Introduction
The July Revolution, also referred to as the Student-People uprising, was a student-led pro-democratic mass uprising in Bangladesh in the summer of 2024 that ousted authoritarian leader Sheikh Hasina. Women and girls united as a vital force and played a key leadership role in the democracy movement.
Indeed, this was not the first time women have contributed to democracy movements in Bangladesh. For instance, Bangladeshi women played a pivotal role in the 1971 independence movement. Following the legacy of feminist pioneer Begum Rokeya, Bangladeshi feminists in particular have consistently challenged patriarchal structures and advocated for women’s rights domestically, while simultaneously resisting narrow interpretations of Islam and rejecting rigid binaries between religion and secularism. Indigenous Bangladeshi feminists have further challenged the construction of Bengali nationalism, pushing for a more inclusive understanding of citizenship. More recently, women leaders from the July Revolution rejected a prestigious international award from the United States to protest US foreign policy concerning Palestine.
While the contributions of Bangladeshi feminists to national democratic movements have received some attention, their efforts in shaping an anti-imperial, Global South feminism deserve deeper exploration. These women are at the forefront of a political praxis that skillfully navigates patriarchy, global capitalism, narrow Bengali nationalism, Islamophobia, and Global North dominance. Bangladeshi feminists articulate a transformative vision for women’s material existences rooted in their Global South lived realities. Their vision offers critical insights into how international law can be informed by their respective identities as women, Bangladeshi, indigenous, working class, and grassroots activists.
Gender mainstreaming in international law does aim to integrate gender perspectives throughout policymaking and law-making. The Economic and Social Council of the UN defines gender mainstreaming as the “process of assessing the implications for women and men of any planned action, including legislation, policies or programs, in all areas and at all levels” with the ultimate goal of achieving gender equality. However, current efforts by international organizations and Western feminists often fail to reflect the lived experiences of women from the Global South, recognize intersectional oppression, and legacies of colonialism.
This article urges the UN and other international agencies to adopt a decolonial, intersectional feminist framework that centers grassroots Global South women’s struggles, such as the role of women in democracy movements like the July Revolution.
Bangladeshi Feminists Counter Imperial Feminisms
Since the July Revolution, women have continued to mobilize for gender equity and broader democratic reforms under the interim government. Through persistent advocacy, women activists compelled the interim government to form the Women’s Affairs Commission, which proposed wide ranging changes to improve the lives of Bangladeshi women including a uniform family law for women of all religions in marriage, divorce, and inheritance. Hefazat-e-Islam, an orthodox Sunni advocacy organization, challenged its proposed changes to family law, even calling for the Commission’s abolition. As in the past, Bangladeshi women, many identifying as Muslim, mobilized in the Women’s Solidarity March to protest this narrow and reactionary view of women’s rights, marking a significant act of resistance and presence. They also countered various outside criticisms of the movement by Western policymakers from rising Islamism to narratives of a foreign-funded plot, including a regime change by the US.
Despite these critiques Bangladeshi feminists received and in the wake of international praise and recognition for their activism, Bangladeshi student leaders from Students Against Discrimination and the July Revolution notably rejected the U.S. State Department’s 2025 International Women of Courage Award. The award honors women advocating for human rights and gender equality. Umama Fatema, a key organizer of the July Revolution and a spokesperson for Students Against Discrimination, explained the group declined the award in protest of U.S. foreign policy and in support of Palestine, stating: “The collective recognition of women activists is an honor for us. However, this award has been used to justify Israel’s brutal assault on Palestine in October 2023.”
Fatema’s rejection of the award reflects a critique of colonial or imperial feminism—ways in which women’s rights and gender equality have been instrumentalized in the service Western nation-building projects. Historian Antoinette Burton illustrates how 19th-century British feminists invoked imperial ideologies—like civilizing missions and racial superiority—to assert moral authority, framing their roles as mothers and moral guardians as justification for demands for gender equality. Scholar Kumari Jayawardena explores how local male elites in formerly colonized countries reacted to the imperialist portrayal of local women’s status as a measure of their lack of civilization. These elites pursued reforms, such as banning dowry and child marriage and adopting Western ideals; all aimed at creating the ‘enlightened woman’—a figure who embodied both modernity and tradition yet still upheld existing gender hierarchies.
