1. Feminist Counterpublics as Democratic Innovations: Transnational Infrastructures of Resistance in the Russian Anti-War Movement

Although feminist movements have been widely analyzed for their role in defending political and social rights, their contributions as agents of democratization, particularly in authoritarian contexts, remain understudied. Amid the “third wave” of autocratization and the rise of far-right and anti-gender politics, it is increasingly urgent to investigate innovative strategies to sustain democratic norms and resist anti-gender pushback. While existing scholarship on transnational opposition in autocracies largely focuses on electoral participation and financial dimensions, these approaches are analytically limited in contexts where elections are rigged, and foreign assistance to the opposition is criminalized. This article shifts the analytical focus toward feminist counterpublics and the infrastructures that sustain them, examining how feminist actors generate democratic practices outside formal institutions. Drawing on long-term digital ethnography, participant observation, and in-depth semi-structured interviews, the study analyzes Russian feminist anti-war and pro-democratic groups residing in European democracies to explore how they exercise political agency and contribute to democratizing practices in their authoritarian homeland. The findings show that these actors enact feminist democratic innovations across three domains: (1) transnational infrastructures of care that create conditions of access and belonging; (2) hybrid third places that function as laboratories of horizontal deliberation, activist training, and collective will-formation; and (3) digital contention that expands feminist participation, challenges epistemic injustice, and circulates resistant interpretive frameworks across borders. Together, these practices reveal how feminist groups in exile function as transnational agents of democratization, cultivating infrastructures that redistribute influence, expand participation, and generate alternative epistemic and affective repertoires that reconfigure political engagement transnationally.