Most systematic reviews concentrate on pooling effect estimates from multiple trials from different contexts, as though there were one underlying effect that can be uncovered by pooling. They often fail to examine mechanisms and how these might interact with context to generate different outcomes in different settings and populations. Realist reviews do focus on questions of what works for whom under what conditions but do not use rigorous methods to search for, appraise the quality of and synthesise evidence to answer these questions. We show how systematic reviews can explore more nuanced questions informed by realism while retaining rigour. Using the example of a systematic review of school-based interventions to prevent dating and other gender-based violence, we first examine how systematic reviews can define context–mechanism–outcome configurations. This can occur through synthesis of intervention descriptions, theories of change and process evaluations.

To fully understand the innovative potential of intersectional advocacy, one needs to understand the traditional policymaking process that it confronts. In Chapter 2 illustrates how policy boundaries contribute to inequality in the United States. Drawing from a textual analysis of the Congressional hearings on the Violence Against Women Act (VAWA) and newspaper articles covering VAWA, the chapter presents evidence that the policy boundaries in the VAWA harmed intersectionally marginalized groups. Moreover, it shows advocacy groups that did not represent intersectionally-marginalized groups contributed to the setting of these policy boundaries by participating in the policymaking process. Underscoring how advocacy groups that do not represent multiply-marginalized intervene in the policymaking process, this chapter illustrates what is at stake with the traditional policymaking process and the ways that mainstream advocacy groups have participated in it.

In Chapter 3, the overarching question of this book starts to be answered: how do advocacy groups intervene in policymaking processes to represent intersectionally marginalized populations? Here, work is presented that examines how advocacy groups representing intersectionally-marginalized groups have participated in this policymaking process. Analyses of the testimony and statements from advocacy groups during Congressional hearings over the reauthorization of VAWA from the past 25 years is provided to show that select organizations were successfully advocating for linkages between policies and issues that reflected the experiences of intersectionally marginalized groups. These linkages were between VAWA and policies on welfare, immigration, and tribal rights. In this chapter, “intersectional advocacy,” is identified to explain how advocacy groups in this setting engaged in it to change VAWA policy over time. The chapter shows that VAWA changes in remarkable ways that better represent and serve intersectionally marginalized groups.

In Chapter 4, the applicability of this practice is considered by answering the question: to what extent does participation in intersectional advocacy vary depending on the level of government or political context where the advocacy takes place? Drawing from a qualitative analysis of 43 interviews with organizational leaders, this chapter presents how intersectional advocacy was applied at the municipal, state, and federal levels. This analysis shows that organizational leaders strategically established policy connections between gendered violence and unaffordable housing, inaccessible healthcare, and mass incarceration. The chapter then describes how issue and policy linkages vary across these problem areas and the level of government advocates are situated within. The types of institutional boundaries they encountered as they intervened in these policymaking processes are also described here. Ultimately, the chapter illustrates how the practice of intersectional advocacy transcended these three different levels of government, and that groups deployed different strategies depending on these varying contexts.

Chapter 1 brings the American state into full view by showing the ways in which its policy arm reinforces gender, economic, and racial inequality. The chapter situates this institutional function within a larger historical context of patriarchal systems that reproduce these inequalities in ways that must be understood when it comes to addressing gendered violence. The chapter then introduces the original concept of intersectional advocacy and explains its theoretical and empirical contours: how it is rooted in Black Feminist theory and developed from a practical understanding of how advocacy groups represent intersectionally marginalized constituents. After establishing the theoretical and empirical groundwork for intersectional advocacy, the chapter ends with a discussion of why this practice is important, how it travels across issue contexts, and how it is studied throughout the book.

What explains why these groups take on the practice of intersectional advocacy? In Chapter 5, this question is answered from an organizational perspective. Drawing again from the qualitative analysis of interviews with organizational leaders, the chapter presents the features of organizations that practice intersectional advocacy. There are four constitutive features of their organizations that were related to their engagement in intersectional advocacy. Despite a commitment to intersectional feminism, one of these organizations did not have all of these features and it also did not fully participate in intersectional advocacy. By discussing this case, the chapter demonstrates how an analysis of the four organizational features also help identify why groups such as these do not fully take on this practice. It then ends with how organizations with commitments to intersectionally marginalized groups but have not actualized them through intersectional advocacy, can change their varying organizational structures to take on this approach. This chapter is written in a way that scholars and organizational practitioners can both understand and appreciate the practice of intersectional advocacy.

