IGWS is a multipurpose and interdisciplinary research center that serves scholars and researchers interested in gender and women's studies in the Middle East/North Africa, South Asia and Africa. The primary function of the institute is to serve as a resource nexus within and through which research projects, conferences, workshops, seminars, and academic research on gender and women's issues are engaged.

Modernities and concomitant liberal articulations of social space and place - delineated by political and cultural visions of the postcolonial world order and its boundaries - have critically informed women's and gender studies over the past few decades. The challenges to modernist and postcolonial geographies and political imaginaries posed in the historical present are increasingly demanding a reconsideration of the frameworks within which gender scholarship has taken place. Envisioning gender studies in the global south demands not only a critical engagement with the grammar of the modern subject but also its critical repositioning within a new global geography. Recognizing the Middle East as an unsatisfactory artificial category, the goal of IGWS is to facilitate these critical demands through a focus on transnational dialogue, cross-regional networking and interdisciplinarity. Although focused on the MENA region as its main target, the institute is committed to fostering scholarly dialogue pertaining to the flows of bodies, ideas and goods between the Middle East, Africa and South Asia.