Researching Resistance and Persistence in the UN Women’s Rights Machinery

The use of ethnography, has become well established in feminist institutionalist research. In this paper, I report and analyse the use of accidental ethnography as a way to capture the contestation over feminist governance at the UN. I refer to it as “accidental” in the sense, that I had not intended it to be a part of my research but found I was immersed in physical, liminal and affective transnational feminist spaces. The paper is based on field research at the UN Commission on the Status of Women (CSW) and the Committee on the Elimination of Discrimination against Women (CEDAW Committee) in 2025–26. It seeks to report not only on the manifest inclusions and exclusions of UN institutions, but also on the revelatory moments in conducting feminist research with actors in the feminist movement, in interviews and conversations online and in person. After progress in building inclusive norms of participation and institutionalising ideas of gender equality, more recently ground has been gained by forces of resistance. An active anti-gender lobby has gained new momentum seeking to replace gender equality with the amorphous “rights of the family”. This normative contestation is well established, operating through member-states and transnational lobbies to erode language and retard progress on women’s rights and gender equality. Undertaking this research was an exercise in understanding tensions, competition and strategic communications. In reporting on the ethnographical elements of this research I hope to illuminate not only the insights gained from this immersion, but the embodied tensions at this point in feminist history, to further advance our understanding of resistance.