Feminist Activism as Epistemological Threat to Power

The first threat that feminist activism poses to existing power holders is epistemological: feminist activists necessarily challenge existing political orders and the ways in which such orders traditionally have been justified. Most contemporary states and elites base their authority via claims and policies grounded in security, order, and protection — frequently underpinned by coercion, militarization, and patriarchal authority (Pateman Reference Pateman1988; Tickner Reference Tickner1992; Young Reference Young2003). Feminist activists and WHRDs contest these claims, offering alternative understandings of security grounded in care, interdependence, and mutual responsibility (Feminist Peace Initiative and IGLI 2025; IM-Defensoras 2023). In doing so, they challenge the status quo and expose the dysfunction and existing forms of power and security.

This epistemological challenge is particularly threatening to authoritarian and populist regimes whose legitimacy rests on affective and moral claims rather than institutional procedures — i.e., on the idea that the leader governs in the people’s name and in the people’s interests (Mudde and Kaltwasser Reference Mudde and Kaltwasser2017; Norris and Inglehart Reference Norris and Inglehart2019). Feminist activists who contest those claims are not just opponents within a system; they are threats to the system’s ability to present itself as legitimate. As Neumann (Reference Neumann2024) documents in Nicaragua, the Ortega regime’s targeting of feminist organizations was a deliberate strategy rather than a byproduct of generalized repression — it reflected a recognition that feminist mobilization threatened the regime’s self-presentation as a revolutionary and liberatory project in ways that other forms of opposition did not. The regime framed feminist activists as foreign-funded “agents of imperialism,” precisely because their challenge cut to the moral core of the government’s claim to power (Graff and Korolczuk Reference Graff and Korolczuk2021; Neumann Reference Neumann2024).

Similar dynamics are visible in El Salvador, where feminist activists and journalists who document ongoing violence against women and human rights abuses under President Nayib Bukele’s State of Exception have been doxxed, surveilled, and driven into exile. Their mobilization challenges President Bukele’s claims that incarcerating nearly 100,000 gang members makes the country the safest in the hemisphere, including for women (Zulver and Ruelle Reference Zulver and Ruelle2025). By refusing to accept what Iris Marion Young (Reference Young2003) refers to as the “gendered logic of masculinist protection,” feminist activists are targeted with violence. In both Nicaragua and El Salvador, feminists, their ideas, and the ways in which they organize threaten the claims upon which authoritarian leaders have staked their legitimacy.

There are many examples of this pattern in authoritarian and transitional contexts. Following the 2021 military coup in Myanmar, for instance, women protesters deployed htamein (sarong) garments as barricades, drawing on widely held beliefs that contact with women’s clothing diminishes men’s spiritual power. This tactic did more than disrupt the military movement: it exposed the fragility and constructed nature of the gendered beliefs underpinning military authority. By revealing that the military’s power rested, in part, on symbolic and patriarchal claims rather than inevitability or strength, these feminist tactics and campaigns constituted an epistemological rupture — a public demonstration that the regime’s authority was ultimately fragile. The regime’s violent crackdown — which killed more than 800 civilians, detained thousands more, and involved the public desecration of the garments — was not only about restoring order; it was about reasserting the credibility of its gendered authority that the women activists had revealed as flimsy (Hedström Reference Hedström2016; Olivius and Hedström Reference Olivius and Hedström2019).

Similarly, Yanar Mohammed’s work in Iraq did not simply provide services to women fleeing violence; it directly contested narratives that framed militarization, sectarian governance, and patriarchal control as necessary for stability in Iraq’s post-war order. By naming these systems as sources of insecurity rather than protection — and by building feminist infrastructure that demonstrated women’s capacity for self-governance and collective care — Mohammed’s activism destabilized the epistemic foundations of post-war governance in Iraq. Her assassination must be understood in this light: not just as punishment for her advocacy, but as an attempt to silence a voice that had consistently made dominant power arrangements appear unjust.

Feminist Activism as Ontological Threat to the Future

The second threat posed by feminist activism is ontological; feminist activists contest what politics is and what it could become. Beyond challenging existing systems, many feminist activists and WHRDs prefigure alternative forms of governance, security, and social organization through their own organizing practices (Raja Reference Raja2026). In doing so, they destabilize claims that existing institutions — including the state, the police, prisons, the military, corporations — are natural, necessary, or inevitable. This prefigurative dimension of feminist activism functions as a living critique of dominant political systems; it invites pre-emptive suppression precisely because it demonstrates that another world is not only imaginable, but already (in nascent form) underway (Berry and Lake Reference Berry and Lake2021; Gilmore Reference Gilmore2007; Graeber Reference Graeber2009).

