This issue is devoted to the way authoritarian political parties and organisations have both attacked but also sought to appropriate human rights discourse.

This special issue is based on a series of symposia on Gender and Fundamentalisms conducted over the last four years on different aspects of the relationship between gender and fundamentalisms.

In this issue we are calling for a new interpretive framework that recognises the multiple genealogies that have contributed to binary constructs of the Western/secular versus the authentic/religious; takes into account the different power positionalities of those engaging in global and national struggles temporally and spatially.