Building on research on cultural threat‐induced polarization, we investigate the effect of the individual‐level salience of cultural threats on polarization between social liberals and conservatives. In a unique survey experiment conducted with 129,000 respondents nested in 208 regions in 27 European Union (EU) member states, we manipulate the presence of two cultural threats, women's rights, and refugee immigration, to test their polarizing effects on social liberals’ and social conservatives’ support for traditional values. We find that priming the threat of refugee immigration polarizes conservatives and liberals equally. Yet, introducing the salience of women's rights leads to lower preferences for traditional values, particularly among more liberal respondents. Our findings demonstrate: 1) the study of backlash should distinguish individuals by their predisposition to backlash, rather than studying the population as a whole; and 2) social conservatives’ backlash should be studied conjointly with social liberals’ counter‐reactions to backlash. Future research may investigate why different cultural threats provoke different reactions.

On 19 August 2020, the Constitutional Court of Uganda handed down a landmark judgment on maternal health rights in Uganda. This judgment held that the State of Uganda was responsible for violating the right to health, non-discrimination, life and inhuman and degrading treatment of women under international law and Ugandan constitutional law for its failure by omission to provide basic emergency obstetric care in public facilities. This article examines the contribution of the Constitutional Petition No 16 judgment to the strengthening of women's reproductive health rights. By rejecting the “lack of resources” defence when complying with minimum core obligations under progressive realization in the provision of emergency obstetric services, the court makes an important contribution to the limited but growing body of jurisprudence holding governments accountable for a failure to ensure the protection of women's sexual and reproductive rights at both domestic and international levels.

In international human rights law, the right to food has become a widely accepted legal and normative framework for tackling the problem of food insecurity. However, as currently formulated, the right to food is insufficient as a framework to tackle gender-specific barriers that impede women's access to food, which has contributed to the persistence of women's food insecurity globally. While the equal enjoyment of the right to food is guaranteed by the non-discrimination and equality provisions in international law, this notion of equality, associated with the formal equality approach, fails to recognise and address women's historical experience of systemic discrimination. This article argues that women's food insecurity should be approached from a broader formulation of the right to food that is informed by a substantive equality perspective, drawing from contemporary interpretations and elucidations by human rights bodies which have pushed for a more substantive notion of equality.

Drawing on a qualitative study of Hong Kong's Women's Commission (‘WoC’), this article examines how institutional mechanisms for the advancement of women function in a hybrid regime that includes both democratic and authoritarian elements. Hong Kong has a rights-based legal framework and equality agencies that support the operation of equality laws and policies. Paradoxically, Hong Kong's political system is non-democratic, and Beijing's Central People's Government is exerting more direct control on the territory. Grounded in qualitative interviews conducted with WoC members, non-governmental organisations, and scholars in Hong Kong, this article concludes that the WoC's full institutional potential in drawing attention to gender inequalities has not been realised. The implementation of authoritarian governance practices also has implications for the WoC's composition and agenda and may inhibit the development of progressive gender equality strategies to advance the status of women.

Legality of abortion has been one of the most controversial political initiatives in modern times, which also impacts the healthcare delivery system especially for women. The debate often devolves into disagreement on either access to services on demand from healthcare providers or service refusal regardless of the circumstances. However, the reality is different from this bipolar conversation. Instead, it varies depending upon location of the potential abortion recipient and a host of factors associated with nation-states. Thus, our purpose is to reveal different legislative protocols that lead to or inhibit availability of this aspect of women's reproductive rights, and to empirically determine what are the underlying series of factors that drive these policy decisions. Together they reveal a complex mosaic of fundamental principles that are rarely considered when formulating public policy. We hope our research across nations will help healthcare providers and policy makers recognize the genealogy of options and opportunities as they continue to debate abortion's provision to women within healthcare systems.

In 2020 the Constitutional Tribunal of Poland held that the legislation that permitted abortion in cases of ‘fatal foetal anomaly’ was an unconstitutional interference with the right to life of the foetus. This article examines the recent decision, which prohibits abortion on the grounds of foetal anomaly, arguing that this decision is part of a broader scheme of Polish and transnational anti-abortion lawfare. This lawfare seeks both to (re)shape Polish law in an anti-abortion mould, and to take advantage of ‘gaps’ in European and international human rights law standards on abortion in order to claim rights compliance for law and policy that, in reality, restricts access to abortion in a manner that is incompatible with international human rights law.

This paper highlights the intersection of gender, sexuality and class in shaping the ways in which ‘leftover’ women navigate legal and social discrimination. ‘Leftover women’ is a stigmatising term in China that refers to women who do not get married by the time they reach their late twenties. Based on my fieldwork in China with queer and heterosexual ‘leftover’ women, I introduce two strategies of stigma management: ‘buying a licence to be deviant’ and ‘identity-hopping’. The former is a strategy adopted by heterosexual women with financial resources and a desire frequently expressed by queer women. ‘Buying a licence to be deviant’ refers to the strategy of accumulating sufficient financial resources to justify one's choice to be deviant and deal with the legal consequences of the evasion of the population policies. ‘Identity-hopping’ is popular among those with a lower social and financial status, who use the law's labelling function to hop from one stigmatised identity to another as a way to deal with stigma. From an intersectional lens, this paper advances law and society's study of stigma and discrimination by emphasising the hierarchy of stigmatised identities and the strategy of using the law's power of labelling identities to hop from one identity to another. It also demonstrates how the intersection of gender, sexuality and class complicates the ways in which leftover women understand and engage with the law.

This article examines the instrumentalization of women's rights and the transformation of the gender rights regime in the context of democratic backsliding in Turkey. I show how the Islamically rooted Justice and Development Party governments and their allies used women's rights in constructing authoritarian rule and promoting a conservative gender agenda. The governing elites had different needs at different political stages and instrumentalized women's rights to meet those needs. First, they needed to legitimize their rule in a secular context, so they expanded liberal laws on women's rights. Second, in the process of backsliding, they sought to construct and legitimize their conservative ideology, so they reinterpreted existing laws to promote conservative goals. Finally, they wanted to mobilize conservative women in support of the newly authoritarian regime, so they built new institutions and marginalized existing women's NGOs. The article contributes to the literature on regime types and gender rights by shifting the focus from regime type to regime change.

Pivoting around two sit-ins at the University of Georgia, this article examines student activism in the late 1960s and early 1970s in the US South. The first sit-in, at the conclusion of the spring 1968 March for Coed Equality, was part of the effort to overcome parietal rules that significantly restricted women's rights but left men relatively untouched. The second occurred in 1972 when the university responded to salacious allegations of immorality in women's residence halls by replacing progressive residential education programming with the policing of student behavior. This article centers student efforts for women's rights, demonstrates how students and administrators shifted tactics in reaction to external stimuli, and explores the repercussions of challenging the entrenched patriarchal power structure. In so doing, it joins the growing literature complicating understandings of student activism in the era by focusing attention away from the most famous and extreme cases.