The activism of Berta Cáceres in Honduras exemplifies this threat. Cáceres not only opposed the construction of the Agua Zarca dam in the early 2000s; she worked alongside Indigenous Lenca communities to defend and enact alternative relationships to land, governance, and collective decision-making. These practices challenged more than a single development project — they challenged the broader model of extractive capitalism and state–corporate alliances that render such projects possible (Federici Reference Federici2004; Lakhani Reference Lakhani2020; Mies Reference Mies2014). Her assassination in 2016, nearly 10 years to the day before Yanar Mohammed’s, must therefore be understood not only as retaliation, but as an attempt to extinguish a lived alternative to dominant political and economic orders.

Similarly, grassroots organizers across the world are actively building community care-based infrastructures, especially in marginalized communities subjected to state surveillance and violence. As one example from Kenya, feminist activist Ruth Mumbi and Women Collective Kenya have built community-based care networks in poor neighborhoods and informal settlements, providing community food kitchens, childcare, and mutual aid in contexts where the state is absent or predatory. In another context in Cali, Colombia, Posá Suto, a queer collective of Afro-Colombians, offers mutual aid food distribution, dance and drag shows, and space for indigenous healing, while helping organizers challenge repressive policing and state policies. These forms of organizing do more than fill gaps in service provision — they model alternative forms of governance rooted in care, reciprocity, and collective responsibility (Berry Reference Berry2022; Piepzna-Samarasinha Reference Piepzna-Samarasinha2018; Spade Reference Spade2020). By demonstrating that security and welfare can be organized outside of state and market logics, they render alternative futures visible. And, in doing so, they invite preemptive, violent repression.

Feminist Activism as Strategic Threat

The third threat posed by feminist activists and WHRDs is a strategic one: these activists are targeted because they are effective. Feminist movements build broad, transnational, cross-issue coalitions, sustain participation over time, and achieve tangible political change (Chenoweth and Marks Reference Chenoweth and Marks2022; Htun and Weldon Reference Htun and Weldon2012). In doing so, they materially change laws, policies, and politics. They embody what Véronica Gago refers to as a potencia feminista ; “a deployment of a counter-power” and “an expansion of what we desire as possible in the here and now” (Gago Reference Gago2020, 2).

The Green Tide in Latin America illustrates this clearly. Emerging from the #NiUnaMenos mobilizations against particularly egregious cases of feminicideFootnote ¹ and impunity in Argentina, feminist activists leveraged mass protests against gendered violence to also advance demands for reproductive rights. Many of the core organizers of this effort had been building a movement for abortion rights in restrictive Argentina for decades. Once the groundswell of popular mobilization exploded in relation to feminicide, activists began to leverage the momentum to make broader claims about the importance of women’s full bodily autonomy. Building transnational momentum with the “Black Protests” and then the “All Women’s Strike” in Poland (Graff and Korolczuk Reference Graff and Korolczuk2022), Argentine feminists began to link issues of gendered violence with issues of reproductive rights and freedoms. The “tide” began to wash across the region, and resulted in abortion legalization in Argentina, Mexico, and Colombia. The success and scale of these Green Wave movements highlighted that feminist organizing could reshape not only public discourse but legal regimes. This success was perceived as a major cultural threat by political, religious, and economic elites invested in maintaining control over women’s bodies and reproduction.

The recent “Women, Life, Freedom” movement in Iran further illustrates the strategic threat posed by feminist mobilization (see also Tajali Reference Tajali2026). Sparked by the killing of Mahsa Amini in 2022, the movement quickly evolved into one of the most sustained and far-reaching challenges to the Iranian regime in decades. Feminist activists and WHRDs were central as symbols of resistance and as organizers, tacticians, and narrative leaders — mobilizing mass protests, coordinating across diaspora networks, and sustaining international attention in the face of brutal repression. The movement’s core slogan, “Jin, Jiyan, Azadî” (“Women, Life, Freedom”), articulated a feminist vision that linked bodily autonomy to broader demands for political transformation. Despite mass arrests, executions, and ongoing surveillance, the persistence and diffusion of the movement underscore a key feature of feminist activism: its capacity to endure, adapt, transform, and reshape political realities.