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Introduction
In the last half century, the international human rights movement has established itself as an influential—some might say momentous—global movement. Despite its modest beginning in 1948 as a declaration (Universal Declaration of Human Rights), it has evolved into multiple conventions with the legal power to pressure ratifying states into compliance. The Women's Rights as Human Rights movement (WRHRM), with the landmark 1979 UN adoption of the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women (CEDAW), is considered a particularly noteworthy poster child for the international human rights movement. Predicated on the premise that all forms of discrimination against women, and especially violence against women, are human rights violations, the WRHRM seems to have transcended particularities that divide women across the globe, such as "race, class, sexual orientation, colonialism, poverty, religion, [and] nationality," and thereby epitomize "global feminist" politics (Bunch 1987, 303). The WRHRM subscribes to Western conceptions of human rights and gender equality and pressures ratifying non-Western states to adopt them in their domestic legal systems. Although this may risk replicating the imperialist stance of the colonial era, an overwhelming majority of human rights activists from the Global South support the movement. Western feminists take this as evidence that the WRHRM exemplifies transnational feminist solidarity and expands "the commonality and solidarity" among women's struggles across the globe (Bunch 1987, 303). Niamh Reilly (2007), for instance, claims that the WRHRM promotes "bottom-up participation" among feminist human rights activists from the Global South (191) who represent "the standpoint of particular marginalized experiences and identities" (193).
Not all feminists agree with such a rosy assessment: socialist feminists (Otto 1999), care ethicists (Held 2015), and postcolonial feminists (Alvarez 1998; Grewal 1999; Basu 2000; Menon 2004; Chowdhury 2007; Kapur 2012; McLaren 2017) have been critical of the WRHRM for diverging and at times overlapping reasons. Yet the view that the WRHRM represents exemplary transnational feminist solidarity is widespread not only among a broad swath of Western feminists of liberal persuasion (Bunch 1990; Cook 1993; Friedman 1995; Okin 1998; Keck and Sikkink 1999; Zwingel 2005; MacKinnon 2006; Merry 2006; Reilly 2007; Ackerly 2008) and influential human rights theorists (Ignatieff 2001; Pogge 2002; Buchanan 2004; Donnelly 2013) but also feminists from indigenous communities (Kuokkanen 2012; NWAC 1991) and...