The world we inhabit is not the world of a single crisis. It is the world of several, simultaneous, mutually reinforcing ones: rising authoritarianisms, legal rollbacks on sexual and reproductive rights, armed conflict, the climate crisis, organized disinformation, the shrinking of civic space. For human rights defenders —women, girls, trans and non-binary people who hold together the fabric of movements from territories, communities, borders, and exiles— this is not a metaphor. It is the environment in which they do their work, every day.
And in that context, someone has to tell what is happening. Not as a chronicle of victims. As political analysis of systems.
The backlash is not spontaneous
There is a comfortable narrative about the rollback of rights: that it is an understandable, if regrettable, reaction to changes that came too fast. That narrative is false. What defenders face today is not a sum of isolated threats. It is an organized system: anti-rights movements with financial infrastructure, conservative religious networks with transnational reach, digital actors coordinating harassment and disinformation campaigns, legal frameworks designed to criminalize rights defense under the name of “security” or “sovereignty.” The backlash has architecture. And that architecture must be named for what it is: a political project. At the same time, defenders keep building. Systems of collective care, networks of mutual protection, digital security strategies, alliances that sustain the continuity of activism when the State fails, when funding runs dry, when accumulated exhaustion threatens to win. That too is data. That too is analysis.
The problem with research that does not listen
There is a long tradition of global human rights reports that document violations without producing situated knowledge. Methodologically impeccable. Politically empty. That count how many defenders were killed but not why patterns vary by region, identity, or type of defense. That record digital harassment but not the strategies movements use to confront it. That cite Global South organizations as sources of data but not as producers of analysis. That research is extractive. It arrives, takes what it needs, and leaves. And the knowledge it produces serves primarily those who already have access to the spaces where it circulates. Feminist research must do something different. It must produce knowledge from the realities of those who defend rights—not about them. It must treat defenders and their organizations as co-producers of analysis, not as informants. It must be designed so that those who participate in the process recognize their own experience in the results—and can use that instrument. That requires time. It requires genuine methodological care. It requires assuming that epistemic authority does not come from institutional distance but from proximity to the realities of activism.
Safety first
Producing evidence about the work of defenders in high-exposure contexts is not a neutral exercise. Naming can protect. And naming can put people at risk. This tension does not disappear with good intentions—it must be integrated into the methodological design from the start. That means rigorous anonymization protocols, digital infrastructure that minimizes risk, real informed consent—not a signed form—that includes an honest conversation about the implications of participating. It means that the safety of people who participate in a research process is the responsibility of the team conducting it, not of those being researched. And it also means understanding that making the work of defenders visible in contexts of backlash is itself a political act. A way of contesting the narratives that criminalize, silence, or render them invisible. A way of building global solidarity at a moment when feminist movements are being attacked in coordinated, well-resourced ways.
Why this matters now
International cooperation monitoring systems measure results. Global reports document violations. Multilateral mechanisms adopt resolutions. But there is something all of that still fails to capture systematically: the political intelligence that defenders themselves produce about their contexts, their strategies, their victories, their needs. In a moment of contraction of feminist space, that intelligence is a central political resource. And producing it requires research that is not extractive. That does not reproduce, in its own methodology, the power asymmetries it claims to be documenting. The polycrisis is not a backdrop. It is the system that produces the conditions in which defenders work and that organizes the forces that attack them. Understanding it this way changes the questions we ask. It changes who participates in building the answers. And it changes what we do with the knowledge we produce.