Why Civic Space Matters in a Time of Backlash: Lessons from CSW70
By Ismini Mangafas
Read the full report here
At its 70th Commission for the Status of Women (CSW70), the United Nations convened academics, activists, policymakers, and practitioners in a series of civil society and government meetings to examine major obstacles to gender equality and propose solutions. These discussions highlighted challenges that disproportionately affect women and girls, including femicide, “gender backlash,” and gaps in sexual and reproductive healthcare. While mostly framed as women’s and girls’ issues, however, these challenges also produce cascade effects on families, communities, and society overall.
At the same time, other challenges – which can still be gendered in impact – appear more universal. These include armed conflict, unemployment and joblessness, disability rights, shrinking civic space, and digital rights and liberties in the context of emerging technologies. We explore many of these challenges in our report on CSW70’s priority theme, which was “strengthening access to justice for women and girls, including by promoting inclusive and equitable legal systems, eliminating discriminatory laws, policies, and practices, and addressing structural barriers.”
There is, however, a blunt truth to the matter: some issues are prerequisite to others. That doesn’t mean that issues shouldn’t be addressed in tandem; people should contribute where their expertise and influence are strongest, while participating in forums that consolidate issues in an intersectional and multidimensional way. But the reality is that solving some issues sometimes relies on solving others. For example, Dr. Felipe Paullier, who spoke at the youth meeting on the CSW70 priority theme, noted, “peace is a prerequisite to justice.” This points to the many cross-context obstacles that a lack of peace spurs. Similarly, feminists who advocate for full legal capacity for people with disabilities are also challenging precedents used to justify the legal incapacitation of others more broadly.
Under that framework, it’s hard to see why shrinking civic space shouldn’t be high on the priority list. Like other rights-based organizations that have tracked and investigated restrictions on civic space worldwide, Civicus Monitor defines civic space as any environment in which individuals can exercise their “fundamental rights to associate, assemble peacefully, and freely express views and opinions,” which are “the three key rights that civil society depends upon.”
This matters because, according to Civicus Monitor, those rights enable people to “influence the political and social structures around them,” which is “the bedrock of any open and democratic society.”
The chain between grassroots organizing and institutional influence has three links: assembly, during which people gather; expression, through which they convey a common interest; and impact, the result of that expression. The transition from expression to impact depends on expression evolving into pressure on the institutions that shape public life. In other words, democratic levers of control must exist, and expression must land on them, for impact to materialize.
These levers, which can include anything from commercial boycotts to workers’ unions to collective voting commitments at the ballot box, aren’t always accessible or useful. For example, if a democracy’s government is hollowing it out, elections may cease to offer meaningful alternatives. Some governments have policies that forbid unionization or boycotts. In such cases, civic space provides the terrain on which people can organize the next layer of solutions: protests, labor strikes, and other forms of civil disobedience that force democratic concessions.
Civic space has been shrinking through direct and indirect government interventions. Direct actions against civic space can include fines, arrests, and even deadly force by government agents. Indirect actions, often framed as serving purposes other than suppressing public assembly, can range from curfews to hostile architecture. In some cases, governments can collude with one part of civil society to marginalize the rest of it, through tactics like doxxing, political intimidation and violence, selective access to free speech, and professional or financial retaliation.
But even against efforts to erode it, civic space is still a source of societal resilience and resistance. Here, individuals can develop and implement methods to regain footing in public debates, circulate new perspectives, and preserve to access to natural rights, even if only in partially concealed ways. In many ways, the internet can foil state and proxy attempts to shrink civic space by providing an expansive digital landscape in which people can organize.
In practice, however, digital civic space has shrunk too. The absence of meaningful ownership rights over personal data has led to increasingly entrenched surveillance mechanisms, in some cases contributing to detentions and disappearances. Less severe for individuals, but still deeply damaging to civil society, are censorship tactics such as de-platforming, banning, and shadow-banning users on the basis of opinion. Digital civic space can also shrink when platform algorithms disproportionately amplify some viewpoints over others, whether because of governmental collusion or pressure, profit incentives, or incidental political alignment. Doxxing, deepfakes, and coordinated spam campaigns can also create a chilling effect on dissent expressed through social media.
