This book investigates gender equality and women's empowerment in Sierra Leone, focusing in particular on women's interactions with the state and its development partners.

Introduction; PART I: Theories, Concepts, and Issues; 1. Theorizing Gender-Responsive Governance, Women's Agency and Empowerment, and the Logic of (In)quality and Transitions to Equality; PART II: The Logic of Inequality in the Bounded Spaces of Sexuality, Violence, and Discrimination; 2. The Histories and Boundaries of State-Capture: Sexuality, Power, and Belonging; 3. Locating Inequality in the Formal and Informal Economic Sector; 4. How Society Created an Education Sector that Propagated Inequality; 5. Politics, Electoral Violence, and Gender Inequality; 6. Then Came the Era of a Civil War and Its Aftermath: Women's Lives in War and Peace; PART III: The Logic and Transitions to Gender-Responsive Governance, Equality, and Empowerment; 7. Feminizing the Quasi-Institutional Interventions to End Sexual Violence; 8. Women, the State, and the Rise of a Gender-Responsive Knowledge-Economy; 9. 'Let's Quantify the Contributions of Women': Costing of Equality via Gender-Responsive Budgeting; 10. Creating the 'Local State' and Expanding the Decentralized Space for Women's Grassroots Political Participation