In the last decade, research on violence against women in politics (VAWIP) has increased significantly. First identified by women activists in the Global South, VAWIP refers to behaviors that specifically target women as women by pressuring them to leave politics (Krook and Sanín Reference Krook and Sanín2016). Activists in Bolivia and later in other regions of the Global South first called attention to VAWIP in the late 1990s and early 2000s, when countries around the world began adopting gender quotas to increase the presence of women in government (Krook Reference Krook2019). Most scholarship in this area has focused on violence targeting women candidates and elected officials (Collignon and Rüdig Reference Collignon and Rüdig2020; Dalton Reference Dalton2021; Håkansson Reference Håkansson2021; Herrick et al. Reference Herrick, Thomas, Franklin, Godwin, Gnabasik and Schroedel2021; Raney and Collier Reference Raney and Collier2024; Schneider and Carroll Reference Schneider and Carroll2020). Attention to women in formal politics is warranted given their important representational role. Women’s presence in politics is a necessary first step to achieve political change and advance women’s interests (Beckwith Reference Beckwith2011).
Yet existing scholarship emphasizing women operating within formal political institutions does not capture the full range of political activities in which women may engage. The primary actors involved in political work outside electoral and institutional arenas are activists, including human rights defenders. Activists organize collective action, mobilize marginalized communities, advocate for policy changes, document abuses and repression, and challenge existing political arrangements. For women, especially those from marginalized groups, activism is often the primary avenue of political participation.
Women’s activism is vital in both democratic and authoritarian contexts. Women activists fill important gaps in advocating for women when they are numerically underrepresented in democratic systems. They also provide platforms for women to have a political voice when institutionalized forms of political participation and representation are virtually inaccessible due to regime transition or repression. Indeed, in authoritarian and illiberal contexts, activism may constitute one of the few available channels for women’s engagement in public life. In diverse parts of the world, women activists thus occupy a distinct position in political contestation not captured when mainly highlighting women trying to enter and operating within political institutions.
Emerging research suggests that this activism is often dangerous, subjecting women to severe violence to curb their political participation and voice. In Iran, the Women, Life, Freedom movement has faced repression and abuses as they have fought for women’s rights and democracy (Tajali Reference Tajali2026). In Nicaragua, feminist organizations are often persecuted by the state and accused of being foreign agents (Neumann Reference Neumann2024). In Central and Eastern Europe, women’s organizations have faced public attacks and judicial harassment — and, in some cases, they have had their funding withdrawn (Roggeband and Krizsán Reference Roggeband and Krizsán2021). Recent evidence suggests, in fact, that women who are part of broader pro-democracy movements often face the brunt of state repression, as can be seen in Iran, Georgia, Venezuela, and other countries (Amnesty International 2024a, 2025; Inter-American Commission on Human Rights 2025).
Despite growing scholarly attention to violence against women activists (Alam Reference Alam2021; Neumann Reference Neumann2024; Zulver Reference Zulver2022; Zulver and Stallone Reference Zulver and Stallone2025), work in this area has treated such violence primarily as a part of broader patterns of political repression, rather than as a form of gendered violence against women actors. While VAWIP-A and VAWIP share important features, they also involve distinctive mechanisms, targets, and motivations. Bringing these bodies of scholarship into conversation can offer a more nuanced analysis of how gendered violence operates across both formal and informal political arenas.
The essays in this Critical Perspectives Symposium bridge this gap. The authors respond to a common set of questions about the forms, targets, perpetrators, and consequences of VAWIP-A. What forms does this violence take, who perpetrates it, and whom or what does it target? How is VAWIP-A related to VAWIP and where do the two diverge? How do the manifestations, purposes, and effects of VAWIP-A vary across regime types? What consequences does it have for women’s activism, democracy, democratic transition, and autocratic consolidation? In their responses, the authors consider the role of gender — a process that creates hierarchies between and among men and women, while interacting with other contextually relevant categories of marginalization — in shaping both the causes and consequences of violence.
Together, the essays show that violence against women political activists is a global phenomenon, occurring across contexts as varied as Nicaragua, Japan, Russia, Spain, and Bangladesh. The authors identify multiple forms of VAWIP-A, including physical violence, assassination, surveillance, judicial harassment, threats, online abuse, and more. Yet the tools available to perpetrators, as well as the types of perpetrators, vary across political contexts, ranging from security forces to state officials, community and family members, and anonymous people on social media. The contributors note how regime type shapes not only the opportunities available for women’s political participation, but also the conditions surrounding the violence targeting them.
