The remarkable array of women's activists and leaders from different parts of the world assembled for the dialogue in this volume are deeply concerned at the recent emergence of various trends that may threaten the ongoing work of women's movements in advancing gender equality, women's human rights and sustainable human development. These phenomena include the multifarious impacts of globalization and neoliberal economics, developments in biotechnology, the neo-conservative backlash against women's rights, monopolistic ownership patterns over information technologies that exclude women, fundamentalisms of various kinds and the rise of identity politics that subordinate or marginalize women's issues, and the increase in violent conflict and war.

The contributors to this volume are united in seeing a pressing need for women's movements to evaluate the methods they have used until now, with a view to making their political work more effective in future. They try to identify current issues and trends in the world. They think through how these may impact on women and the work of women's movements. And they identify how women should prepare for them, and what strategies they should prioritise, in order to protect and advance their agenda.

With as deliberately diverse a group of women thinkers as this, there is inevitably a thought-provokingly diverse range of views about how women ought to respond if they not be pushed on to the defensive, but instead take the initiative again and be more proactive across the wide range of arenas and issues that bear particularly on one-half of humanity.