This article explores how religion as a political force shapes and deflects the struggle for gender equality in contexts marked by different histories of nation building and challenges of ethnic diversity, different state-society relations (from the more authoritarian to the more democratic), and different relations between state power and religion (especially in the domain of marriage, family and personal laws). It shows how 'private' issues, related to the family, sexuality and reproduction, have become sites of intense public contestation between conservative religious actors wishing to regulate them based on some transcendent moral principle, and feminist and other human rights advocates basing their claims on pluralist and time- and context-specific solutions. Not only are claims of 'divine truth' justifying discriminatory practices against women hard to challenge, but the struggle for gender equality is further complicated by the manner in which it is closely tied up with, and inseparable from, struggles for social and economic justice, ethnic/racial recognition, and national self-determination vis--vis imperial/global domination.

The purpose of this article is to investigate in which ways multi-level actor cooperation advances national and local implementation processes of human rights norms in weak state contexts.Examining the cases of women's rights in Bosnia and Herzegovina and children's rights in Bangladesh, we comparatively point to some advantages and disadvantages cooperative relations between international organizations, national governments and local NGOs can entail. Whereas these Multi-level Actor Constellations (MACs) usually initiate norm implementation processes reliably and compensate governmental deficits, they are not always sustainable in the long run. If international organizations withdraw support from temporary missions or policy projects, local NGOs are not able to perpetuate implementation activities if state capacities have not been strengthened by MACs. Our aim is to highlight functions of local agency within multi-level cooperation and to critically raise sustainability issues in human rights implementation to supplement norm research in International Relations.

By focusing on visible minority women in Germany, this article contributes to an emerging field of intersectional research on political representation. Research on minority women's access to politics is still limited despite Germany's sizable immigrant population. To fill this gap, this article provides recent data on the descriptive representation of visible minority women at both the federal and state level. Furthermore, it seeks to explain differences in political representation, primarily why the representation of minority women at the federal level and in some states is better than that of minority men, while in other states it is the reverse.Since traditional institutional explanations, such as gender quotas and electoral systems, provide only part of the solution to this intersectional puzzle, this article argues that informal practices of individual party elites need to be considered. Qualitative interviews with visible minority women in German politics suggest that some party elites actively promote minority women, while others overlook or even discriminate against them, contributing an additional explanation of why minority women's access to politics is easier in some cases than in others.

The literature on Normative Power Europe (NPE) largely omits the question of why the EU chooses to focus on particular norms in the first place. This paper goes beyond the assumption that the EU simply externalizes its internal norms, because such a perspective does not sufficiently explain why the EU prioritizes certain norms over others, particularly in the case of contested norms. Using LGBTI rights and Freedom of Religion or Belief (FoRB) in the EU's external human rights policy as two cases, I demonstrate how norm entrepreneursboth external and internalhave been essential for bringing these norms to the EU's attention. Only after initial internal resistances had been overcome, were these norms able to reach the EU's external agenda. The two cases illustrate the internal political struggles that precede norm selection, supporting recent calls for a more politics-oriented perspective on Normative Power Europe.

Why do regional security organizations choose different approaches to implementing global gender norms? To address this question, we examine how the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE) and the European Union (EU) integrated requirements derived from UN Security Council Resolution 1325 (UNSCR 1325) on women, peace and security into their security policies. We identify differences in scope and dynamics between the change processes in the two organizations. The OSCE simply adapted its existing gender policy and has not changed it since, whereas the EU introduced a new, more extensive and specific policy, which it has already amended several times. Drawing on historical institutionalism and feminist institutionalism, we found that, first, reform coalitions prepared the ground for gender mainstreaming in the organizations’ respective security policies; and that, second, embedded policy structures, including rules and norms about external interaction as well as existing policy legacies, were responsible for the different approaches of the EU and OSCE with respect to UNSCR 1325.