Gendered Meanings of Democracy Struggles in Croatia

This paper assesses the bottom-up processes of democratization in post-socialist Croatia by focusing on different forms of citizens’ mobilizations, such as protests, campaigns, blockades and strikes, over the past 30 years. More specifically, the paper identifies and analyzes 10 most significant ‘protest events’ – either the largest and/or most influential, understood using Della Porta’s (2020) terms of legacies or “vibrations” to emphasize the continuation and re-production of protest events even after time normalizes. The analysis outlines different examples of struggles for democracy with the goal of identifying: the scope of inclusion/participation of feminist actors and women’s organizations in a protest, and inclusion of gender issues in the framing of a protest message. The Croatian case is interesting due to continuity of feminist initiatives from the late socialist period (1970s), and centrality of feminist actors for the 1990s democratization movement, while also revealing a more recent, well-organized anti-gender movement (2010s) that brought to a rare example of ‘marriage referendum’ success among the Eastern European countries.