The US imperialist war on Iran has brought to the forefront the insidious way women’s rights are weaponised by the West to justify wars of aggression and to spread Islamophobia. But the weaponisation of women’s rights is something which touches women in every country and we need to look at this issue closely in order to understand why the UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres has been compelled to acknowledge that instead of “mainstreaming equal rights, we are seeing the mainstreaming of misogyny.”He made this observation on the occasion of the release of the UN report “Women’s Rights in Review 30 Years After Beijing”, published in 2025. The report shows that since 1995, countries have enacted 1,531 legal reforms advancing gender equality, maternal mortality has dropped by a third and women’s representation in parliaments has more than doubled. However, all these gains have slowed down but there is a reversal in the gains of women’s rights world over due to international factors such as the effect of the Covid pandemic, soaring food and fuel prices, and the undermining of democratic institutions by conflicts and wars. The UN Report documents how the backlash on women’s rights has led to a woman or girl is killed every 10 minutes by a partner or member of her own family. Digital technology and artificial intelligence spread harmful stereotypes, while the digital gender gap limits women’s opportunities.Also read: The War, the Indian State and the Worker CitizenThe UN does not speak of “weaponisation of women’s rights” but usually speaks of “weaponisation of gender” especially in context of non-State parties or of repressive regimes in the Global South but seldom in the context of imperialist wars by USA and its allies. Here I focus on the way the US (and its allies) have been responsible for the mainstreaming of misogyny through a process a weaponisation of women’s rights.What does weaponisation of women’s rights actually mean? Broadly, it means to use the language of “protecting women,” “gender equality,” or “saving women” as a political tool to pursue other agendas—wars, sanctions, communal mobilisation, border control, or authoritarian consolidation—rather than to genuinely transform women’s lives.Although weaponization of women’s rights is a part of the history of patriarchy this tool has been used most effectively in the so-called War against Terror launched by the US in the aftermath of the 9/11 attack on the Twin Towers in New York. First Lady Laura Bush in a radio address on November 17, 2001, declared that the war on terrorism was also “a fight for the rights and dignity of women,” explicitly linking the invasion of Afghanistan to the liberation of Afghan women from Taliban rule: “Good morning. I’m Laura Bush, and I’m delivering this week’s radio address to kick off a world-wide effort to focus on the brutality against women and children by the al-Qaida terrorist network and the regime it supports in Afghanistan, the Tablian. That regime is now in retreat across much of the country, and the people of Afghanistan — especially women — are rejoicing. ..” NATO and U.S. officials, including figures such as Hillary Clinton and Madeleine Albright, repeatedly invoked the subjugation of women as a threat to global stability, arguing that more gender-equal societies are less likely to produce terrorism.In the aftermath of the 9/11 attack saw the merging of women’s-rights rhetoric with security policy giving rise to what experts call “Securo-feminism,” in which empowering women becomes a tool of national-security and counter-terrorism strategy rather than a project for human liberation against patriarchy…. NATO and U.S. officials, including figures such as Hillary Clinton and Madeleine Albright, repeatedly invoked the subjugation of women as a threat to global stability, arguing that more gender-equal societies are less likely to produce terrorism. Lila Abu-Lughod is perhaps the most well-known critic of Western feminists who, she has argued in her books, helped legitimise the invasion of Afghanistan by framing Afghan women as universally oppressed by “Muslim culture,” thereby reproducing colonial and Orientalist binaries between “liberal West” and “backward Islam.”The latest example is the US-Israel aggression on Iran. On June 14, 2025 a day after Israel launched airstrikes on Iran, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu addressed the Iranian public. He said: “As we achieve our objective, we are also clearing the path for you to achieve your freedom… This is your opportunity to stand up and let your voices be heard. Woman, Life, Freedom. Zan, Zindagi, Azadi,” he said. The slogan Netanyahu invoked was a slogan raised by the Kurdish women’s in Iran after Jina (Mahsa) Amini died in state custody in September 2022, following her arrest for allegedly violating the government’s hijab laws. Reports of her torture and death sparked a nationwide uprising, with people flooding the streets and posting on social media to protest the repression of women and minorities.Both the US President Donald Trump and the Israeli Prime Minister justified the war on Iran by stating that the war would help a regime change and the liberation of Iranian women. This kind of weaponisation of women’s rights has been called ‘embedded feminism’ when a State tries to legitimise an intervention in a conflict by co-opting feminist discourses and instrumentalising feminist activists and groups for their own agenda. Many Iranian women living in the West celebrated the bombing of Iran and supported Trump. However, Iranian feminists, including Kurd women have condemned the war and the hijacking of women’s liberation by imperialist forces. For instance, four