Authoritarianism, gender politics and feminist agency: contesting sexual and gender-based violence under Myanmar’s hybrid regimes (2010–2021)

This paper examines how authoritarian structures and feminist agency interact in shaping policies concerned with sexual and gender-based violence (SGBV), focussing on Myanmar Myanmar’s transition decade (2010–2021). Spanning military-initiated liberalisation (2010–2015) and semi-civilian governance (2016–2021) before the 2021 coup, Myanmar provides a critical lens for understanding how authoritarianism adapts to manage and target feminist activism. Drawing on longitudinal qualitative research and over forty in-depth interviews with women’s rights organisations (WROs), policymakers and feminist networks, this study analyses how feminist actors navigated expanding yet tightly controlled political spaces, where SGBV advocacy became both a site of possibility and contestation. The advocacy for the Prevention of Violence against Women (PoVAW) Law serves as the central empirical focus. While feminist advocates successfully inserted SGBV into national discourse and policy agendas, the PoVAW process became a battleground where struggles for gender equality collided with authoritarian power structures. Despite a decade of mobilisation and parliamentary lobbying, the law was never enacted. Interpreting the PoVAW’s stalled trajectory not as a simple policy failure, but as a revealing political text, this paper illuminates how authoritarian power operates under pseudo-democratic or hybrid conditions. The law's non-passage exposes the enduring limits of reform, particularly the state’s consistent strategy of avoiding accountability, especially where SGBV implicates the military. This resistance reveals SGBV as a “protected domain” of military authoritarian power, maintained through the military’s constitutional veto power, entrenched patriarchal authority and a rising Buddhist-nationalist backlash. The coexistence of structural constraint and vibrant feminist activism reveals both the limits and possibilities of feminist agency under hybrid regimes. By tracing how WROs leveraged emerging political spaces, navigated co-optation and resisted depoliticisation, this analysis argues that SGBV politics illuminate how hybrid regimes manage feminist activism in the appearance of reform while systematically maintaining core control. This analysis contributes to comparative debates on gender and authoritarianism by demonstrating that feminist activism in such a context constitutes an ongoing struggle over the boundaries of political possibility itself. Furthermore, the Myanmar case, characterised by military authoritarianism, ethnic conflict and Buddhist nationalism, offers insights from the Global South, expanding the literature beyond the focus on Christian/Hindu nationalism.