Women Human Rights Defenders (WHRDs) are at the heart of every struggle for justice, equality, and freedom. From advancing labour rights and defending land and territories, to pushing back against state and patriarchal violence, and expanding digital freedoms, WHRDs have been central to defending rights of entire communities.
As feminist, queer, and rights-based movements continue to be targeted online and offline, the stakes for safety, sustainability, and solidarity are rising. Political and digital repression – military conflicts, genocide, surveillance, gendered disinformation, online harassment, algorithmic erasure – is not just a technical issue; it’s a political weapon designed to exhaust and silence those on the frontlines. At the same time, sustainability of movements is under threat. The funding for gender justice and human rights is being slashed, redirected, or made conditional. Many governments are turning inward, aid is aligning with foreign policy goals, and gen der equality work is increasingly deemed too “controversial” to fund.
Grassroots groups and WHRD-led collectives are stuck in a cycle of emergency response and survival, while long-term, core, and flexible funding remains a distant dream. However, as major donor shifts, particularly the abrupt US funding withdrawal, leave deep gaps in rights-based work, some donor institutions have begun mobilising responses.
This webinar titled, “Digital Repression, Safety & Movements’ Sustainability,” is a space for activists, WHRDs, and feminist organisers to come together across regions to ask difficult questions:
- What does sustainability actually mean in the face of digital militarisation?
- How do we keep organising when safety and funding are both precarious?
- What kinds of support do we actually need, and what are we tired of seeing (and not seeing) from donors?
Rather than offering solutions or toolkits, this is an exploratory space to surface shared analysis, radical visions, and political clarity, especially as the global funding landscape becomes increasingly hostile to rights-based work.
This conversation will surface experiences of those directly confronting repression, state-corporate complicity, and algorithmic violence, and create space to question the dominant narratives around “resilience” that are often placed on our shoulders.
This webinar is a space for movements to centre feminist analysis, lived experience, and resistance in the face of digital and offline violence and political backlash. The discussion invites WHRDs, feminist technologists, researchers and frontline organisers to critically reflect on the evolving nature of digital repression, and the structural obstacles to building sustainable, well-resourced movements.
Moderator: Sadaf Khan (APC)
Speakers:
- Shmyla Khan, researcher on human rights and gender
- Weam Shawgi, feminist advocate for gender rights
- Tesneem Elhassan, a feminist researcher and analyst on collective memory and the digital presence of WHRDs
