This course aims to examine gender through power, contested in State institutions and the public sphere and exercised through various legal and policy instruments. It further aims to contextualize our knowledge of gender in its political past, underlining the important role the Nation-State has had in engendering spaces and identities while committing, condoning, or suppressing gender-based violence. In contrast, the course also aims to assess political participation and examine the role of the women’s movement, since such civil society mobilization is reinventing gender discourse, realigning power struggles, and consequently the locus of political action and development. The course has a final objective of examining norms and human rights instruments that both foster and inhibit political participation and gender equality.