Besides these broad similarities with VAWIP, the authors also highlight some points of divergence from violence targeting women in formal politics. Kuteleva (Reference Kuteleva2026) emphasizes that VAWIP-A cannot be fully understood as backlash against women’s entry into formal politics, as is often assumed in scholarship on VAWIP. Rather, what activists do, what they demand, and what their mobilization makes politically possible can all trigger VAWIP-A. Berry and Zulver (Reference Berry and Zulver2026) similarly argue that feminist and human rights activists are targeted not only because of their gendered identities or their demands but because of the form and implications of their mobilization. Their ability to build broad, transnational, and cross-issue coalitions over sustained periods of time can generate tangible political and legal changes. Finally, and perhaps most significantly, women activists often face violence perpetrated and orchestrated by the state itself.
State actors can perceive women activists as especially threatening in contexts where their political authority depends on controlling the meaning of public order, morality, family, nation, or security. Feminist activism often exposes the gap between official narratives and lived realities of violence, corruption, exclusion, and insecurity. As Neumann and Menjívar (Reference Neumann and Menjívar2026) show, women activists challenge the state’s self-presentation as a benevolent protector or guarantor of order. Women’s activism therefore challenges the state’s monopoly over legitimate political action. Lü (Reference Lü2026) illustrates how this dynamic operates in the high-capacity authoritarian setting of China, where the state determines what counts as politics, who may appear as a legitimate political subject, and which forms of action are permissible. Under such conditions, violence is not only reactive to women’s entry into politics but preemptive, sustained, and woven into daily life.
The essays also cast light on the multiple targets of VAWIP-A. Violence is directed at a broad range of women in civil society, including women activists, journalists, researchers, lawyers, civil servants, human rights defenders, and feminist advocates. Their targeting is further shaped by intersectional inequalities. Women who are racialized, Indigenous, rural, low-income, queer, trans, migrant, or associated with stigmatized political causes face intensified forms of attack (Neumann and Menjívar Reference Neumann and Menjívar2026; Tajali Reference Tajali2026). VAWIP-A is therefore not only aimed at women’s bodies but also their reputations, families, and organizations (Lü Reference Lü2026; Miura Reference Miura2026; Tajali Reference Tajali2026).
The authors further show that violence against women activists targets more than individuals: it is directed at organizations, activist networks, feminist infrastructures, and political ideas. Several contributions emphasize that VAWIP-A targets feminism as a political project — in such cases we thus see a convergence between the literatures on VAWIP and anti-gender and anti-feminist movements. Feminist activism exposes power, creates alternative spaces of collective action, embodies noncompliance, and unsettles the gendered foundations on which dominant political and social orders rest.
Rodó-Zárate and Reboiro-Río (Reference Rodó-Zárate and Reboiro-Río2026) observe, for example, that feminist advocates are targeted (regardless of their gendered identities) because they defend feminist and equality-oriented agendas. Berry and Zulver (Reference Berry and Zulver2026) similarly show that women human rights defenders and feminist activists are targeted because their organizing challenges gendered boundaries of political authority and makes alternative political futures tangible. Kuteleva (Reference Kuteleva2026) notes, however, that this violence is not only a response to women’s specific political actions — it may also be directed at women prior to any type of political action taking place. This is because authoritarian regimes often define noncompliant femininities as deviant and dangerous, perceiving women who refuse prescribed roles as mothers and wives as threats. The state, in these cases, uses violence to designate certain women, bodies, ideas, and identities as enemies of the nation.
The range of aggressors is similarly broad. In the VAWIP literature, perpetrators include political rivals, party members, colleagues, voters, family, community members, and anonymous actors. The essays in this Critical Perspectives section show that these actors also matter for VAWIP-A. Aggressors may encompass state officials, police officers, military actors, courts, regulatory agencies, media organizations, online users (especially those influenced by the manosphere), employers, landlords, family members, and civil society actors. Miura (Reference Miura2026) theorizes this in terms of a triad of victimization, in which each phase of violence involves different manifestations and aggressors. A woman may first experience direct harm through sexual harassment or assault by an identifiable perpetrator. When she reports the abuse, she may then experience secondary victimization through institutional failure, disbelief, or belittlement by law enforcement and other authorities. If the case becomes public, a third layer of victimization may follow through mass online abuse and misogynistic narratives circulated by diffuse actors in digital spaces.
