Anti-Gender Policy Transfer Within Illiberal Networks: Russian and Hungarian Templates and Their Selective Adaptation in Georgia

Anti-gender politics have increasingly become a way for illiberal governments to manage crises, negotiate legitimacy, and re-order their international positioning. Existing research often treats this spread as ideological diffusion. This paper instead examines how anti-gender policy transfer unfolds within illiberal networks, and how legal ideas do not simply travel intact but are reworked and re-purposed as they move. The study focuses on Russia and Hungary as reference points and investigates how their anti-gender repertoires were selectively adapted in Georgia's 2024 "Law on Protecting Family Values and Minors." Two questions guide the analysis: (1) In what ways do Russian and Hungarian models underpin the Georgian turn to anti-gender governance? and (2) how does selective adaptation operate as a governing technique in a hybrid regime undergoing democratic backsliding? The research draws on qualitative content and discourse analysis of primary legislation, parliamentary debates and official statements. Policy transfer and legal transplant theory form the analytical framework. The findings indicate that Georgia's law is not a direct reproduction of Russian legislation. Russian influence is most evident in the symbolic timing of anti-gender escalation, yet the structure and conceptual foundations of the Georgian law diverge sharply. Rather than mirroring Russia's "propaganda" model, Georgian legislators rooted the law in biological determinism, transgender exclusion, and the erasure of "gender" as a legal concept. Hungary serves as a secondary reference point, offering a case where anti-gender politics have been normalised inside the EU, enabling Georgian elites to signal norm defection without openly declaring alignment with Russia. Taken together, the Georgian case illustrates a hybrid mode of anti-gender lawmaking: local reinterpretation supported by transnational illiberal signalling. The paper's contribution is two-fold. First, it demonstrates that anti-gender policy transfer in this region proceeds through selective adaptation rather than straightforward transplant. Second, it shows how anti-gender law becomes a tool for domestic consolidation while simultaneously communicating geopolitical distance from the EU. Georgia thus offers a key empirical site for understanding how anti-gender politics currently travel, settle, and gain institutional form within illiberal networks.