Women human rights defenders

This year’s first special issue of Gender & Development addresses the critical theme of women human rights defenders (WHRDs) and their unwavering commitment towards the protection and advancement of gender justice and human rights of vulnerable groups. WHRDs continue their work despite serious threats to their lives, livelihoods, and physical and mental well-being. As this edition of the journal goes to print, media headlines and broadcast interviews report the murder of a Kenyan LGBTQ activist Edwin Chiloba, who was smothered to death (Rédaction Africanews with AFP 2023), the extension of pre-trial detention for Gulnara Dzhurabayeva, Klara Sooronkulova, Rita Karasartova, and Asya Sasykbayeva’s in Kyrgyzstan who were arrested for peacefully protesting against the transfer of ownership of the Kempir-Abad water reserve from Kyrgyzstan to Uzbekistan (Frontline Defenders 2023), and four men were hanged in the past few months, and several other human rights defenders remain at risk of execution for protesting against the Iranian government (Fassihi and Engelbrecht 2023). In 2021, the Business and Human Rights Resource Centre recorded more than 600 attacks worldwide against human rights defenders, raising concerns about harmful business practices – with 70 per cent (seven in ten) taking place against climate, land, and environmental rights defenders (Business and Human Rights Resource Centre 2022). Against this backdrop of increasing human rights violations, rising political authoritarianism, emboldening of extremists and reactionary groups, continuing ecological degradation, protracted wars, hostility towards refugees and migrants, and the abject failure of governments and the international community to protect the rights of the dispossessed, this issue amplifies the voices of women and those fighting alongside women and vulnerable groups. Common threads run through the articles and essays in this issue. One is that governments, even the formally democratic ones, tend to be ambivalent about human rights and especially about the political positions that women take to agitate towards progressive changes. Governments may opt to tame, depoliticise, or minimise the efforts of WHRDs, both overtly and covertly. Second, women are often the very ones to protect the vulnerable, the marginalised, and the systemically excluded, continuing to build social capital and agency, and often operating in conflict or militarised zones, in areas of industrial extraction, and against influential and powerful forces of finance capital. Third, WHRDs share a common experience – that of being relentlessly silenced into submission,