When knowledge becomes the battlefield II - Anti-gender interventions in knowledge production and de-democratization

Abstract

In the wake of far-right electoral success, many countries across the world have witnessed the declining quality of liberal democratic governance, and the weakening protection of basic individual and collective rights. Gender has become central to authoritarian and nativist politics, manifesting in increasing opposition to gender equality policymaking, LGBTQ+ rights and comprehensive sex education across the European continent. Even if the far right’s active engagement with topics such as gender affirming healthcare and trans women’s access to gendered spaces is a relatively recent phenomenon, European anti-gender politics are by no means ‘new’, and are deeply rooted in the continent’s “capitalist, colonial, and fascist legacies” (Roggeband et al., 2025, p. 1). In response to these developments, this panel engages with the topic of anti-gender mobilization through the lens of democratic erosion and epistemic contention. Departing from the observation that “contemporary gender politics cannot be fully understood and conceptualized without understanding its relationship to processes of de-democratization” (Lombardo et al., 2021, p. 521), the panel focuses specifically on the connections between democratic erosion and attacks on knowledge production. Authoritarian attacks on knowledge about gender manifest in a variety of ways (Korolczuk et al 2024), from the ban on gender studies in Hungary and similar attempts in Romania (Băluță & Băluță, 2025), to far-right attacks on sex education and gender inclusive teaching in the Netherlands and Germany (Segers, 2025; Volk, 2025). Accounting for the diversity of far right and anti-gender interventions in critical knowledge production, this panel engages with the interplay between epistemic politics and de-democratization through different theoretical and empirical lenses. First, the panel provides a critical analysis of the quality of European democracies, and the limited attention that has been paid to the importance of science and education in bolstering societal resilience against autocratic politics. It also addresses how anti-gender movements undermine freedom of speech and academic freedom by simultaneously undermining the legitimacy of evidence-based research and providing a pseudoscientific basis for exclusionary politics. Moreover, the panel explores the role of transnational disinformation campaigns in epistemic contention over specific policy issues such as the conversion therapy ban in Norway, and addresses how far-right epistemic warfare leads to the troubling self-censorship of critical scholars in Germany. Overall, this panel addresses how anti-gender attacks on knowledge can be understood as both a cause and a symptom of democratic erosion, even in the context of contemporary liberal democracies. This is part of a two-panel proposal – see also ‘When knowledge becomes the battlefield I’

Title	Details
Constitutionalizing “Biological Truth”: Gender Politics and the 2025 Slovak Constitutional Reform	View Paper Details
Mobilizing the politics of knowledge for the politics of autocratization	View Paper Details
Attacking “Gender” in the Field of Knowledge Production: a Path to De-democratization	View Paper Details
Anti-Gender Disinformation and Epistemic Struggles in Debates on LGBTQ+ Conversion Practices	View Paper Details
Academic Freedom Under Pressure: Attacks on Gender Studies and the Gendered Dimension of Deplatforming and Self-Censorship in Germany	View Paper Details