On February 12, 1983, 43 years ago, under the military dictatorship of Zia ul Haq, women in the city of Lahore, Pakistan, held a nonviolent march and sit-in to protest a prejudicial law of evidence that made women’s testimony in courts worth only half that of men, proposed and eventually passed in a series of authoritarian laws that disenfranchised women and infringed on their fundamental democratic rights. The protest provoked a strong reaction from the state, with marchers facing brutality at the hands of the police who beat the protesters with batons, tear-gassed the crowd, and arrested dozens of people.
Among the women who marched in the Law of Evidence protest was the Pakistani feminist sociologist Farida Shaheed, a founding member of the women’s rights organization Women’s Action Forum (WAF), created in 1981. In 1975, Shaheed alongside others established Shirkat Gah Women’s Resource Centre, an organization for which Shaheed has served as longtime executive director. In the years that followed, she became a leader nationally and internationally, uniting her expertise in feminist research with her policymaking experience in democratic rights. She served on Pakistan’s National Commission on the Status of Women and as the United Nations (UN) Special Rapporteur for Cultural Rights from 2009 to 2015. In 2022, Shaheed was appointed as UN Special Rapporteur on the Right to Education until 2028.
I write on Farida Shaheed’s rich history of feminist research and organizing as part of the expansive global history of Third World feminist internationalism in my book, The Future That Was: A History of Third World Feminism Against Authoritarianism (2026). As I argue, Third World feminism was, at its heart, a project of anti-authoritarianism. Feminists like Shaheed produced situated feminist research to fight against military dictatorships and discriminatory policies that threatened the foundations of democratic rights and citizenship in the postcolonial world. Shaheed, like many feminist researchers, turned to internationalist domains like the United Nations as a platform to advocate for radical democratic politics against authoritarianism, militarism, and neocolonialism.
Shaheed’s advocacy extends beyond her work in feminist research and policymaking in Pakistan to her role as a cofounder and long-time member of the feminist research network Women Living Under Muslim Laws, founded in 1984. In the decades that followed, WLUML boasted a membership of researchers from over forty countries across the global north and south. On September 21, 2001—just ten days after the attacks on the World Trade Center in New York City—WLUML released the powerful statement, “In Search of Justice, Human Rights, and a Just Peace,” a call against the US war in Afghanistan and beyond. The statement declared that “vengeance is not justice,” poignantly insisting on collective opposition to American military interventions that would only lead to suffering among the most vulnerable people. The perpetual war that their statement cautioned against became a cruel reality in the decades that followed.
But her work as a feminist internationalist continues. Just two years ago, from April to May 2024, Farida Shaheed conducted an urgent study of the threat to academic freedom in the United States in her role as UN Special Rapporteur on the Right to Education. Her case study of the US coincided with the most consequential moment for higher education in recent decades, as students built pro-Palestinian protest encampments across campuses in the US and abroad. Profoundly alarmed by the repression that she saw firsthand, Shaheed produced a timely end-of-visit statement which offered an urgent reflection on the rapid destruction of academic freedom in American education. She then produced and published official report that she presented to the UN Human Rights Council in June 2024.
In her end of visit statement from May 10, 2024, Shaheed did not mince words. She indicted universities for actively shattering academic freedom in the face of student protest: “More than 2,000 people have been detained as a result of raids by fully armed police on university campuses, including students and professors. Police interventions have been requested or authorized by the institutions themselves. . . . All these measures have inevitably created a chilling effect on the whole academic community and a climate of intimidation” (2). The statement highlighted the widespread censorship of education in the US with gag order legislation and book bans on topics like slavery and gender and sexuality in 45 out of 50 states.
In her advanced unabridged report on US education from April 2024, Shaheed argues that academic freedom is one of the most important elements of democracies, essential alongside the free press and independent courts. Her report foreshadows an unfolding nightmare of threats that expanded under Trump’s second term. Shaheed, alongside other Special Rapporteurs, expressed “concerns for the suspensions and expulsions of students from universities, dismissals of academics, calls for their deportation, threats to dissolve student unions and associations, and restrictions on campus meetings to express solidarity with the suffering civilians in Gaza and denounce the ongoing Israeli military response” (12). She further condemned how censorship and attacks on minoritized fields of research had taken over US universities: “in America, States have enacted laws prohibiting classroom instruction on sexual orientation or gender identity” (19). Shaheed details the many forms of censorship as “States have enacted restrictions against critical race theory, the teaching of structural racism and gender inequity” with attacks on academic freedom resulting in restrictions on the teachings of “Black feminism, queer theory, intersectionality, and other frameworks that address structural inequality” (19).
Shaheed’s reporting on academic freedom in higher education in the US circulated long before the second election of Donald Trump and his 2025 attacks on so-called gender ideology, the targeting of “DEI,” and the defunding of USAID and federal research support. She argued that the authoritarian targeting of academic freedom in the US must be understood through a unified analytic framework that linked the gutting of free inquiry to the mass militarization of campuses, suppression of student protest, and widespread attacks on minoritized research. In the final recommendations in her official report to the Human Rights Council on June 27, 2024, Shaheed asserted that the right to academic freedom must be a key tenet of international law.
