Paper short abstract:

We explore how women's struggles in Bangladesh use coalition building strategies to counter backlash and how impact of this strategy varies by the coalition’s focus, and space it engages in, leadership composition, and form, and what lessons it entails for building sustainable movements.

Paper long abstract:

Bangladesh made significant gains in women’s rights and gender equality, but in recent times these gains are facing a strong backlash and women’s rights organisations and feminist groups are taking counter actions. We use four longitudinal case studies of women’s struggles to explore the question: how do women’s struggles in Bangladesh build sustainable coalitions to counter backlash from State and non-State actors, and to what effect? The selected case studies covered the struggles for decent wages, the anti-child marriage movement, the movement for the introduction of comprehensive sexuality education and rape law reform.

We analyse how these four struggles as coalitions frame their issues for their constituency and the outside public, what role their leadership plays in building and sustaining coalitions, and what kinds of compromises are made in the process. We show how the impact of coalition building strategies varies by the focus of the struggle, the space the struggle takes place in and the form of the coalition and its leadership. We argue that while building coalitions provides struggles security through numbers and allow them to gain influence and access to policy and popular spaces, it also comes with costs. Success with respect to creating space both in terms of public discourse and working with the state on policies means compromises within the movement with respect to contentious agenda and inclusion of unruly groups and comes at the cost of losing radical impact.