Feminist mobilization and resistance: Insights from Poland and South Korea

In the context of an illiberal and populist turn in democratic politics, women’s rights and gender equality have come under threat. Feminists have faced new challenges coming from democratic backsliding (Krizsán and Roggeband 2019; Lombardo et al. 2021). Against this background, feminism is on the rise. Traditional explanations in existing literature attribute increased feminist activism to socio-economic factors, deprivation and resource mobilization. Conversely, this article highlights a novel aspect and argues that gendered moral shocks, which occur in anti-feminist contexts, reignite feminist movements and intensify their activism. This hypothesis is tested using paired comparison in the form of the most different system design to explain the revival of feminist movements in Poland and South Korea. Overall, this article offers a refined conceptual and theoretical framework to understanding feminist mobilization in unexplored East European and East Asian contexts and thus contributes conceptually, theoretically and empirically to the literature on social movements and gender and politics.