With this Radar, we open the special series ‘Feminisms, Violence and Possible Futures’, which will run until 10 December, Human Rights Day. Before discussing violence and resistance, we ask who today has the money, infrastructure, laws and weapons to decide over other people’s lives. We propose a map of power that shows who exercises it, through which institutions and with what consequences. Its main protagonists are men, and their power rests on companies, laws and institutions that are also part of the map.

The Mirabal Sisters and the Political Origins of 25 November

On 25 November 1960, agents of Rafael Leónidas Trujillo’s dictatorship murdered Patria, Minerva and María Teresa Mirabal in the Dominican Republic. The three sisters, known as Las Mariposas (‘The Butterflies’), were involved in resistance to the regime. They were seized as they returned from visiting their imprisoned husbands, beaten to death, and their car was thrown down a ravine to make the murders look like an accident, as the National Human Rights Commission of Mexico recalls.

In July 1981, the First Latin American and Caribbean Feminist Meeting, held in Bogotá, proposed that date as a day of struggle against violence against women (Isis International; Bogotá’s District Secretariat for Women). The United Nations General Assembly officially established the day in 1999. The International Day for the Elimination of Violence against Women thus has a Latin American, feminist and anti-authoritarian genealogy, marked by confrontation with a dictatorship.

An Unequal Map

At the beginning of 2026, only 28 countries had a woman serving as head of state or government, while 101 had never had one, according to the Inter-Parliamentary Union and UN Women. Women held 22.4% of ministerial posts, with particularly limited representation in defence, interior and justice. The United Nations adds that one in three national gender-equality bodies had lost power over the preceding two years.

The wealth of the world’s billionaires reached a record $18.3 trillion in 2025. According to Oxfam, people who amass such fortunes are at least 4,000 times more likely to hold political office than the population as a whole. This concentration coexists with persistent everyday violence. UN Women and UNODC estimated that some 50,000 women and girls were killed by intimate partners or other family members in 2024, around 137 a day. These are distinct phenomena that demand attention both to institutional power and to the relations of domination running through everyday life.

From Satire to the Owners of the Platforms

On 1 November, Noelia Ramírez reported in El País on an appearance in Barcelona by the British collective Everyone Hates Elon, known for its satirical actions targeting Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos and Mark Zuckerberg. Its spokesperson spoke of the ‘owners of social media’ and explained how the group’s activism seeks to shift attention away from migrants, so often turned into scapegoats, and towards those who concentrate wealth and influence.

The satire points to three different positions within the same structure. Musk has interests spanning X, xAI and SpaceX, enabling him to combine communications reach, public contracts and electoral influence. According to Reuters, by 12 October he had committed around $366 million to the 2026 US election cycle, including $276 million since July, to support Republican candidates. Bezos retains shareholder influence over Amazon, which he founded and where he serves as executive chair, although he does not run its day-to-day operations. In September, four former warehouse workers filed a class-action lawsuit over the treatment of pregnant employees, and the company said it had approved more than 99.9% of accommodation requests (Reuters, via Insurance Journal). Zuckerberg, as the head of Meta, makes decisions about platforms used by billions of people. Each in his own way, the three share the ability to turn private resources into decisions with collective consequences.

Grok, Meta and Digital Violence

The crisis surrounding Grok, the AI system integrated into X, illustrates one of those consequences. According to an estimate by the Center for Countering Digital Hate, around three million sexualised images were generated over eleven days in January, including manipulated images depicting real women undressed without their consent and some 23,000 images appearing to depict minors (El País; AFP). X introduced restrictions after the images had spread widely.

The regulatory response came from several centres of power. India demanded action from X within 72 hours, Indonesia and Malaysia temporarily blocked the tool, and the European Commission opened formal proceedings in January to investigate, among other risks, the spread of manipulated sexualised images and gender-based violence.

In January 2025, Meta removed from its hate-speech rules the explicit prohibition on referring to women as household objects or property and on dehumanising trans and non-binary people through certain insults. In July 2026, Instagram announced measures against videos of harassment of strangers recorded using Meta’s smart glasses. In both cases, power lies with those who set the boundaries of visibility, consent and redress.

Who Runs AI?

Among a selection of companies crucial to AI models, cloud computing, chips and digital platforms, male corporate leadership stands out. Their top executives include Sam Altman (OpenAI), Dario Amodei (Anthropic), Sundar Pichai (Alphabet), Satya Nadella (Microsoft), Mark Zuckerberg (Meta), Jensen Huang (Nvidia), Andy Jassy (Amazon), Elon Musk (xAI and SpaceX), Arthur Mensch (Mistral AI), Liang Wenfeng (DeepSeek), Robin Li (Baidu) and Eddie Wu (Alibaba). In August, Koray Kavukcuoglu took over operational leadership of Google DeepMind as senior vice-president, while Demis Hassabis became its chair and Alphabet’s chief scientist, according to Google’s announcement.