jailed women activists in Iran have issued a letter from prison condemning Israel’s attacks on the country and warning against relying on “foreign powers” for regime change. The letter written by Golrokh Ebrahimi Iraee, Verisheh Moradi, Sakineh Parvaneh and Reyhaneh Ansarinejad was published by the pro-Kurdish Firat News Agency, from Evin prison in Tehran.The women activists warned that Israel’s goal was to create a “weak and submissive” West Asia and not to liberate women. They stated: “Our liberation…from the dictatorship ruling the country is possible through the struggle of the masses and by resorting to social forces – not by clinging to foreign powers or placing hopes in them. “The powers that have always brought destruction to the countries of the region through exploitation and colonisation, by inciting wars and killing in pursuit of greater benefits, will have no way out for us except for new destruction and exploitation.” https://www.middleeasteye.net/news/jailed-female-activists-iran-issue-letter-condemning-israeli-attacksThe weaponization of women’s right has spawned an unprecedented Islamophobia and mobilized anti-Muslim hate on a global state. In India the right wing Hindu nationalists have taken advantage and used the issue of women’s rights in the name of “protecting Muslim women” from their society and from Muslim men who are portrayed as terrorists, backward and barbaric. The Hindu Right has incorporate a thin “women’s empowerment” discourse (beti bachao, beti padhao; women in police; campaigns against “eve-teasing”) while advancing Islamophobic, caste-bound, and authoritarian projects—this is often framed as a local form of femonationalism.The selective outrage over assaults by Muslim men, combined with silence or denial around caste atrocities and sexual violence by dominant-caste Hindus, shows that women’s bodies are being instrumentalised for communal mobilisation, not for structural gender justice. Campaigns such as “love jihad,” “save our daughters,” and anti-Romeo squads recast Hindu women’s sexuality and mobility as community property, to be surveilled and controlled “for their safety”. In the Indian context, “Protection” rhetoric justifies intensified policing, vigilante violence, and legal harassment of couples, while doing little about domestic violence, workplace harassment, or caste-based sexual violence.Dalit and Adivasi feminists emphasise that this weaponisation obscures routine state and caste violence against marginalised women, making “women’s safety” discourse itself a tool of upper-caste, majoritarian control.Feminist critics argue these campaigns erase women’s agency in choosing partners, especially in interfaith relationships, and criminalise Muslim men through conspiratorial narratives about demographic warfare. We have seen this in US campaign against immigrants in the name of what President Trump calls “protecting the American people against Invasion” and now the Government of India has framed rules and a new Manual on Deportation (2026) under the Immigration and Foreigner Act, 2025 which gives virtual cate blanch to the police to detain and deport anyone who they suspect of being an illegal migrant.Also read: Delimitation With a Dose of Patriarchy: The Final Act in Modi’s Plan to Hold On to Power Come What MayThe weaponisation of women’s rights leads to increase in control and surveillance, intensified violence and insecurity, and silencing the genuine women’s movement for liberation of men, women and children from patriarchy. Above all it fragments solidarity across nations and religions.In short, weaponisation turns women’s rights from a project for emancipation into a means of legitimising other power projects, often leaving the vast majority of women more controlled, less secure, and less politically empowered.International humanitarian law (IHL) has relied on emotional images of suffering to justify interventions to “save victims” of human rights violations; this often means portraying women as passive and oppressed by their own cultures, reinforcing the idea that outside powers were rescuing them through a so-called “civilizing mission.” Human rights discourse was used to justify war from Yugoslavia to Iraq and from Libya to Afghanistan. Some lawyers even speak of a “human rights-based approach to drones” and write about how wars and counter-insurgency operations can be carried out in accordance with the principles of human rights.Chase Mader, the author of The Passion of Chelsea Manning, The Story Behind the Wikileaks Whistleblower (2013) has written extensively about the weaponisation of human rights.He points out:“Elite factions of the human-rights industry were long ago normalised within the tightly corseted spectrum of American foreign policy. Sarah Sewell, the recent head of the Carr Center for Human Rights at Harvard, has written a slavering introduction to the new Army and Marine Corps Counterinsurgency Field Manual: human-rights tools can help the US armed forces run better pacification campaigns in conquered territory…. the influential liberal think tank the Center for American Progress also appeals to human rights in its call for troop escalations in Afghanistan – the better to ‘engage’ the enemy.” Its important not to understand the forces which are leading to the mainstreaming of misogyny, and understand the importance of deeper solidarity based on a critique of forces trying to hijack women’s movement and making women pawns in power politics.Nandita Haksar is a human rights lawyer and author of several books, including How Robots Stole Our Jobs: Struggles of Suzuki Workers in the Age of AI, Aakar, 2026 (Hindi: Factory se Footpath Tak, Roboton ke daur me Suzuki ke Mazdur).