An exchange took place last week on Twitter about whether we had more to lose or gain from holding a 5th World Conference on Women. The conversation was sponsored by the international NGO, Gender at Work , and can be seen under the hashtag: #5thwcw. The discussion was triggered by an article that we wrote taht was published on openDemocracy in January, called ‘Women’s rights have no country’.
We argued against a dominant position that it is too risky to hold another UN conference on women because the forces of conservative backlash are currently so significant that women risk losing the normative gains made at the Beijing conference 20 years ago. This caution is evident in the meek approach of the upcoming UN Commission on the Status of Women discussed in an article by Lyric Thompson this week, where there will be no attempt to enrich and deepen the achievements of Beijing. Our point was that transnationalism has always been a crucial resource for feminists at national, regional and international levels. We argued that the mounting backlash against women's rights was all the more reason to find grounds for solidarity, build effective networks, and demonstrate a capability to work across borders to defend women’s rights.
The Twitter discussion was an initial and fairly random foray into a global public debate - that we argue must be held - on the viability and value of holding another UN conference. There were over 1400 tweets and almost 200 individual contributors - a good start, but nothing to compare with the Twitter hysteria engendered by Emma Watson outing herself as a feminist. Still, some interesting points came up: a conviction that young people must be engaged more effectively in the struggle for gender equality; anxiety about intensifying conservative backlash; skepticism about the capacity of states to defend women’s rights, about the likelihood that the most excluded women and girls will participate, about the value of norm development in addressing the unfinished agenda of women’s rights, about the capacity of technology to enable a deepening of the women’s’ rights process,.