The state occupies a particularly important role across the various contributions. Neumann and Menjívar (Reference Neumann and Menjívar2026) show how formally neutral laws and legal institutions — for example, those regulating foreign funding, civil society registration, or judicial appointments — can be used by state actors to silence and dismantle women’s organizations while maintaining a formal language of legality, order, or national protection. Lü (Reference Lü2026) describes these dynamics as state-orchestrated distributed violence. In high-capacity authoritarian contexts, repression depends on dispersed networks of actors such as police, employers, landlords, family, and those who are connected through social media, each applying pressure on the activists without the appearance of violence and punishment. Violence is thus woven into everyday life. Such repression happens transnationally as well (Amnesty International 2024b). Kuteleva’s (Reference Kuteleva2026) analysis of semiotic violence in Russia is especially important, showing how media and public discourse can turn women’s private lives, bodies, and identities into sites of political prosecution.
Being at the receiving end of VAWIP-A has a wide range of impacts, both personal and political. At the individual level, violence produces fear, trauma, exhaustion, reputational damage, economic insecurity, and withdrawal from public life (Noh and Saadi Reference Noh and Saadi2026). These individual effects are not experienced as isolated incidents. As Rodó-Zárate and Reboiro-Río (Reference Rodó-Zárate and Reboiro-Río2026) and Lü (Reference Lü2026) show, they often unfold as sustained forms of harassment, intimidation, and hostility that lead women over time to reduce their visibility, abandon public platforms, or withdraw from political work. These effects on individuals then lead to what Neumann and Menjívar (Reference Neumann and Menjívar2026) call cascading harm: when activists withdraw, organizations lose leadership, expertise, visibility, and continuity. When organizations are attacked, communities lose critical channels of assistance, advocacy, and accountability. Miura (Reference Miura2026) also demonstrates how multi-layered violence leads to a broader chilling effect that deters women from entering, remaining in, or speaking publicly about political life.
The democratic consequences of VAWIP-A are therefore substantial. By deterring women activists, journalists, researchers, and advocates from participating in public life, violence narrows the range of voices, interests, and experiences represented in political debate. At the political-system level, VAWIP-A contributes to democratic erosion and authoritarian consolidation. In democratic regimes such as Japan, harassment, institutional indifference, and online abuse can hollow out women’s participation while preserving the veneer of political openness. In authoritarian contexts, VAWIP-A operates explicitly as a strategy of regime maintenance. And in societies undergoing political transitions, women activists’ contributions are often actively erased, preventing them from converting their activism into institutionalized forms of representation (Tajali Reference Tajali2026).
In responding to and resisting VAWIP-A, several contributors show that law is a particularly ambivalent terrain. On the one hand, legal protections are essential for recognizing violence, holding perpetrators accountable, and providing remedies to those harmed. Miura (Reference Miura2026) highlights the importance of strengthening legal responses to sexual harassment, hate speech, and online abuse involving political actors. The absence of such legal frameworks leaves victims without channels to hold perpetrators accountable. On the other hand, Neumann and Menjívar (Reference Neumann and Menjívar2026) demonstrate that law can also be weaponized against women activists and organizations. Regulations on foreign funding, civil society registration, and organizational status function as tools of repression. The problem, then, is not simply the absence of law but how the laws are used against women activists.
By centering women political activists, this Critical Perspectives Symposium shows that gendered violence is a mechanism through which political orders are made, defended, and contested. This is true both in the formal and in the informal political arenas. The contributors of this Critical Perspectives Symposium make an important intervention by expanding the focus of VAWIP to include women engaged in politics outside formal political institutions. In doing so, they capture a broader range of political activities and illuminate how VAWIP and VAWIP-A converge and diverge. Future research on VAWIP and VAWIP-A should build on these interventions by paying more systematic and sustained attention to queer, trans, and non-binary activists. In addition to expanding awareness of other forms of gender-based violence in political spaces, such work would provoke further reflection on the experiences and activism of those who challenge binary assumptions about gender and political violence.
