The Clash Between Tradition and Modernity: Resurgence of Customs in Contemporary Society

When globalization accelerates and modern values spread rapidly, something predictable tends to happen: a portion of society pushes back. Traditional customs that seemed to be fading away make a comeback. Religious conservatism intensifies. Cultural practices once deemed outdated get reframed as essential heritage. This isn’t random-it’s a pattern documented across continents, and it has real, measurable consequences for women’s lives. Understanding why traditional norms resurface, how they intersect with gender-based violence, and what tools exist to challenge them is essential to any serious conversation about gender justice in the 21st century.

Why traditional norms come back 🔗

The revival of traditional customs rarely happens in a vacuum. It is almost always a reaction-a defensive response to changes that certain groups find threatening. Globalization, Western liberalism, secularism, and feminist movements are often perceived by conservative communities as destabilizing forces that undermine family structures, social roles, and communal solidarity. Reviving older norms becomes a way of reasserting local identity and protecting what is seen as cultural heritage under siege.

This dynamic is particularly visible in societies experiencing rapid economic change. Research on contemporary India shows that economic liberalization has triggered a “crisis of masculinity” among men whose traditional roles as providers and authority figures are being challenged. When men feel their social standing is threatened, gender-based violence can become a mechanism for reasserting control-a way of performing a masculinity that modernity appears to be eroding. The result is a disturbing paradox: modernization creates new opportunities for women while simultaneously intensifying backlash violence against them.

In South Africa, studies on domestic violence and masculinity reveal how rituals like traditional male circumcision continue to reproduce hegemonic masculine norms across generations. These coming-of-age ceremonies teach young men cultural expectations around dominance over women and family leadership. While some men move away from these frameworks through education, the rituals themselves remain powerful vehicles for transmitting patriarchal values as cultural heritage rather than as forms of oppression.

The World Bank has noted that harmful social norms are sustained by a complex matrix of beliefs and behaviors, not just individual attitudes. Structural drivers-migration, globalization, economic inequality, and conflict-all create conditions where communities retreat into familiar customs for security and identity. This means that legal prohibitions alone rarely eliminate these practices, because the norms holding them in place operate at a much deeper social level.

The impact on women’s rights 🔗

When traditional norms resurface in response to modernity, women’s bodies and freedoms consistently become the site of contestation. Practices that restrict or harm women-female genital mutilation (FGM), child marriage, dowry systems, and honor-based violence-are not simply ancient relics. They are actively maintained, defended, and in some cases intensified as expressions of cultural identity.

Cultural traditions including child marriage, female genital mutilation, and honor killings disproportionately affect women and girls, perpetuating cycles of violence and severely restricting individual development. The World Health Organization classifies FGM as a fundamental violation of human rights, yet the practice persists across 30 countries in Africa, the Middle East, and Asia, affecting an estimated 230 million girls and women alive today.

FGM, identity politics, and the postcolonial dilemma 🔗

Female genital mutilation sits at the center of one of the most contested debates in feminist and postcolonial scholarship. On one side is an internationally accepted framework that treats FGM as a severe human rights violation and a form of gender-based violence. On the other is a critique-led significantly by postcolonial feminists and African scholars-that dominant anti-FGM campaigns reflect ethnocentrism and cultural imperialism.

Research on decolonizing FGM discourse highlights how ethnic identity fuels the continuation of the practice in many communities, where it is understood as a link to female ancestors, a marker of belonging, and a source of communal pride. In this framing, the practice is not simply imposed on passive victims but is tied to questions of self-determination and resistance to external control-particularly given the history of colonial interference in African cultural life.

The historical roots of this tension are illuminating. Jomo Kenyatta, Kenya’s first president, positioned female circumcision as central to Gikuyu national identity-a direct rebuke to British colonial missionaries who sought to eradicate the practice. Postcolonial feminist scholars have analyzed this move as evidence of how patriarchal nationalism appropriates women’s bodies as symbols of cultural purity and national survival. The practice became simultaneously a marker of anti-colonial resistance and a mechanism for controlling women-a duality that continues to complicate advocacy efforts today.