Shaheed’s comprehensive study of attacks on academic freedom in the US reflect her long-term commitment to free inquiry as essential to the fight against authoritarianism. Women fought for the right to produce knowledge over decades, from Shirkat Gah to the massive transnational research network WLUML. A feminist scholar and activist who labored under a patriarchal military dictatorship, Shaheed knows firsthand the dangerous effects of the loss of free inquiry in an increasingly undemocratic society.
Shaheed’s visit and report on the crisis of academic freedom in education institutions in the US was publicized by the UN and other organizations like the ACLU, yet her bold statements have not yielded a resolution on academic freedom at the UN nor extensive media attention. Instead, in the months that followed its release, American universities became further complicit with attacks on academic freedom by paying for government-university compacts perpetuating authoritarian censorship and enforced binary gender, while the Trump administration increasingly undermined tenets of human rights and international law. We live in the reactionary world of the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025, no longer pursuing the promises of fifty years ago in the UN International Women’s Year in 1975 and subsequent feminist internationalism of the 1980s and early 1990s.
Yet there is much to be learned in Shaheed’s long-term commitment to a feminist ethic of bold research and report writing. Statements against war by the Women’s International League for Peace & Freedom in March 2026 have resonance with the interventions of WLUML from twenty-five years before in pursuit of a “just peace,” for a future free of perpetual war and genocide. Shaheed’s study of the systematic assault on academic freedom in the US is pathbreaking in its direct indictment of universities for their active complicity in the destruction of academic freedom, setting the stage for other urgent reports like PEN America’s devastating 2026 Expanding the Web of Control, co-authored by Amy Reid, erstwhile professor of French and founder and director of the dismantled gender studies program at The New College of Florida. It is in these meticulous documents testifying to the ongoing annihilation of academic freedom that we find an urgent and rapidly growing archive for dissent.
Durba Mitra is a feminist historian and theorist whose scholarship spans women’s, gender, and sexuality studies and global intellectual history. She is the author of The Future That Was: A History of Third World Feminism Against Authoritarianism (Princeton University Press, 2026) and Indian Sex Life: Sexuality and the Colonial Origins of Modern Social Thought (Princeton University Press, 2020).
Works Cited
ACLU. “ACLU Statement on UN Special Rapporteur Visit on US Implementation of Right to Education.” Press release issued by the ACLU Media Office, May 24, 2024. https://www.aclu.org/press-releases/aclu-statement-on-un-special-rapporteur-visit-on-us-implementation-of-right-to-education.
“In Search of Justice, Human Rights, and a Just Peace by Women Living under Muslim Laws.” Meridians 2, no. 2 (2002): 268–70. http://www.jstor.org/stable/40338525.
Mitra, Durba. The Future That Was: A History of Third World Feminism Against Authoritarianism. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2026.
PEN America. “Expanding the Web of Control: America’s Censored Campuses 2025.” Report published online January 15, 2026. https://pen.org/report/americas-censored-campuses-25-web-of-control/.
Shaheed, Farida. “Statement by the Special Rapporteur on the Right to Education, on her Visit to the United States of America, April 29–May 10, 2024.” Washington, DC. https://www.ohchr.org/sites/default/files/documents/issues/education/statements/20240510-stm-eom-sr-education-usa.pdf.
United Nations. “Academic Freedom Just as Crucial as a Free Press or Independent Judiciary, Says Special Rapporteur.” Press release issued by UN Media Office, June 24, 2024. https://www.ohchr.org/en/press-releases/2024/06/academic-freedom-just-crucial-free-press-or-independent-judiciary-says.
United Nations. “Education during armed conflict offers a lifeline, protection, stability and hope says UN expert.” Press release issued by UN Media Office, October 24, 2025. https://www.ohchr.org/en/press-releases/2025/10/education-during-armed-conflict-offers-lifeline-protection-stability-and#:~:text=%E2%80%9CIn%20war%2C%20a%20functioning%20school,of%20communities%2C%E2%80%9D%20she%20said.
United Nations. “The Right to Academic Freedom. Report of the Special Rapporteur on the Right to Education, Farida Shaheed.” UN Thematic Report A/HRC/56/58. Published April 25, 2024. Delivered to the UN Human Rights Council 56th Session, June 2024. English version. https://docs.un.org/en/A/HRC/56/58.
United Nations. “Visit to the United States of America. Report by the Special Rapporteur on the Right to Education, Farida Shaheed. Advanced Unedited version” UN Country Report A/HRC/59/41/Add.1. Published April 25, 2024. English version. https://reliefweb.int/report/world/report-special-rapporteur-right-education-farida-shaheed-right-education-armed-conflict-human-rights-imperative-a80479-advance-unedited-version
United Nations. “Visit to the United States of America. Report by the Special Rapporteur on the Right to Education, Farida Shaheed.” UN Country Report A/HRC/59/41/Add.1. Published June 27, 2024. English version. https://docs.un.org/en/A/HRC/56/58
Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom. “WILPF Calls for Immediate Ceasefire and Compliance with International Law.” March 2, 2026. https://www.wilpf.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/03/Iran-US-Israel-draft-statement-1.3.26.pdf.
