Hillary Clinton: Women's Rights Are Democratic Rights The Global Authoritarian Backlash to Gender Equality

[CousinIT]

https://www.foreignaffairs.com/united-states/womens-rights-are-democratic-rights-hillary-clinton

No paywall: https://archive.ph/pVY5Y

Published in Foreign Affairs
The Global Authoritarian Backlash to Gender Equality
Hillary Rodham Clinton

Autocracies now outnumber democracies, and nearly three-quarters of the world’s population lives under authoritarian rule. Over the past decade, dictators in China and Russia consolidated their control. Hungary, Turkey, and other fragile democracies tipped further into illiberalism. A wave of coups in Africa toppled legitimately elected leaders. Even in the United States, a democracy since its founding, the rule of law weakened and the threat of authoritarianism surged. This trend has crushed hopes that blossomed after the end of the Cold War about the permanent triumph of liberal democracy and has spurred much debate about what went wrong.

These developments can’t be understood, let alone reversed, without grasping a crucial element at the heart of the authoritarian wave: the persecution of women. Across cultures and continents, women champion democracy, and tyrants target them as part of their playbook for amassing power. Failing to treat the repression of women as the crisis it is all but guarantees that democratic erosion will continue unchecked.

More than 30 years ago, I declared at the United Nations’ Fourth World Conference on Women in Beijing that “human rights are women’s rights and women’s rights are human rights.” It was a controversial statement at the time but reflected the reality that women were on the frontlines of the “third wave” of democratization that brought down the Iron Curtain and liberated millions of people around the world in the 1980s and 1990s. Across the Soviet bloc, women-led activism, from labor strikes in Poland to grassroots environmental and civic movements in East Germany and Hungary, helped erode communist control. In Argentina, Brazil, and Chile, women’s movements emerged from the shadows of dictatorships to reshape politics. Argentina was the first to enact a national electoral quota for female candidates, in 1991. Guatemalan women helped bring peace in 1996 after decades of civil war. The women of the African National Congress in South Africa helped end apartheid.

Today, with democracy in retreat, it’s clear that women’s rights have been a canary in the coal mine. Around the world, attacks on women’s rights, opportunities, and full participation in society have seemingly been ignored. What follows is rapid democratic decay: institutions hollowed out, dissent criminalized, and power concentrated beyond accountability. This is not by accident, but by design.

Authoritarian regimes systematically chip away at women’s rights because they recognize that women’s participation is both a catalyst for democracy and a bulwark against tyranny. This repression is both ideological and tactical—silencing women’s contributions that underpin democratic strength and enforcing patriarchal appeals that legitimize authoritarian power. As the scholar Saskia Brechenmacher observed in Foreign Affairs earlier this year: “Given the importance of civic freedoms and political space to meaningful progress for women, strengthening democratic institutions will be an important element. . . . Yet focusing only on democracy while neglecting specific initiatives to improve gender equality would be misguided.” This deep connection between women’s rights and democracy must be understood in order to combat and ultimately reverse the trends unfolding today. Women’s rights are still human rights, and autocrats know it.. . .

[Dave Bowman]

1. Women's Rights are Human Rights.