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Paper short abstract

Focusing on Shaheen Bagh (India) alongwith feminist protests across the Global South,the paper explores how women reframe democratic participation through care, rights claims & nonviolent occupation, while states counter through law, surveillance & criminalisation, exposing contested accountability.

Paper long abstract

Feminist movements across the Global South have increasingly emerged as critical sites of democratic contestation, articulating demands that extend beyond gender equality to encompass citizenship, economic justice & state accountability. In India, the Shaheen Bagh movement (2019–2020) marked a pivotal moment in feminist political mobilisation, where Muslim women from working-class backgrounds reclaimed public space to challenge exclusionary citizenship regimes and assert constitutional belonging. This paper situates Shaheen Bagh within a broader comparative analysis of feminist movements across the Global South, including women-led protests in Sri Lanka during the 2022 economic crisis and feminist labour organising in Bangladesh’s garment sector. The paper argues that these movements exemplify a form of intersectional feminist politics in which gender-based claims are inseparable from questions of class, religion, caste, labour, and democratic participation. At Shaheen Bagh, feminist mobilisation reconfigured protest politics through practices of care, constitutional performance, and sustained non-violent occupation. Similar forms of feminist resistance appear across the Global South, where women confront economic precarity, state violence, and authoritarian governance in contexts marked by limited institutional responsiveness. The analysis foregrounds how states respond to such mobilisation through legal regulation, deploying public order laws, emergency powers, surveillance, and criminal sanctions to contain and delegitimise women’s collective action. Yet feminist movements have simultaneously invoked constitutional guarantees, human rights norms, and transnational feminist solidarities to claim legitimacy and visibility. It concludes that feminist movements illuminate alternative democratic imaginaries in the Global South, challenging narrow conceptions of participation and reasserting accountability from the margins of formal politics.