FRAMING PAPER - Facing the backlash: what is fuelling anti-feminist and

2 Facing the backlash: what's fuelling anti-feminist and anti-democratic forces? Democratic backsliding After the end of the Cold War and the fall of many military regimes in the Global South,1 the 1990s witnessed an expansion in the number of democracies around the world. [...] This clearly played out in 2022, when in response to the death in police custody of Kurdish 22-year-old Jîna ‘Mahsa’ Amini, feminists from Iran and the diaspora campaigned for the successful expulsion of Iran from its four-year elected term on the Commission on the Status of Women. [...] Groups of the religious right argue for ‘natural rights, family rights and the right to life of the unborn,’ against the demands of international women’s rights constituencies (Sanders, 2018). [...] Organisations and actors involved in backlash politics have trained and funded their representatives to enter positions of power in national and local governments, judiciaries and other areas of influence (Shameem, 2021). [...] (2023) ‘Coercion and control: sexual and reproductive health and rights, the decline of democracy and rise in authoritarianism’.