Plenary 3

Funding for Women’s Rights – Blog Post

Posted in Plenary 3 on November 20th, 2012 by

Joni van de Sand, WO=MEN IN ISTANBUL Evening Plenary: Tapping Current Opportunities and Assessing Challenges to Mobilize Resources for Women’s Rights and Feminist Organizing Around the World Seven years ago, AWID asked the question “Where is the Money for Women’s Rights?” in a context where many funders and activists agreed that donor interest in women […]

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Plenary speech by Kaythi Win, Chairperson of APNSW

Posted in Plenary 3 on November 1st, 2012 by

Hello everybody, I am Kthi Win from Myanmar and I am a sex worker. I manage a national organisation for female, male & transgender sex workers in Burma & I am also the chairperson of the Asia Pacific Network of Sex Workers.  Until now, organising anything in Myanmar has been very difficult.  And people ask, […]

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Where we must stand: African women in an age of war

Amina Mama. Whether one considers the direct effects of military rule and conflict on women, or the global economic implications of the US war-on-terror, militarism threatens to strip away all the 20th century gains in women’s rights, dispossessing us once more. African women must take a stand, says Amina Mama (Read this article in Italian) […]

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Senegal: the land belongs to those who work it

Fatou Guèye. After a quarter century of armed conflict, and a socio-economic fabric reduced to shreds, women in Casamance, Senegal, are winning the right to access land and rebuild peace, says Fatou Guèye Ziguinchor is a region in Casamance in the south of Senegal that is separated from the rest of the country by Gambia. […]

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Peace movements: violence reduction as common sense

CYNTHIA COCKBURN If one thing holds the overall movement of peace movements together it is the goal of violence reduction. There’s a shared conviction that violence is a choice, that there exists, much more often than commonly supposed, a more violent and a less violent course of action Can we justifiably speak of a global […]

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Brazil: “state feminism” at work

Posted in Plenary 3, The Role of the State on October 29th, 2012 by

ANA ALICE ALCÂNTARA and CECILIA SARDENBERG. How far can the flourishing “participatory state feminism” in Brazil expand into the state apparatus in order to counter the absence of women in decision making positions and redefine women’s place in society? Feminist activism in Brazil has stretched the very concept of democracy by including women’s rights in the process […]

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Visible players: the power and the risks for young feminists

Posted in Plenary 1, Plenary 2, Plenary 3, Sexuality, The Role of the State on October 29th, 2012 by

JENNIFER ALLSOPP. From the student protests in Chile, to the protests of the ‘Arab spring’ in the MENA region, the debate among young feminists about how to reclaim public space reveals tensions between an individualist model of autonomy and a collectivist reclamation of public space. Jenny Allsopp reports on day two of the AWID Forum 2012 […]

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A Revolutionary Woman

Posted in Plenary 3 on October 25th, 2012 by

 By Marwa Sharafeldin (Egypt) You talk to me about your austerity measures The need to copyright my past, present and future To relieve your financial crisis pressures I have to tighten my belt and work hard For somehow, I have to save the banking system So it can save me and my daily, hard work […]

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Disobedience of the prescriptions of capitalism

Posted in Plenary 3 on October 25th, 2012 by

Following a packed gathering in the Binbirdirek Cistern that had participants singing and dancing well into the night, the third morning of the 2012 AWID Forum opened with poet Marwa Sharafeldin and six speakers highlighting the sounds and strategies of resistance. Across the stories they told, a common theme was disobedience of the prescriptions of […]

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Experiences of Resistance and Collective Organizing to Transform Economic Power

Posted in Plenary 3 on October 25th, 2012 by

The previous AWID Forum in 2008 focused on the “Power of Movements”. This plenary returned to that theme, and presented some of the experiences of diverse movements that are confronting and resisting dominant forms of economic power and who are organizing creatively to build their own power. Panelists shared insights on how different groups are […]

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