Blog post by Raquel Santos Fernandes and Isabel Estrada Carvalhais, University of Minho, Portugal

Women vote, work and pay taxes, but for many of them, democracy remains an experience that is incomplete, uneven and deeply conditional. This sense of being ‘half-citizen’ goes well beyond the absence of formal rights. It is about how citizenship is experienced and constrained in everyday life. In various political contexts, women’s rights are among the first to be contested or reversed. Restrictions on reproductive rights, reversals on protection against gender-based violence and policies normalizing their responsibility for care reveal how gender inequality exposes the fault lines of citizenship.

In our Identities article, ‘From foes to friends? Fighting against women’s ‘half-citizenship’ through gender-mainstreaming citizenship’, we respond to these tensions by proposing the idea of gender-mainstreaming citizenship. This framework integrates political participation, economic autonomy and intimate rights into a single analytical lens. It challenges the assumption that democracy stops at home’s front door and highlights how inequalities in the private sphere directly undermine democracy. 

Blog post by Dr Aaron Winter, Lancaster University and co-editor, Identities: Global Studies in Culture and Power. Cross-posted from LSE Blogs.

​On 2 June 2026, a “protest” against alleged racist policing in Southampton led to injuries to police and multiple arrests. While historically, the far-right have tended to deny racism, defend the police and demonise or attack protestors, in this case it was the far-right accusing the police of ‘reverse racism’ against white people and “two-tier policing” which holds that racialised and migratised people are given preferential treatment. It followed the trial and conviction of Vickrum Singh Digwa, who is Sikh, for the stabbing murder of Henry Nowak, a white British-Polish university student, with a ceremonial knife on 3 December 2025 and the release of police bodycam footage. It showed the police, appearing to believe Digwa’s claims that he was the victim of the stabbing and racism, rejecting Nowak’s pleas that he was stabbed and could not breathe.  
​
 The “Justice for Henry Nowak Protest”, included far-right leaders and influencers such as Tommy Robinson and Britain First leader Paul Golding. Reform UK leader Nigel Farage argued that Britain has a “two tier culture where the rights and privileges of white people matter less than those of ethnic minorities” and that “white lives matter just as much as black lives”, evoking the BLM protests of 2020. He also called for an end to “anti-white prejudice” and the public to respond with “pure, cold rage“. Like so much these days, it is not limited to the far-right. Conservative leader Kemi Badenoch blamed “the training that police have been given, all of this nonsense that came in after the Black Lives Movement”, adding “I do not want police looking at the colour of your skin when they’re deciding how to treat you”, and Tory Shadow Home Secretary Chris Philp said that the "police appeared more concerned with the accusation of racism than they were with helping Henry".