Feminist mobilization, crucial for advancing women's human rights, has increased in all world regions since 1975. However, we do not know enough about the global impact of this mobilization because we lack adequate databases to explore the ways that feminist mobilization interacts with other factors that enhance and limit women's rights, such as democracy, intergovernmental processes, and transnational, regional organizing. Our ability to explore these questions is obstructed by a lack of data on the global south and measures that focus on formal organizations. This project remedies these gaps, developing an improved measure of feminist mobilization that encompasses autonomous, domestic feminist mobilization in 126 countries, 1975–2015, enabling us to track global and regional trends. Using regional comparisons and statistical analysis, we use this new measure to reveal new patterns and complexities in feminist mobilization. We discern distinct regional patterns in such organizing that defy facile predictions of global convergence and suggest a central role for UN processes advancing women's rights. Our analysis also points to the importance of transnational feminist networks and democratization as factors enabling and strengthening feminist mobilization. We conclude by suggesting some fruitful avenues for exploring relationships between feminist movements, international institutions, and democracy.

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The global coronavirus pandemic has reified divisions, inequity, and injustices rooted in systems of domination such as racism, sexism, neoliberal capitalism, and ableism. Feminist scholars have theorized these interlocking systems of domination as the “continuum of violence.” Building on this scholarship, we conceptualize the U.S. response to and the consequences of the COVID-19 pandemic as reflective of the continuum of violence. We argue that crises like pandemics expose the antidemocratic and exclusionary practices inherent in this continuum, which is especially racialized and gendered. To support our argument, we provide empirical evidence of the continuum of violence in relation to COVID-19 vis-à-vis the interrelated issues of militarization and what feminists call “everyday security,” such as public health and gender-based violence. The continuum of violence contributes theoretically and practically to our understanding of how violence that the pandemic illuminates is embedded in broader systems of domination and exclusion.

Contrary to our understanding of when states act on women’s rights, Jordan adopted a policy on violence against women at the same time as it faced a number of external and internal security threats. In this article, I query the relationship between militarism and the gender policymaking process in Jordan to make sense of this puzzle. I specifically consider the ways in which a feminist conceptualization of militarism offers a more fruitful understanding of government action on violence against women in Jordan than studying this policy development through the lens of patriarchy, state institutions, and/or feminist activism alone. Indeed, evaluating the development of Jordan’s Family Protection Law through the lens of militarism and related security practices reveals the depth and breadth of these phenomena: the martial values and priorities of the Jordanian regime extend beyond the realm of traditional, ‘high politics’ security issues and impact civil, social, and even interpersonal relations – relations that are always already gendered – that are seemingly far removed from military concerns. I argue that the Jordanian government adopted its policy on violence against women because this enhanced the state’s image in the international arena and appeased domestic audiences by adhering to a gendered logic of protection that maintains the state as the ultimate protector of women. Overall, the article deepens our understanding of how militarism and the security climate influence the gender policymaking process, particularly in semi-authoritarian regimes.

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