Among the exceptions, Lisa Su leads AMD, and Mira Murati leads Thinking Machines Lab. The problem is structural. Across the 19 economies examined by LinkedIn for the Global Gender Gap Report 2026, which do not include China, women held 19.3% of AI engineering posts and 44.8% of data-annotation jobs, which are among the lowest-paid roles in the US sector. That is why we need to look beyond company chairs to ask who decides over capital, infrastructure, labour and how these systems are used.

Military uses are also part of that chain of decisions. In July 2025, the US Department of Defense awarded contracts worth up to $200 million per company to Anthropic, Google, OpenAI and xAI. Shortly afterwards, Palantir, led by Alex Karp, secured a framework agreement with the US Army worth up to $10 billion.

The AI Industry at the White House

On 29 September, Donald Trump brought leading technology executives together at the White House, among them Dario Amodei, Jensen Huang, Greg Brockman, Sundar Pichai, Mark Zuckerberg, Elon Musk and Lisa Su, AMD’s chief executive (CBS; Reuters). Six companies — Anthropic, Google, Meta, Nvidia, OpenAI and xAI — signed a voluntary agreement on internal controls and audits, which Trump described as morally binding. All the signatory companies were headed by men, although not everyone attending was a man.

The episode reveals a concrete mechanism of power. Companies developing technologies with society-wide implications participate directly in defining their own safety commitments, and compliance relies to a large extent on controls promoted by the companies themselves. The feminist question also concerns who was absent from the negotiations and what ability the people and communities affected will have to intervene.

Four Men at the Helm of States

Trump, Xi, Putin and Netanyahu govern different regimes, with different institutional contexts, responsibilities and democratic checks. Comparing them allows us to observe how decisions about gender, rights, war and technology are concentrated in different centres of power.

Donald Trump. The US midterm elections take place on 3 November, according to the Federal Election Commission. The January 2025 executive order imposed a binary and immutable definition of sex across the federal administration, presented by the executive as a defence of women against what it calls ‘gender ideology’. The July 2025 order established ‘ideological neutrality’ criteria for federal procurement of AI models. The expansion of restrictions concerning abortion and gender in foreign aid affects, according to KFF, funding programmes with a potential value of up to $39.8 billion.

Xi Jinping. Since the Communist Party leadership reshuffle in 2022, the Politburo has included no women. The 29 October 2026 plenum once again highlighted Xi’s central position and the party’s internal discipline. In 2025, Xi publicly pledged to combat violence against women, while Amnesty International denounced the repression of feminist activists. Journalist Sophia Huang Xueqin, a figure in China’s #MeToo movement, was sentenced to five years in prison for ‘inciting subversion of state power’, and in September 60 organisations called for guarantees that her scheduled release on the 18th would mean genuine freedom.

Vladimir Putin. In 2017, Russia reduced criminal penalties for certain first-time assaults within the family, and it still lacks comprehensive domestic violence legislation. In May, the UN included Russian forces for the first time in its report on conflict-related sexual violence, and Ambassador Vasily Nebenzya called it a ‘clearly biased and politicised decision’. In September, the Office of the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights documented 1,004 cases of sexual violence linked to the invasion between February 2022 and July 2026, attributing 89% to Russian authorities and 11% to Ukrainian authorities. Most of the victims were men, primarily in detention facilities, and sexual violence in war affects people of all genders. In 2023, the International Criminal Court issued an arrest warrant for Putin over the alleged unlawful deportation and transfer of children from Ukraine.

Benjamin Netanyahu. Following Israel’s elections on 27 October, the bloc supporting him won 53 of the 120 seats, short of the 61 needed for a majority, while Arab parties won 19 and the remaining opposition parties 48. Netanyahu remains caretaker prime minister during negotiations (results published on 30 October). An International Criminal Court arrest warrant has been outstanding against him since November 2024. In October, UN Women estimated that more than 38,000 women and girls had been killed in Gaza since October 2023 and around 11,700 had sustained serious injuries. A UN commission of inquiry concluded in 2025 that Israeli forces had systematically destroyed sexual and reproductive healthcare facilities in Gaza, and Netanyahu responded that the Human Rights Council was an anti-Israel circus (AP). For its part, a United Nations mission found reasonable grounds to believe that rape and other acts of sexual violence were committed during the Hamas attacks of 7 October 2023.

From Patriarchy to Dueñidad

Argentinian anthropologist Rita Laura Segato uses the concept of dueñidad — the power of ownership and dominion — to describe a form of lordship linked to the extreme concentration of power and resources (La guerra contra las mujeres). The idea helps frame a question that runs through this map: who can treat data, infrastructure, territory or even the conditions of other people’s lives as their own? It enables us to examine the relationships between property, authority, coercion and impunity in companies and states, each with their differences.

Remembering the Mirabal sisters means recovering the political character of their struggle. Until 10 December, this special series will examine the labour and care that sustain AI, digital violence, feminist resistance, 25 November, and the conditions for justice and redress. The aim will be to shift attention from those who monopolise decisions towards those who resist and challenge them, and build alternatives.

If you are experiencing gender-based violence in Spain, 016 offers free, confidential support, also via WhatsApp on 600 000 016. In an emergency, call 112. In Argentina, Line 144 provides free assistance 24 hours a day.

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