Resistance as Governance: Feminist Strategies in Transnational Responses to Online Gender-Based Violence

Feminist governance is facing growing tension between gender equality commitments and the institutional, economic, and political forces that constrain them. These tensions are especially visible in the emerging governance of technology-facilitated gender-based violence (TFGBV), where responses depend on collaboration among governments, international organisations, industry, academia, and civil society, all working to address harm amid persistent inequalities and fragmented responsibilities. This paper examines how feminist actors across these arenas govern the issue in practice and advance policy agendas under precarious and unequal conditions. Drawing on exploratory qualitative research based on eighteen semi-structured interviews, it analyses how they transform conditions of marginalisation into spaces of governance and how governance is practised through strategies that combine resistance, care, and persistence. These strategies range from rearticulating harms and building cross-sectoral coalitions to developing survivor-centred and context-specific frameworks that challenge dominant narratives of digital safety. The analysis shows that what is often dismissed as advocacy or activism forms the very infrastructure through which governance becomes possible. Conceptualising resistance as governance challenges the binary between compliance and opposition and foregrounds how feminist actors continually negotiate the terms, language, and priorities of responses to digital violence. It also recognises the emotional and affective labour that sustains these collective efforts, illuminating how feminist actors navigate authority and accountability without stable institutional, political, or economic support. At this intersection of constraint and creativity, feminist governance continues to evolve through solidarity, care, and the determination of those who engage both inside and beyond established institutions.