Report

Countering backlash: Reclaiming gender justice

This report from UK think tank the Institute of Development Studies conceptualises gender backlash as a multidimensional attack on gender equality.

This report distils six years of collaborative research (from late 2019 to early 2026) from the IDS-led Countering Backlash programme, by IDS itself and 11 partners across seven countries on how contemporary gender backlash operates, and how feminist, queer, and other social movements are resisting it. It argues that current backlash is not simply anti-feminist business as usual but a qualitatively different, globally proliferating mode of patriarchal crisis management, emerging amid intersecting crises, authoritarianism, and deepening inequalities.

The report conceptualises gender backlash as a multidimensional attack on gender equality, its institutions, and those advancing gender justice, driven by overlapping reactive, pre‑emptive, proactive, and opportunistic actors including religious fundamentalists, ethnonationalist projects, conservative civil society, digital manosphere communities, and authoritarian‑leaning states.

These actors operate through transnational networks and digital platforms, mobilising affect (fear, resentment, nostalgia) and targeting symbolic sites of bodies, families, and nations to re-naturalise heteronormative, patriarchal, and majoritarian orders. Backlash is theorised as both episodic and continuous: a recurring mechanism that updates inequitable systems under pressure, rather than a temporary reversal of linear progress.