From Resistance to Rollback: Theorizing the Global Attack on Women’s Rights Norms

After decades of progress, international women’s rights principles are increasingly under attack from a broad coalition of governments and nongovernmental organizations at the United Nations. Drawing support from long-standing religious conservatives and emergent patriarchal populists (Sanders and Jenkins 2021), opponents of women’s rights seek to purge commitments to women’s sexual and reproductive health and rights and any recognition of diverse gender roles and identities from international law and policy. In this paper, we argue that a hospitable global political opportunity structure has allowed critics to move from resisting and spoiling women’s rights to more aggressively seeking to roll back and replace them with alternative norms premised on conservative interpretations of religion and culture and biological essentialism. This paper provides the theoretical foundations for understanding how norms advance and regress in international politics with reference to the extensive IR constructivist literature on this topic and our research on women’s rights. Building on Sanders’ (2018) conceptualization of norm spoiling, the process through which actors seek to resist and break norms without necessarily needing to secure widespread acceptance of alternatives, we argue that women’s rights norms are now being threatened by norm replacement. The growing convergence of older religious conservative opposition to women’s rights with emergent patriarchal populist attacks position anti-women’s rights campaigners to successfully pursue what we theorize as norm rollback, a form of normative regime change that alters the normative consensus. The comparative politics literature, particularly on gender and religion, demonstrates how varied these normative alternatives can be, but we find that disparate advocates are increasingly coordinating their efforts to roll back and replace women’s human rights. We conclude our paper by considering why anti-feminism is so central to illiberal global politics and what the growing assault on women’s rights signifies about threats to pluralistic democracy and social equality. This research incorporates new insights into how emergent forms of illiberal populism reshape older patterns of women’s and LGBTQ rights contestation in global governance. It likewise expands scholarship on the nexus of populism and gender by moving beyond domestic and regional politics to examine the international legal arena. By analyzing cooperation between patriarchal populists, religious conservatives, nationalist regimes, and increasingly savvy anti-feminist NGOs, we highlight serious challenges to women’s rights worldwide.