The coronavirus pandemic has confronted women all over the world with specific gender-based challenges. A particularly gruesome one is the considerable increase of violence against them especially in the privacy of their homes in the context of confinement. Jordan, where women in the pre-coronavirus period already experienced significant levels of gender-based violence, is no exception to this trend. Stemming from a wider project dealing with local resistance to international injunctions and prescriptions in the field of women’s rights in Jordan, this paper focuses on the pandemic period. It is particularly interested in examining local responses to the rise in domestic violence with a core question: considering that the crisis has significantly disrupted routinized processes in almost every single aspect of social life including at the level of “development cooperation”, did it provide local actors with greater room for devising local responses to gender-based violence, and if so with what resources and from what normative perspectives? Building on fieldwork conducted by local partners notably through interviews with stakeholders, the paper will try to assess whether the crisis has contributed in reinforcing the “local turn” (Mac Ginty and Williams 2009) that was initially driven mostly by the Western actors of development. It hypothesizes that by simultaneously increasing the acuity of gender-based violence and disrupting the usual operation of development cooperation, the coronavirus pandemic has opened up new avenues for local actors to develop more local approaches to the complex problem of violence against women. Differently put, the pandemic context might be a critical juncture in the rebalancing of still asymmetric relationships between Western donors and experts on the one hand and local brokers and actors on the other hand. Building on their extensive experience in resisting their donors’ will in a variety of hidden and not-so-hidden ways, the latter might be gaining a freer hand and a greater experience. The paper will first examine the various actors who have taken the lead in responses to the rise of violence against women in Jordan during the pandemic and then analyze these responses from both their practical and axiological dimensions. This twin analysis will serve to examine whether these responses converge with the substance of earlier resistance by local actors to international injunctions and prescriptions. One step further, the paper will build on actors’ experiences and perceptions to reflect on whereas the “local turn” is in a process of greater local appropriation.