Postcolonial feminists and anthropologists have consistently critiqued anti-FGM efforts for being ethnocentric and for treating African communities as monolithic, backward, and incapable of internal reform. This critique carries genuine weight: who gets to define what constitutes harm, and whose voices count in that conversation, matters enormously. When international campaigns are perceived as outsiders imposing foreign values, communities often double down on the practices being criticized-turning resistance to intervention into a form of identity assertion.

At the same time, thirty years of academic discourse on FGM demonstrates that framing the debate purely as a clash between “Western feminism” and “African tradition” obscures a more complex reality. Many of the most effective advocates against FGM are women from within practicing communities-and scholarship that pits these two perspectives against each other risks sidelining the very people most affected. The more productive approach targets harmful institutions and power structures rather than entire cultural groups.

Harmful social norms that sustain gender-based violence-including norms around sexual purity, family honor, and male authority to discipline women-are contextually derived but not immovable. Research in humanitarian settings shows that communities can and do shift these norms when interventions are community-led, contextually sensitive, and sustained over time. The key is distinguishing between cultural respect and cultural deference to practices that cause measurable physical and psychological harm.

Child marriage and dowry: tradition as economic and social control 🔗

FGM is not the only harmful practice experiencing revival or entrenchment. Child marriage persists in many regions as a response to economic pressure, security concerns, and the desire to preserve family honor. Feminist decolonial scholarship has pushed back against the framing of girls in the Global South as passive victims, emphasizing the importance of centering girls’ own voices and experiences in both research and advocacy. This doesn’t minimize the harm of child marriage; it insists that effective solutions must engage the communities where these practices occur, not simply legislate against them from above.

Dowry systems and bride price arrangements similarly reflect the economic logic embedded in patriarchal traditions. When a woman is understood primarily as a transaction between families, her rights and bodily autonomy become secondary to family interests. These frameworks are sustained not only by individual belief but by institutional structures-legal systems, religious institutions, and community enforcement mechanisms-that legitimate them as normal and desirable.

Global and local tensions: traditional practices vs. human rights standards 🔗

The friction between traditional practices and modern human rights standards plays out at every level-from community dynamics to international diplomacy. At the global level, the legal architecture for challenging harmful practices is substantial. CEDAW Article 5 establishes clearly that tradition can never be invoked as a justification for discrimination, requiring states to actively modify social and cultural patterns that marginalize women. The Istanbul Convention goes further, explicitly stating that culture, customs, religion, or tradition cannot be used to excuse acts of violence.

Yet the gap between these commitments and lived reality is vast. CEDAW is the human rights treaty subject to the most reservations, with many states invoking cultural or religious arguments to avoid implementation. The Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights has called this practice a clear violation of the universality principle-a way of ratifying equality in name while preserving discrimination in practice.

The cultural imperialism argument 🔗

One of the most persistent challenges to global human rights standards is the accusation of cultural imperialism. When international organizations campaign against FGM, child marriage, or honor killings, critics-including some postcolonial scholars and political leaders-argue that these campaigns reflect Western values being imposed on non-Western societies under the guise of universal rights. This argument has real political power, particularly in communities with living memories of colonial interference.

Universal human rights are not a menu of options from which countries can pick and choose-they are international obligations that all member states of the United Nations have committed to uphold. But the question of implementation legitimacy matters. Research on Kenya’s anti-FGM legislation found that while power hierarchies influence who gets to define and speak about FGM, the picture is more nuanced than a simple Africa-versus-West binary. The legislation had significant African agency behind it, including the work of African women’s rights advocates and transnational collaborations-a fact that the cultural imperialism framing tends to erase.

The UNESCO 2001 Declaration on Cultural Diversity is explicit: no one may invoke cultural diversity to infringe upon human rights guaranteed by international law. Culture and gender norms are not static-they evolve, and protecting human dignity does not require dismantling cultural identity.