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In the last decade, research on violence against women in politics (VAWIP) has increased significantly. First identified by women activists in the Global South, VAWIP refers to behaviors that specifically target women as women by pressuring them to leave politics (Krook and Sanín Reference Krook and Sanín2016). Activists in Bolivia and later in other regions of the Global South first called attention to VAWIP in the late 1990s and early 2000s, when countries around the world began adopting gender quotas to increase the presence of women in government (Krook Reference Krook2019). Most scholarship in this area has focused on violence targeting women candidates and elected officials (Collignon and Rüdig Reference Collignon and Rüdig2020; Dalton Reference Dalton2021; Håkansson Reference Håkansson2021; Herrick et al. Reference Herrick, Thomas, Franklin, Godwin, Gnabasik and Schroedel2021; Raney and Collier Reference Raney and Collier2024; Schneider and Carroll Reference Schneider and Carroll2020). Attention to women in formal politics is warranted given their important representational role. Women’s presence in politics is a necessary first step to achieve political change and advance women’s interests (Beckwith Reference Beckwith2011).
Yet existing scholarship emphasizing women operating within formal political institutions does not capture the full range of political activities in which women may engage. The primary actors involved in political work outside electoral and institutional arenas are activists, including human rights defenders. Activists organize collective action, mobilize marginalized communities, advocate for policy changes, document abuses and repression, and challenge existing political arrangements. For women, especially those from marginalized groups, activism is often the primary avenue of political participation.
Women’s activism is vital in both democratic and authoritarian contexts. Women activists fill important gaps in advocating for women when they are numerically underrepresented in democratic systems. They also provide platforms for women to have a political voice when institutionalized forms of political participation and representation are virtually inaccessible due to regime transition or repression. Indeed, in authoritarian and illiberal contexts, activism may constitute one of the few available channels for women’s engagement in public life. In diverse parts of the world, women activists thus occupy a distinct position in political contestation not captured when mainly highlighting women trying to enter and operating within political institutions.
Emerging research suggests that this activism is often dangerous, subjecting women to severe violence to curb their political participation and voice. In Iran, the Women, Life, Freedom movement has faced repression and abuses as they have fought for women’s rights and democracy (Tajali Reference Tajali2026). In Nicaragua, feminist organizations are often persecuted by the state and accused of being foreign agents (Neumann Reference Neumann2024). In Central and Eastern Europe, women’s organizations have faced public attacks and judicial harassment — and, in some cases, they have had their funding withdrawn (Roggeband and Krizsán Reference Roggeband and Krizsán2021). Recent evidence suggests, in fact, that women who are part of broader pro-democracy movements often face the brunt of state repression, as can be seen in Iran, Georgia, Venezuela, and other countries (Amnesty International 2024a, 2025; Inter-American Commission on Human Rights 2025).
Despite growing scholarly attention to violence against women activists (Alam Reference Alam2021; Neumann Reference Neumann2024; Zulver Reference Zulver2022; Zulver and Stallone Reference Zulver and Stallone2025), work in this area has treated such violence primarily as a part of broader patterns of political repression, rather than as a form of gendered violence against women actors. While VAWIP-A and VAWIP share important features, they also involve distinctive mechanisms, targets, and motivations. Bringing these bodies of scholarship into conversation can offer a more nuanced analysis of how gendered violence operates across both formal and informal political arenas.
The essays in this Critical Perspectives Symposium bridge this gap. The authors respond to a common set of questions about the forms, targets, perpetrators, and consequences of VAWIP-A. What forms does this violence take, who perpetrates it, and whom or what does it target? How is VAWIP-A related to VAWIP and where do the two diverge? How do the manifestations, purposes, and effects of VAWIP-A vary across regime types? What consequences does it have for women’s activism, democracy, democratic transition, and autocratic consolidation? In their responses, the authors consider the role of gender — a process that creates hierarchies between and among men and women, while interacting with other contextually relevant categories of marginalization — in shaping both the causes and consequences of violence.
Together, the essays show that violence against women political activists is a global phenomenon, occurring across contexts as varied as Nicaragua, Japan, Russia, Spain, and Bangladesh. The authors identify multiple forms of VAWIP-A, including physical violence, assassination, surveillance, judicial harassment, threats, online abuse, and more. Yet the tools available to perpetrators, as well as the types of perpetrators, vary across political contexts, ranging from security forces to state officials, community and family members, and anonymous people on social media. The contributors note how regime type shapes not only the opportunities available for women’s political participation, but also the conditions surrounding the violence targeting them.
