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Amnesty International's (AI) focus on civil and political rights has marked their work with a gender bias from the outset. In the first comprehensive look at AI's work on women's rights, Miriam Ganzfried illustrates the development of their activities regarding women's rights issues over twenty years. Through interviews with staff members and activists and unprecedented access to archive material from the Swiss and the German AI sections, she shows how women activists strategized to make AI increase its work on women's rights. Additionally, the book demonstrates that, despite the leadership's commitment to the Stop Violence Against Women campaign, internal resistance hampered the integration of women's rights into the organization's overall work.
About the author
Miriam Ganzfried (Dr. phil.), born in 1979, is a political scientist and works at the Center for Higher Education and Science Studies (CHESS) at the University of Zurich, Switzerland. She studied political science and gender studies at the Universities of Geneva and Zurich. During her dissertation, she worked at the Interdisciplinary Centre for Gender Studies and the Faculty of Business, Economics and Social Sciences of the University of Bern and at the Swiss Agency for Development and Cooperation. Her research interests are change processes and resistances in organizations, equal opportunity policies and higher education management.
Summary
Amnesty International's (AI) focus on civil and political rights has marked their work with a gender bias from the outset. In the first comprehensive look at AI's work on women's rights, Miriam Ganzfried illustrates the development of their activities regarding women's rights issues over twenty years. Through interviews with staff members and activists and unprecedented access to archive material from the Swiss and the German AI sections, she shows how women activists strategized to make AI increase its work on women's rights. Additionally, the book demonstrates that, despite the leadership's commitment to the Stop Violence Against Women campaign, internal resistance hampered the integration of women's rights into the organization's overall work.
Additional text
»The book is a humbling reminder of how difficult it has been to arrive at an agreement that women's rights are human rights. It will no doubt serve as a key reference for tracking progress on the integration of women's rights within AI and in human rights discourse more broadly in the years to come.«
Report
»The book is a humbling reminder of how difficult it has been to arrive at an agreement that women's rights are human rights. It will no doubt serve as a key reference for tracking progress on the integration of women's rights within AI and in human rights discourse more broadly in the years to come.«
Elisabeth Prügl, Swiss Political Science Association, 25.01.2022 20220208
