Russia’s transformation meant a significant alteration in the response to sexual vio­lence. Whereas earlier Soviet police might take action when a woman was raped by those known to her, by the 1990s, police began routinely rejecting all sorts of sexual violence statements without any investigation (Human Rights Watch 1997, 21—24). If they accepted the initial […]

As Soviet rule waned in the late 1980s, even this haphazard parafeminist approach to women and gender violence became suspect. Mikhail Gorbachev’s policy of glasnost meant not just more freedom of speech, but less authority to intervene in people’s lives. His reforms also unintentionally eroded the legitimacy of com­munist institutions, including many that had helped […]

This communist approach to gender violence was predicated on a traditional gen­der ideology about women’s and men’s roles in the home and intimate life. So­viet promises of equality were not realized in everyday life. Women faced a dou­ble burden, having to work outside the home as good Soviet citizens while also expected to shoulder the […]

In contrast to this global feminist call for the systematic response to violence against women as a violation of women’s human rights, the Soviet response to various forms of gender violence was haphazard. For instance, before 1991, do­mestic violence was intermittently regulated under the rubric of “hooliganism” (Sperling 1990, 19). Not explicitly about violence between […]

As these changes were underway among transnational women’s activists and around the global conception of the issue of gender violence, Russia was also un­dergoing a huge transformation. For some seven decades in the twentieth cen­tury, Russia had been the leading republic in the Soviet Union. This multiethnic empire was marked by the Communist Party that […]

The new link between violence against women and human rights also enlisted hu­man rights monitors already active on other issues, such as Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International. Despite early assertions that rights could not be denied based on sex (e. g., in the U. N.’s Universal Declaration of Human Rights), most human rights advocates […]

Linking women’s organizing worldwide to the United Nations meant, for many activists, a new language, culture, and tradition, often bewildering to outsiders. At the United Nations, activism is centered on “working sessions” to produce consensual documents through an almost interminable process of negotiating word choice (Merry 2006a, ch. 2). Ostensibly about such questions as whether […]

From Global Sisterhood to Global Feminism Like many other social movements, feminism has long been transnational, in­cluding the transnational woman suffrage movement in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries (Keck and Sikkink 1998). Yet, even though the United Na­tions had declared a commitment to equality in the U. N. Charter, the idea for an international […]

Т И E CONSENSUS AMONG GLOBAL feminists constructed by the early 1990s issued a challenge to governments around the world. In contrast to this vision of women’s rights as human rights, violence against women had most often been treated as a woman’s individual misfortune that states had no responsibility to address. As the Cold War […]

Although I compare within the case, this is a case study of Russia. This choice reflects my commitment to “thick description” (Geertz 1973) and the sense that often the social science that matters most are those studies that tell good stories, paying attention to historical circumstances and particularities (Tilly 1984). As this is a story […]