Besides these broad similarities with VAWIP, the authors also highlight some points of divergence from violence targeting women in formal politics. Kuteleva (Reference Kuteleva2026) emphasizes that VAWIP-A cannot be fully understood as backlash against women’s entry into formal politics, as is often assumed in scholarship on VAWIP. Rather, what activists do, what they demand, and what their mobilization makes politically possible can all trigger VAWIP-A. Berry and Zulver (Reference Berry and Zulver2026) similarly argue that feminist and human rights activists are targeted not only because of their gendered identities or their demands but because of the form and implications of their mobilization. Their ability to build broad, transnational, and cross-issue coalitions over sustained periods of time can generate tangible political and legal changes. Finally, and perhaps most significantly, women activists often face violence perpetrated and orchestrated by the state itself.
State actors can perceive women activists as especially threatening in contexts where their political authority depends on controlling the meaning of public order, morality, family, nation, or security. Feminist activism often exposes the gap between official narratives and lived realities of violence, corruption, exclusion, and insecurity. As Neumann and Menjívar (Reference Neumann and Menjívar2026) show, women activists challenge the state’s self-presentation as a benevolent protector or guarantor of order. Women’s activism therefore challenges the state’s monopoly over legitimate political action. Lü (Reference Lü2026) illustrates how this dynamic operates in the high-capacity authoritarian setting of China, where the state determines what counts as politics, who may appear as a legitimate political subject, and which forms of action are permissible. Under such conditions, violence is not only reactive to women’s entry into politics but preemptive, sustained, and woven into daily life.
The essays also cast light on the multiple targets of VAWIP-A. Violence is directed at a broad range of women in civil society, including women activists, journalists, researchers, lawyers, civil servants, human rights defenders, and feminist advocates. Their targeting is further shaped by intersectional inequalities. Women who are racialized, Indigenous, rural, low-income, queer, trans, migrant, or associated with stigmatized political causes face intensified forms of attack (Neumann and Menjívar Reference Neumann and Menjívar2026; Tajali Reference Tajali2026). VAWIP-A is therefore not only aimed at women’s bodies but also their reputations, families, and organizations (Lü Reference Lü2026; Miura Reference Miura2026; Tajali Reference Tajali2026).
The authors further show that violence against women activists targets more than individuals: it is directed at organizations, activist networks, feminist infrastructures, and political ideas. Several contributions emphasize that VAWIP-A targets feminism as a political project — in such cases we thus see a convergence between the literatures on VAWIP and anti-gender and anti-feminist movements. Feminist activism exposes power, creates alternative spaces of collective action, embodies noncompliance, and unsettles the gendered foundations on which dominant political and social orders rest.
Rodó-Zárate and Reboiro-Río (Reference Rodó-Zárate and Reboiro-Río2026) observe, for example, that feminist advocates are targeted (regardless of their gendered identities) because they defend feminist and equality-oriented agendas. Berry and Zulver (Reference Berry and Zulver2026) similarly show that women human rights defenders and feminist activists are targeted because their organizing challenges gendered boundaries of political authority and makes alternative political futures tangible. Kuteleva (Reference Kuteleva2026) notes, however, that this violence is not only a response to women’s specific political actions — it may also be directed at women prior to any type of political action taking place. This is because authoritarian regimes often define noncompliant femininities as deviant and dangerous, perceiving women who refuse prescribed roles as mothers and wives as threats. The state, in these cases, uses violence to designate certain women, bodies, ideas, and identities as enemies of the nation.
The range of aggressors is similarly broad. In the VAWIP literature, perpetrators include political rivals, party members, colleagues, voters, family, community members, and anonymous actors. The essays in this Critical Perspectives section show that these actors also matter for VAWIP-A. Aggressors may encompass state officials, police officers, military actors, courts, regulatory agencies, media organizations, online users (especially those influenced by the manosphere), employers, landlords, family members, and civil society actors. Miura (Reference Miura2026) theorizes this in terms of a triad of victimization, in which each phase of violence involves different manifestations and aggressors. A woman may first experience direct harm through sexual harassment or assault by an identifiable perpetrator. When she reports the abuse, she may then experience secondary victimization through institutional failure, disbelief, or belittlement by law enforcement and other authorities. If the case becomes public, a third layer of victimization may follow through mass online abuse and misogynistic narratives circulated by diffuse actors in digital spaces.
