Powerful insights from leading gender and development scholars.

Development Alternatives with Women for a New Era (DAWN) argues that social contracts must be recreated if they are to fulfil the promise of human rights. In The Remaking of Social Contracts, leading thinkers and activists address a wide range of concerns - global economic governance, militarism, ecological tipping points, the nation state, movement-building, sexuality and reproduction, and religious fundamentalism. These themes are of wide-ranging importance for the survival and well-being of us all, and reflect the many dimensions and inter-connectedness of our lives. Using feminist lenses, the book puts forward a holistic and radical understanding of the synergies, tensions and contradictions between social movements and global, regional and local power structures and processes, and it points to other alternatives and possibilities for this fierce new world.

In the last decade of the twentieth century, social movements debated whether their goals should include "equity" or "equality" for women. This book offers a different perspective. In a world which is becoming more and more unequal both within countries and between them, the answer is "neither", and a new social contract should be based instead on justice. In this foundational book, DAWN spells out gender justice not just as another item on the wish list of social movements but as the basis of a new, indispensable social contract.