The Maputo Protocol: a model for contextual universalism 🔗

The Maputo Protocol, ratified by many African states, offers one of the most promising frameworks for bridging the gap between universal rights standards and local contexts. Unlike CEDAW, it was drafted by African women themselves, addressing issues specific to African women’s realities-including FGM, polygamy, and rights in armed conflict. It draws on global human rights norms while contextualizing them for African realities, avoiding the universalism-versus-relativism trap by insisting that African women’s rights can be defined, articulated, and defended from within African frameworks.

This approach matters because it demonstrates that the tension between tradition and modernity does not have to be resolved by choosing one over the other. Communities can preserve cultural heritage, affirm collective identity, and still reject practices that cause harm. The question is whether those in power-political leaders, religious authorities, community elders-are willing to distinguish between traditions that strengthen communities and those that harm their most vulnerable members.

Moving toward change: what works 🔗

Research on social norm change shows that behaviors are held in place by a matrix of norms, beliefs, and institutional structures-and that this matrix can shift when interventions operate at multiple levels simultaneously. Effective approaches include community-led education programs, engagement with religious and traditional leaders, economic empowerment for women, and policy reform that creates accountability without simply criminalizing communities.

The SASA! program in Uganda, for example, used a community-level approach to address the norms underlying violence against women-not by imposing external standards, but by creating space for communities to identify and challenge those norms themselves. This kind of approach recognizes that lasting change comes from within, not from above. Across the Asia-Pacific region, UN Women’s work on CEDAW implementation has similarly found that where women themselves understand and can claim their rights, enforcement improves and harmful practices decline.

Education is consistently identified as the most powerful structural lever. When women have access to education and economic resources, their ability to resist harmful norms increases substantially. When men are educated about gender equality from an early age, the peer norms that legitimate violence begin to shift. Neither outcome is guaranteed or rapid-but both are documented and replicable.

The clash between tradition and modernity is not going away. As long as communities feel that their identities and ways of life are threatened by external forces-whether globalization, migration, or shifting gender norms-some will respond by intensifying adherence to traditional customs, including harmful ones. Meeting that challenge requires more than laws and international declarations. It requires sustained, community-grounded work that takes culture seriously without treating culture as an excuse for harm.

What do you think? When communities invoke cultural sovereignty to defend practices that international bodies classify as human rights violations, where should the line be drawn between respecting cultural autonomy and enforcing universal protections? And who should have the authority to draw it-international institutions, national governments, or the communities themselves?

References

1. https://www.academia.edu/1983974/Resisting_Modernity_The_Performance_of_Gender_Based_Violence_in_Contemporary_India
2. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2405844020321770
3. https://blogs.worldbank.org/en/developmenttalk/gender-based-violence-power-and-norms
4. https://medium.com/@eweinigeria/cultural-norms-and-practices-and-their-impact-on-gender-based-violence-in-communities-883f40315304
5. https://www.intechopen.com/chapters/86638
6. https://notchesblog.com/2014/11/20/mau-mau-anti-colonialism-and-female-genital-mutilation/
7. https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/09646639221118862
8. https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/1468796811419603
9. https://conflictandhealth.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s13031-019-0189-x
10. https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC11688646/
11. http://hrlibrary.umn.edu/iwraw/culture_custom_womensHR1999.html
12. https://www.mdpi.com/2076-0760/12/3/117
13. https://www.ohchr.org/en/stories/2018/10/universality-cultural-diversity-and-cultural-rights
14. https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/23311983.2021.1988385
15. https://www.unesco.org/en/articles/tracker-ndeg18-cutting-edge-re-balancing-scales-gender-equality-cultural-life
16. https://blogs.lse.ac.uk/gender/2020/08/31/the-interplay-between-gender-and-culture-how-the-african-human-rights-system-sought-to-accommodate-universality-and-cultural-relativity-of-womens-rights/
17. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK493719/
18. https://asiapacific.unwomen.org/en/focus-areas/cedaw-human-rights