It is within this historical, political, and legal terrain that feminists from the Global South, including Bangladeshi feminists, navigate resisting the gendered colonialism of imperial “civilizing missions” and racial superiority by Global North feminists while also challenging entrenched patriarchy and religious orthodoxy within their own countries. Both the imperialist ideal of the white woman as savior and the responses by local elites to construct idealized forms of womanhood have created a fraught terrain for Global South feminists to advance an emancipatory vision of human rights. As such, Global feminists struggle to incorporate an intersectional, decolonial perspective into the formulation of international law. In this context, this public refusal of the International Women of Courage award by Bangladeshi student leaders spotlights Global South feminism and challenges the use of feminist recognition to sanitize neocolonial and imperial violence. Global South Feminisms refer to a diverse and evolving set of feminist theories, practices, and movements rooted in the experiences, struggles, and knowledge systems of women and marginalized communities in the Global South. This embrace of a Global South feminism provides a renewed opportunity to examine how such politics might reshape our understanding of international law—the very corpus which starts conversation and sets global expectations for what emancipation and human rights should look like—by foregrounding justice, decoloniality, and the agency of marginalized peoples in global governance.
Similarly to Students Against Discrimination, Third World Approaches to International Law expose how international legal systems are rooted in colonial histories and continue to reproduce structures of domination over the Global South. TWAIL and feminist international law scholars have enriched feminist critiques of international law by foregrounding the intersections of gender with race, colonialism, and economic subjugation. TWAIL approaches—combined with the pressing example which Bangladeshi women have forced the international community to grapple with—provide a path forward for redirecting feminist efforts in International Law towards emancipation.
Global South Feminism and International Law: Policy Implications
While feminist ideas have been integrated into the United Nations and international law, it has been a Eurocentric, colonial feminism, often at the cost of emancipatory conceptions of feminism that reflect women’s experiences in the Global South. This has resulted in a depoliticized form of gender mainstreaming—one that reduces feminism to token representation and technical inclusion, rather than a transformative force for dismantling structural inequalities. It distances “women’s issues” from broader democratic and resistance struggles that women are often engaged in, like the July Revolution. In Bangladesh, under the banner of ‘women’s empowerment,‘ international agencies, such as the World Bank and IMF advanced economic policies that fostered exploitative labor conditions in the garment industry and contributed to broader economic insecurities among youth, fueling their discontent.
To address these limitations, this article recommends that international human rights agencies adopt a decolonial, intersectional Global South feminist framework in the formulation, application, and evaluation of international legal instruments. A specific mandate can be added to relevant international laws, such as Committee on the Elimination of Discrimination against Women (CEDAW), International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, UN Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues (UNPFII), to center the lived experiences, political struggles, and epistemologies of women in the Global South, particularly those engaged in grassroots movements like the July Revolution in Bangladesh. UN agencies implementing human rights laws that affect women’s lives must engage in a consultative process—through formal or informal mechanisms—that allow them to learn from local feminist organizations and experts. Concretely, establishing regional advisory committees can ensure that local perspectives are meaningfully integrated into international policymaking.
A decolonial, feminist framework can lead to wide-ranging set policy recommendation across international human rights laws. The passage of the International Labor Organization’s (ILO) Domestic Workers Convention, C189, exemplifies how global grassroots organizing by domestic workers, combined with the active involvement of inside allies, successfully transformed international labor policy. The convention was made possible because key actors within the ILO engaged directly with domestic workers and their networks, ensuring their voices shaped the outcome. C189 formally recognizes domestic work as legitimate labor and establishes minimum standards, including mandated rest hours, protections against violence, and a minimum age for employment.
My own scholarship has sought to detail examples on how a Global South and decolonial focus to human rights and international law can expand rights for workers in the global supply chain or how environmental human rights can protect women workers in the Global South. Some examples include ensuring that international human rights laws are binding on transnational corporations to protect human rights; guaranteeing legal protections for all women workers; safeguarding the natural environment—which serves as the workplace for agricultural workers—under international environmental laws; protecting women from sexual violence and assault, particularly in conflict zones; and ensuring that human rights defenders are free from political persecution, to name a few.
Critical feminist traditions offer more than just a critique. They hold the potential to contest and restructure international law itself. They foreground policy demands that seek to promote the political and economic autonomy of women in the Global South, just as the leaders of the July Revolution did, pushing beyond symbolic inclusion toward structural transformation.
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Chaumtoli Huq is a Professor of Law at CUNY School of Law and a leading scholar in transnational law. Her expertise spans employment and labor law, migration, and human rights, with a particular focus on the role of social movements in advancing justice in the United States and South Asia.
Image Credit: Tanvir Khondokar, Unsplash Content License, Unsplash.
