Feminist Civil Society as a Counter-Mobilizing Force Against the Far Right in Poland (2016–2025)

This presentation examines feminist movements in Poland as a distinct and enduring segment of civil society responding to far-right and illiberal governance between 2016 and 2023, as well as the situation after 2023. The paper analyses how feminist actors mobilized against legal restrictions on reproductive rights, discursive attacks framed through anti-gender ideology, and the progressive narrowing of civic space. Rather than treating feminist protest as episodic or reactive, the paper conceptualizes it as a long-term counter-mobilizing force embedded in broader struggles over democracy, civil and human rights and bodily autonomy. Empirically, the analysis draws on qualitative interview material with feminist activists, complemented by protest documentation and organizational data, to trace changes in protest repertoires, organizational forms, and strategies of endurance. The paper shows how feminist mobilization evolved from highly visible mass protests—most notably during moments of acute legal threat—to more dispersed, network-based, and everyday forms of resistance. These include informal or semi-formal support, legal accompaniment, and local initiatives and activities, which enabled feminist civil society to persist despite sustained political hostility and discursive delegitimization (2016-2023), as well as indifference and reluctance (after 2023). The paper also contains an analysis of the post-2023 period, marked by a change in government but not by a full reversal of far-right discursive power. The paper captures how feminist civil society recalibrates its strategies when formal political opportunities reopen, yet only theoretically. It demonstrates that the electoral defeat of PiS did not simply restore pre-2016 conditions, but generated new tensions between expectations of institutional responsiveness and continued constraints rooted in law, bureaucracy, and polarized public discourse. Feminist actors thus face a dual task: sustaining mobilization while renegotiating their position vis-à-vis state institutions that are no longer openly hostile but remain structurally limited and additionally treated as at least inconvenient. I would also like to identify an additional layer of complexity within feminist civil society itself. Part of the movement—primarily actors associated with established liberal feminism, active prior to the post-2016 grassroots feminist mobilization, less confrontational in their political orientation, and embedded in political, cultural, and professional networks with access to substantial symbolic and material resources—has adopted a strategy of self-restraint and repertoire narrowing. This stance is justified by the belief that open contention directed at the current government could indirectly strengthen the far right by providing discursive ammunition.