Anti-Gender Coalitions in the United Nations. How Illiberal Actors Navigate Identity Clashes to Cooperate Globally

This paper examines how illiberal actors form unexpected coalitions to challenge the gender architecture of the United Nations. Despite advancing incompatible identity projects, actors such as Christian conservatives, Islamic traditionalists, nationalist governments, and transnational conservative NGOs increasingly coordinate across borders to contest gender equality. While existing research often describes anti-gender mobilization as defensive or reactive, the paper argues that these actors operate as creative agents of institutional change. To support this argument, the paper revisits two strategies typically associated with progressive politics, namely feminist transversalism and postcolonial strategic essentialism, and theorizes them as coordinated forms of disruption that illiberal coalitions appropriate to manage otherwise irreconcilable identity tensions. By invoking abstracted visions of a ‘higher-order morality,’ actors selectively bracket doctrinal, national, and theological differences and construct a provisional and temporary shared subjectivity. These practices constitute what I describe as a form of illiberal transversalism that enables collaboration without requiring substantive ideological convergence. On the empirical level, the analysis focuses on coalition-building dynamics within the Commission on the Status of Women (CSW), one of the UN’s most contested sites of gender politics, and draws on debates around the Agreed Conclusions. Through this, the paper offers a new explanation for how illiberal actors assemble and maintain cross-border networks of cooperation despite persistent identity clashes.