There are two main reasons that digital civic space can be so effectively shrunk. The first is market monopolization, or the extreme ownership of market activity by only a few providers. If few viable substitutes exist among social media platforms, users have limited ability to discipline platforms through exit or demand-side pressure. Users also have little incentive to migrate from one platform to another if alternatives do not meaningfully differ in how they handle rights, privacy, or moderation. For instance, although X, Meta, and TikTok (especially since the US-Ellison purchase) have very different interfaces, they are not radically differently in terms of user data and censorship. The growing platform Bluesky, whose model includes decentralized and personal data storage, may emerge as a partial disruptor; however, even BlueSky allows data-scraping by third parties, including search engines, and it removes posts categorized as harassment or hate speech.
Although corporations do have the legal, and arguably social, right to moderate content as part of their standing as private entities, any platform that relies on systematic censorship – even when its moderation standards align with popular moral or political preferences – is an unreliable site for civic organizing. The shoe can always fall on the other foot.
Most of all, every corporation, including social media platforms that are treated like digital civic spaces, must adhere to the policies and laws of the jurisdictions in which it operates. This means that when laws and policies conflict with natural rights – which is often when the incentive to organize is greatest – people may be unable use mainstream platforms for organizing, due to legal risk for host companies. As a result, those who need digital civic space the most may be the very people most substantively excluded from using privatized platforms.
The second reason that digital civic space is increasingly vulnerable is a lack of technological literacy among individuals, including those who organize on social media. Even though technical coding skills are more accessible than ever – through affordable or free courses from organizations like Coursera and Blue Dot Impact – not many organizers have pursued these opportunities, in part because programming is still viewed as relevant only to aspiring professional, usually corporate, software engineers.
Similarly, most organizers lack fundamental knowledge of the internet, including what it is and how it operates. This dearth of proficiency becomes evident every time uses the internet – and is censored accordingly – as if the open net supports the anonymity, risk tolerance, and speech more securely suited for the dark web.
However, turning to the dark web introduces a new set of challenges. Users need a more manual, hands-on approach to security and malware hygiene, which requires at least some basic coding skills. The dark net also tends to offer a slower and less intuitive user experience than the open web, requiring patience and adaptation. Users also have to prepare for the possibility of encounter extremely heinous material – that, for many reasons including anonymity, doesn’t broadly populate the open net – with little practical ability to act, beyond reporting to Interpol.
These challenges do not even begin to capture the logistical difficulties of hosting a social media platform on the dark net, although it has been done. There are inherent limits to how big a platform can get, since every user has to be vetted lest the wrong one infiltrates. Vetting is its own challenge. By definition (and design), the platform won’t be visible on the open net. Because risk mitigation would likely require minimizing features, the result might resemble a forum more than a conventional social media platform. Any claim to fame could provoke scrutiny, which could invite cyberattacks that target a platform, and even succeed if any platform operator makes a single operational mistake. And even though users on the dark net are anonymous, they can still be identified by other users with competing interests and punished.
None of that nullifies the need for independent and anonymous digital civic space. It does, however, emphasize that creating such a space is a distinct undertaking, which organizers and their coalitions may need to evaluate through a cost-benefit analysis. And if benefits outweigh, those actors may need to begin investing and planning accordingly. It will seem daunting because technology often appears foreign – linguistically, scientifically, and philosophically. However, consider this: some of the most determined users of the dark net are engaged in profoundly harmful activity. They are not smarter than organizers who have already proven to be among humanity’s most creative and intellectual. The nefarious and unethical have managed to claim the dark net as their domain because too few others realize it belongs to us too.
By utilizing a different part of the digital ecosystem, Repro Uncensored has also offered its own solution to shrinking civic space. The Repro Uncensored Collective, hosted through decentralized, privacy-first sites like Decidim and Voca, offers a forum in which organizers can preserve their independence while engaging within a trusted environment. The interface offers scalable capabilities, including optional integration with tools organizers already use, while its hosts aim to protect privacy at each stage. It preserves much of the connective function of social media – albeit without a news feed – while improving users’ ability to hold private conversations, make public proposals, and trigger collective engagement through features such as referendum voting. This digital civic space has been built – now it needs users to test it, give feedback, and keep using it.
