides a hotline for women to report cases of TFGBV. Between 2020 and 2024, more than 42,000 complaints of cyber harassment were filed, though it is unclear to what extent such reports yielded punishment or sanctioning (Sharma Reference Sharma2026). Thus, although there remains a long road ahead in addressing such extensive and targeted violence, feminist scholars, activists, and legal advocates are already documenting it, naming it, and building strategies to prevent it and secure redress.