The book opens with the story of Mariella Batista, a woman who was unable to access essential services through the Violence Against Women Act (VAWA) in 1994 because of her immigration status and who tragically died from intimate partner abuse. Her experiences with VAWA reveal the ways in which policy institutions are rigidly confined to one primary issue area (i.e., gendered violence) and as such these laws fail to serve women with other marginalized identities (i.e., Latinx, noncitizen, low-income women). Her story illuminates the institutional inequalities that lie within U.S. policy institutions. The remainder of this introduction chapter explains the history behind these institutions and the ways in which women have resisted them for centuries. These historical moments set the contemporary landscape for advocacy within today’s movement to address gendered violence. This chapter then introduces the concept of “intersectional advocacy” led by organizations that are reimagining and reconfiguring policies to better represent women like Mariella.

Chapter 3 proposes an original conceptual framework built on gender and security studies and supported by existing international legal standards and norms to reframe the interpretation of the refugee definition and better reflect the nature of violence in armed conflicts. In doing so, it reasserts the Refugee Convention as the cornerstone of international protection. This chapter claims that the ongoing dynamics of violence in situations of armed conflict provide a more valuable lens to interpret the Refugee Convention definition where persons flee armed conflicts as it focuses on the nature of violence, including its continuum, features, application, direction, motivation and impact. A micro-level analysis of this type also enables the identification of gender dynamics that are essential in understanding violence in armed conflicts. The framework outlines the knowledge that should be incorporated into the process of interpreting the refugee definition to ensure effective protection of refugees fleeing armed conflicts. The chapter is broken down into the characteristics of contemporary armed conflicts and how these features relate to the refugee definition, including the temporality of armed conflicts, the rise of non-state actors, weak states, and the objectives, gendered strategies and tactics of fighting parties.

The chapter augments feminist analysis of patriarchy and women’s citizenship in Africa. Among respondents, men and women emphasize gender equality when discussing legalistic elements of citizenship, such as obeying the law. However, since much of everyday citizenship revolves around daily interactions, women’s expected roles as mothers and men’s constructed roles as protectors and providers are central to the ways that respondents view citizenship. Men and women highlight communal obligations, moral character, and building the nation when discussing citizenship, but these elements manifest differently across genders. Although Afrobarometer findings indicate more men attend local meetings, both men and women are active in local groups and stress legal obligations. Some youth push back against gendered citizenship, crafting new citizen identities rooted in lived experiences. Although surveys show fewer women than men engage in voting and protesting (except in Uganda), some respondents demonstrate micropatterns of contestation through support for women in political office. A case study of Ghanaian youth mobilizing against gender-based violence illustrates both challenges to gendered citizenship and affirmation of this identity.

This chapter extends existing literature on property, political authority and state formation by focusing on the gendered aspects of ethno-territorial conflict. From late 1998, Solomon Islands was plunged into a period of conflict, and by 2003, it was regarded as a ‘failed state’. Militants made territorial claims that were grounded in highly gendered notions of culture and ethnicity, and in the aftermath of the conflict, attention has been devoted to consolidating these distinctions via a new constitution adopting a federal system. While ’the Tension’ has often been interpreted as exposing the fragility of state institutions and the tenacity of custom, this chapter argues that it must be understood as emerging from processes of state formation. These processes are profoundly gendered, and reproduce state norms and institutions as a masculine, even hypermasculine, domain. This is highlighted by the widespread gender-based violence perpetrated by militants during the conflict, which was not merely an effect of territorial claims, but constituted them, with devastating consequences for women, children and men who perceived and sought to express themselves differently.

Chapter 4 describes how women, under participatory constitutionalism, are succeeding in broadening the constitutional agenda in the current century in ways that foreground the inequalities rooted in the “private sphere,” thus calling for a new form of gender transformative constitutionalism. In particular, new constitutional agendas are flourishing around the world, covering topics such as intimate partner violence and violence against women; the fuller recognition of women’s sexual and reproductive autonomy; constitutionally grounded assistance to motherhood and reproduction; and the importance of a care-centered understanding of fatherhood challenging hegemonic masculinities, removing the remaining sex-based, care-related differentiations, and challenging of gender-neutral legal norms that shape interpersonal relations and implicit gender role assumptions.

Women are entitled to the equal enjoyment and protection of all human rights, including the right to life. The duty to protect life requires that certain acts be criminalised for everyone under a State’s jurisdiction. These include all acts of gender-based violence directed against women, but especially those that endanger life. In a novel approach to oversight of treaty compliance, a group of experts on action against violence against women and domestic violence (GREVIO) was established under the Istanbul Convention to monitor its implementation. In addition to receiving and considering State reports, GREVIO may organise country visits to clarify possible non-compliance. The chapter also considers maternal health and the right to life.