Feminist activists have long demanded institutional structures that promote and protect women’s rights at the highest levels of the state. This demand was further supported from the international community when the Beijing Platform for Action that resulted from the United Nations Fourth World Conference on Women held in 1995 emphasized the “creation and strengthening of national machineries for the advancement of women at the highest possible level of government”. Women’s rights activists in many Muslim countries have organized extensively in demand of such structures, which may take the form of women’s ministries, commissions, or bureaus, that aim to pass legislation or design institutional protocols to expand gender equality, respect for women’s rights, and elimination of discrimination and violence against women. Despite such organizing, the design and impact of such machineries have varied across the globe, including throughout the Muslim region. While some have formed clearly mandated structures for mainstreaming gender concerns in all state agencies, institutions, laws, and plans, others are weak structures, formed to merely appeal to donors or sections to the electorate. Through case studies of women’s national machineries in Afghanistan, Iran, and Turkey, this research highlights the complexities of national women’s and human rights machineries of these countries, with attention to the ways in which they have varied from one another and throughout time. From the three, only Afghanistan benefited from a formal Afghan Ministry of Women’s Affairs (MOWA) that functioned from 2001 to 2021, while Turkey and Iran have had less formalized women’s advisory entities within the executive branch. In recent years and with coming to power of conservative parties and elites, women’s machineries also shifted to largely address women’s concerns within the context of family, thus undermining feminist movements’ claims that aimed to highlight equal opportunities and roles for women within the public sphere, as it has occurred in Turkey and Iran. The findings of this research will shed light onto the role and impact of national women’s machineries and illuminate the contexts, factors and ideologies that foster formation of entitles that aim to substantively represent women’s interests. Its analysis will analyze the role of the international community within war-torn Afghanistan, as well as an increasingly ostracized women’s rights movement from the global gender discourses as in Iran and Turkey.