The state occupies a particularly important role across the various contributions. Neumann and Menjívar (Reference Neumann and Menjívar2026) show how formally neutral laws and legal institutions — for example, those regulating foreign funding, civil society registration, or judicial appointments — can be used by state actors to silence and dismantle women’s organizations while maintaining a formal language of legality, order, or national protection. Lü (Reference Lü2026) describes these dynamics as state-orchestrated distributed violence. In high-capacity authoritarian contexts, repression depends on dispersed networks of actors such as police, employers, landlords, family, and those who are connected through social media, each applying pressure on the activists without the appearance of violence and punishment. Violence is thus woven into everyday life. Such repression happens transnationally as well (Amnesty International 2024b). Kuteleva’s (Reference Kuteleva2026) analysis of semiotic violence in Russia is especially important, showing how media and public discourse can turn women’s private lives, bodies, and identities into sites of political prosecution.
Being at the receiving end of VAWIP-A has a wide range of impacts, both personal and political. At the individual level, violence produces fear, trauma, exhaustion, reputational damage, economic insecurity, and withdrawal from public life (Noh and Saadi Reference Noh and Saadi2026). These individual effects are not experienced as isolated incidents. As Rodó-Zárate and Reboiro-Río (Reference Rodó-Zárate and Reboiro-Río2026) and Lü (Reference Lü2026) show, they often unfold as sustained forms of harassment, intimidation, and hostility that lead women over time to reduce their visibility, abandon public platforms, or withdraw from political work. These effects on individuals then lead to what Neumann and Menjívar (Reference Neumann and Menjívar2026) call cascading harm: when activists withdraw, organizations lose leadership, expertise, visibility, and continuity. When organizations are attacked, communities lose critical channels of assistance, advocacy, and accountability. Miura (Reference Miura2026) also demonstrates how multi-layered violence leads to a broader chilling effect that deters women from entering, remaining in, or speaking publicly about political life.
The democratic consequences of VAWIP-A are therefore substantial. By deterring women activists, journalists, researchers, and advocates from participating in public life, violence narrows the range of voices, interests, and experiences represented in political debate. At the political-system level, VAWIP-A contributes to democratic erosion and authoritarian consolidation. In democratic regimes such as Japan, harassment, institutional indifference, and online abuse can hollow out women’s participation while preserving the veneer of political openness. In authoritarian contexts, VAWIP-A operates explicitly as a strategy of regime maintenance. And in societies undergoing political transitions, women activists’ contributions are often actively erased, preventing them from converting their activism into institutionalized forms of representation (Tajali Reference Tajali2026).
In responding to and resisting VAWIP-A, several contributors show that law is a particularly ambivalent terrain. On the one hand, legal protections are essential for recognizing violence, holding perpetrators accountable, and providing remedies to those harmed. Miura (Reference Miura2026) highlights the importance of strengthening legal responses to sexual harassment, hate speech, and online abuse involving political actors. The absence of such legal frameworks leaves victims without channels to hold perpetrators accountable. On the other hand, Neumann and Menjívar (Reference Neumann and Menjívar2026) demonstrate that law can also be weaponized against women activists and organizations. Regulations on foreign funding, civil society registration, and organizational status function as tools of repression. The problem, then, is not simply the absence of law but how the laws are used against women activists.
By centering women political activists, this Critical Perspectives Symposium shows that gendered violence is a mechanism through which political orders are made, defended, and contested. This is true both in the formal and in the informal political arenas. The contributors of this Critical Perspectives Symposium make an important intervention by expanding the focus of VAWIP to include women engaged in politics outside formal political institutions. In doing so, they capture a broader range of political activities and illuminate how VAWIP and VAWIP-A converge and diverge. Future research on VAWIP and VAWIP-A should build on these interventions by paying more systematic and sustained attention to queer, trans, and non-binary activists. In addition to expanding awareness of other forms of gender-based violence in political spaces, such work would provoke further reflection on the experiences and activism of those who challenge binary assumptions about gender and political violence.