Gender Justice and Human Rights in International Development Assistance

Sarah Forti PhD is the founder and director of Critical Rights & Gender Consult based in Copenhagen, Denmark, and has more than 20 years of experience in Development evaluations, program design and training in the field of human rights, non-discrimination, women’s human rights and SGBV (Sexual and Gender-based Violence) across Africa, Latin America and Asia.

• IntroductionPart I1. Breaking the waves2. Wavering across the international normative architecture Part II3. Variations on the politics of gender equality4. Universal nocturnes of injusticesPart III5. Critical reframing of gender equality

"Based on extensive experience of the development industry in Sub-Saharan Africa and Latin America, lawyer Sarah Forti argues here for the use of a Human Rights-Based Approach (HRBA) to gender work in the development field, offering students and practitioners in gender and international development a deeper understanding of gender equality." — Pauline Stoltz, Aalborg University, Denmark"For those at the chalk face of international development assistance, Sarah Forti’s book will be indispensable. While it recognises and acknowledges the issues raised by cultural relativism it also seeks (successfully) to revivify the need for an acceptance of the universality of the inequality of women’s cultural and economic status, and the implications of this for useful gender development assistance." — Emeritus Professor Wade Mansell at Kent Law School, University of Kent, UK"The author builds upon a wealth of experience in the field of international development assistance to highlight the universality of violations of women’s rights and rescue the concept of gender justice from discursive fragmentations stemming from cultural relativism and identity politics. An important book not only for development practitioners but for anyone interested in finding clear pathways through the maze of ideologies of gender equality and justice." —Patrick Thornberry, Emeritus Professor of International Law at Keele University, member of the (UN) Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination, and former Chairman of Minority Rights Group, the international human rights NGO