Srilatha Batliwala

Srilatha Batliwala is Director Knowledge Building and Feminist Leadership at CREA (Creating Resources for Empowerment in Action). She is a feminist activist, scholar, and writer with four decades of experience that ranges from grassroots activism and movement building with some of the poorest women in India, to research and building theory from practice in premier international academic institutions and feminist organizations.

Feminists and feminisms come in many forms: Suspend judgment!

The responses of feminist activists to the Suspend Judgement! campaign reveal the hidden hierarchies of power and exclusion we must confront. Part 2. Part 1.

By Srilatha Batliwala, Geetanjali Misra and Nafisa Ferdous

/ 10 Oct 2016

To build feminist futures, suspend judgment!

As feminist thinkers and activists, we must tackle not only the systemic discrimination embedded in the world outside, but the often unconscious or invisible biases that we ourselves have internalized. Part 1. Part 2.

By Srilatha Batliwala, Geetanjali Misra and Nafisa Ferdous

/ 3 Oct 2016

A transformative strategy: the true value of investing in women’s rights

What happened to the largest pot of money ever made available for advancing gender equality and human rights? Srilatha Batliwala reports on the results of AWID's aggregate analysis of the impact of the MDG 3 Fund.

By Srilatha Batliwala

/ 25 Feb 2013

Beyond individual stories: women have moved mountains

Among all the social movements of the past century, the struggle for women’s rights and gender equality has been the most transformative in terms of the deep tectonic shifts it has created in the social terrain, yet skepticism about the value of funding women's rights work persists

By Srilatha Batliwala

/ 18 Feb 2013

What does transforming economic power mean?

Today's targeting of women in processes of realigning economic controls is perhaps quite unique. In order to unpack and understand economic power, we must revisit the different realms in which power operates, and the various forms that it takes - visible, hidden and invisible.

By Srilatha Batliwala

/ 18 Apr 2012

Politics outside politics: how women redefine democracy

A conference on women redefining democracy can do no better than start with Mary Parker Follett, the unsung, unacknowledged 'mother' of modern organizational theory and management studies, and

By Srilatha Batliwala

/ 10 May 2009

Putting power back into empowerment

Of all the buzzwords that have entered the development lexicon in the past thirty years, "empowerment" is probably the most widely used and abused. Like many other important

By Srilatha Batliwala

/ 30 Jul 2007

Women transforming power?

History will undoubtedly reveal that the quest for gender equality and justice was one of the defining events of the twentieth century. Beginning with struggles for women’s suffrage in

By Srilatha Batliwala

/ 5 Oct 2005