Gender and the Rise of Authoritarianism

The rise of authoritarianism across the world in recent years (Alizada et al. 2021, Freedom House 2021) has been characterised by numerous attempts to reverse the gains made towards gender equality at the national and the global levels (Flood et al. 2021). Indeed, movements opposing gender equality and LGBTQ+ rights have been increasingly successful in achieving their goals, while the number of state actors that are increasingly hostile to notions of gender equality has also soared. In sum, contesting gender norms is an intrinsic component of the current wave of autocratisation. The threat that processes of democratic erosion pose for existing norms of gender equality has not escaped the attention of feminist scholars, who have begun tracing the emergence of anti-gender campaigns in Europe (Kuhar and Paternotte 2017) and Latin America (Biroli and Caminotti 2020, Corrêa 2021), patterns of opposition to gender equality (Verloo 2018, Verloo and Paternotte 2018), and the key features of the process of democratic backsliding within the policy area of gender equality (Krizsán and Roggeband 2018, 2021, Guasti and Bustikova 2020). Significant advances in our understanding of the relationship between opposition to gender equality and the rise of authoritarianism notwithstanding, extant literature is characterised by several significant gaps. First, while scholarship on the expansion of gender equality norms typically highlights the role of regional actors such as the EU or international actors such as the UN, as well as the role of transnational activism and monitoring, our knowledge about the international and transnational dimensions of backlash against gender equality remains limited. Recent research tends to focus primarily on the domestic level as the key to explaining how anti-gender actors aim, with various degrees of success, to reverse gains in gender equality. For instance, scholarship analysing the role played by transnational linkages in the rise of anti-gender movements (Kuhar and Paternotte 2017) or patterns of resistance against international norms against gender-based violence such as the Istanbul Convention (Krizsán and Roggeband 2021, Guasti and Bustikova 2020) tends to focus on the national- level factors and processes driving backlash against gender equality, so that the international and transnational dimensions remain secondary for the analysis. Secondly, although we generally have a sound understanding of how gender norms are introduced and reproduced over time in democratic regimes, scholarship has typically paid much less attention to the adoption and institutionalisation of gender norms in authoritarian regimes (for recent work that has begun to address this issue, see Donno and Kreft 2019, Bjarnegård and Zetterberg 2021). Within this context, conceptualising gender in relation to different regime types would shed light not only on non- democratic regimes, but also on the processes underpinning the resilience of egalitarian gender norms in democratic settings. Finally, the emphasis in the current literature tends to be on developments in Europe and/or Western democracies. Thus, expanding the emphasis to other case studies and regions can only benefit scholarly attempts to explain variation in gender outcomes across the world (Biroli and Caminotti 2020, Yamaguchi 2014).