One reason civic space matters so much is that it creates antidotes to the very forces that erode it. Described in CSW70 as “anti-rights movements,” “gender backlash,” and “gender pushback,” these groups, as the youth delegate from Denmark put it, are “well-financed,” “well-organized,” and have been effective at presenting “a clear picture of the world they want – one that young people are watching and some have started to lean in.” Some ideological drivers of these groups include patriarchal interpretations of religion and religious actors’ interference in legal systems, both of which are discussed in greater detail in our report on CSW70’s priority theme.
That’s not all: gender backlash and pushback – retaliation against gender-equal rights and liberties – are driven by the usual suspects like born-and-bred chauvinists, but also by individuals who adopt delusions of male superiority in order to offset feelings of inner turmoil. This can include a sense of personal inadequacy, which can sometimes result from economic downturns that make men unable to fulfill provider stereotypes in previously prosperous societies. It can also include societal isolation, which can result from living too far from other people, not having a community, facing addiction to doom-scrolling, and being more capable of scapegoating women than changing any of that. While many other factors can contribute to feelings of selective worthiness, some men just naively, and without any real reason, accept patriarchal narratives as a source of dopamine until it’s all they have.
Women sustain gender backlash and pushback, too. As with men, there are the usual suspects: pick-mes, born-and-bred to seek approval, almost definitionally from the chauvinists. Other women are shaped by some of the same social pressures affecting men: amid declining employment prospects, denouncing women’s pursuit of work may itself come to feel like a form of empowerment. Women who cannot access work or status through conventional means may also grow resentful and pivot toward endorsing a different kind of performance that is centered on submissive domesticity. With few exceptions worldwide, in contexts where lawmakers repeatedly fail to deter or penalize interpersonal gender-based violence short of murder, some women may rail about how their rightful place is in the home and not out in the open, where bad things can happen.
In societies, especially democratic ones, where gender equality goes from legally enshrined to legally dismantled, it’s remarkable how women enlist for a role in their own demise. The United States is an ongoing and damning example. In 2015, public conversation about human rights and civil liberties included topics such as reversing mass incarceration, limiting government surveillance, and the Supreme Court’s recent recognition of same-sex marriage.
By 2025, that landscape looked substantially darker. Abortion, which had been a national right in 2015, was becoming increasingly criminalized, with proposed penalties including incarceration and execution. Government officials announced lists of domestic enemies, based on political dissent and personal expression. A woman’s family was legally prevented from taking her off of life support until her body went into labor.
Throughout this downturn, many women inside and outside of politics played famous and consequential roles in ruining their own country and dissolving their own rights. At CSW70, the youth delegate from Japan recognized women’s political power, saying, “all of us, people of all genders, form the power structures.” There is, however, one major exception: children, who, unlike adults, cannot consent to being exposed to gender-unequal ideologies, let alone to participate in them. And the younger that children are, the more gender inequality hurts them and shapes their futures.
Civic space enables people to organize for those who cannot; it enables people to gather and decipher the reasoning behind anti-rights ideologies, and to create visible interventions that can coax anti-rights proponents back to reality or prevent additional people from becoming delusional and radicalized. Civic space also serves as a constant check and balance on the government, as a reminder that people can and will assemble to exert their will.
In some ways, UN conferences – particularly those that incorporate members of civil society, like CSW70 – are a kind of civic space. One CSW70 speaker, Patsili Toledo Vasquez, who was a panelist at the UN’s high-level meeting addressing “Violence Against Women and Girls” on 12 March, told Repro Uncensored that these forums are opportunities. Referring to meetings in which expert panelists as well as government representatives share updates on laws and policies, she explained, “those spaces are important for sharing practices, advancing dialogue, and reinforcing commitments – particularly at a time when women’s rights are facing increasing backlash.”
Decentralized and self-organized civic spaces go even further: by their nature, they can subvert the very power structures that have necessitated organizing in the first place. They can name systems and institutions which are beyond reform, and create a marketplace of ideas around which others can coalesce and create momentum. Without civic space, decision-making and governmental influence consolidate in the hands an appointed few, while the remaining levers of democratic control evaporate from disuse or loss of function. It has never been more important, certainly not in our lifetimes, to grasp what civic space is left and reverse, halt, or at least delay its decline. And for many, online is the place to start.