Around the world today, enormous strides for women’s rights have been made on many fronts: domestic violence legislation, girls’ education, recognition of the value of women’s work, and the dynamic growth of the women’s rights movement. Yet women and girls are still being married as children, trafficked into forced labor and sex slavery, trapped in conflict zones where rape is a weapon of war, prevented from attending school, and prevented from making even deeply personal choices in their private lives.

The Unfinished Revolution tells the story of the ongoing global struggle on many fronts to secure basic rights for women and girls around the world, including in the Middle East where the Arab Spring has raised high hopes—but where it is already clear that these political revolutions alone will not be enough to secure rights for women, and might even lead to the weakening of key rights protections. At this time of global unrest and change, how women fare is a key test of other human rights and freedoms, which makes it all the more important that women have a seat at the table when decisions impacting their lives are made.

In 2011, the archipelago of dictatorships across the Middle East and North Africa was swept by popular tsunamis ousting Tunisia’s Zine El Abidine Ben Ali, Egypt’s Hosni Mubarak, and Libya’s Muammar Gaddafi. These revolutions—and demonstrations in Bahrain, Syria, Yemen, Iraq, and other countries—were all different in their demands but had a common factor: women were often visible on the frontlines of the protests in countries where the treatment of women had long been a barometer of societies badly in need of reform.

One of the indelible images of the Arab Spring was that of female protesters wearing headscarves or the full black abaya—or just in jeans and T-shirts—carrying banners, marching on government offices, sleeping in tents. Women brought their babies to city squares to participate in the historic changes; female journalists and social media organizers tweeted, filmed, and reported the revolutions. Women demonstrators were harassed, detained, shot by snipers, and teargassed. Female human rights activists, including my Human Rights Watch colleague Heba Morayef in Cairo, went from morgue to morgue documenting the human toll of the government crackdowns.