As guns proliferate in a worldwide market with few controls, many get diverted from state and rebel armies to petty criminals and 'the man in the street'. Sexual and domestic violence is becoming more deadly, reports Cynthia Cockburn

In the 1970s, the women’s liberation movement had a badge that proclaimed: women who seek equality with men lack ambition. We don’t want to participate as equals in the violence, oppression and greed of patriarchal power, says Rebecca Johnson.

Secularism, as a concept, appears to be in danger from both the left and the right. Among feminists, it tends to be only some minority women scrambling for the soul of secularism. It is time for all feminists to muck in, says Rahila Gupta

Global funding for HIV/Aids now goes to large international organisations. They need the grassroots organisations to tick their boxes of “community involvement”, but they are corporate entities, and the money for the daily advocacy work of positive women has all but dried up, says Alice Welbourn

The women party activists who applied for nominations to stand in next week's local elections in Sri Lanka found themselves blocked by a system of entrenched patron-client relationships. As one of them said, " for how long will the men decide where the wells should be, even though it is the women who fetch the water?".