Gender Based Violence: Politics, Protests and Productions

The section will consist of 7-10 panels with roughly five papers in each. Its content is based on past ECPR and ECPG panels and papers on gender-based violence, and contemporary issues in gender-based violence research, and the section is structured around three very broad main areas: the politics of gender-based violence, including politics, policy, law and other institutions; politicisation, institutionalisation, intersectionalisations of gender-based violence, and gender-based violence politics in times of crises (financial, ecological, humanitarian, and others); the protests of gender-based violence, including social movements and social projects organised online and offline around resistance to gender-based violence, feminist organising, activism, and alliances and coalitions across multiple domains, e.g. across civil society, polity and knowledge production; and the production of gender-based violence, including forms of gender-based violence (e.g. interpersonal, sexual, political, systemic; online/offline, technology-facilitated violence, etc.); framings (how is gender-based violence framed by different actors and institutions, and with what consequences for political change?); conceptual (how gender-based violence is defined, conceptualised and measured in policy and research, and with what consequences for activism and political change? The section is motivated by the contemporary pandemic proportions of gender-based violence, the magnitude of gender-based violence research in politics and social science disciplines, research produced around it, and the fact that at the ECPG in Amsterdam 2019 saw such interest in gender, violence and politics: some twenty panels and many more papers addressed gender-based violence, but these were dispersed across multiple other sections (European Politics, Intersectionality, and others). Therefore, at the ECPG 2021, we will devote a full Section on feminist violence studies/gender-based violence studies and politics. The section welcomes both new panel proposals and papers for the following proposed panels. The politics and politicisation of gender-based violence This panel deals with how the politics of gender-based violence, including politics and policy on multiple forms of gender-based violence and sexual harassment, such as law, policy, conventions (e.g. the Istanbul Convention) and other formal institutions have developed historically and recently, how they have been employed, interpreted and ratified (or not), and the actors involved in these processes, before, during and after various crises; and the historical or comparative politicisation, institutionalisation, intersectionalisations of gender-based violence. It would also welcome papers on contentious or ambiguous politics around violence and anti-violence. Gender and political violence This panel deals with gender aspects on violence in politics. It explores how and when gender is used as a motive for political attacks, different gendered forms of violence, as well as the gendered impacts and interpretations of political violence – on individual politicians as well as on communities and societies more broadly. We seek conceptual as well as empirical contributions, and we hope to explore violence situated differently on the continuum of violence, including, but not limited to, online violence, psychological forms of violence, sexual violence, physical violence as well as organized armed violence. We are particularly interested in papers that engage with intersectional and masculinity theory and with papers that investigate prevention and ways to address these endemic phenomena. The political economy and international relations of gender-based violence This panel examines how gender relations are constituted as well as experienced in relation to global/macroeconomic structures, including financial restructuring, development and peacebuilding, transitions, securitisation and militarisation. It explores violence and violations in state and non-state armed conflict, post-conflict zones and during peacekeeping/building missions; the increased trade with women’s bodies, and the growth of a sex trade around the creation of free trade zones and military sites. The panel welcome papers examining multiple forms of direct violence in conflict, post-conflict and transitional spaces, and papers on more indirect and structural forms of violence and violations, such as the relationship between women’s (lack of/poor) access to productive resources such as land, property, and income and the risk of being subjected to gender-based violence, and/or other critical accounts examining the gendered nature of crisis, conflict and violence in relation to broader global processes. The protests and mobilisation against gender-based violence This panel addresses social movements and social projects and activism organised around resistance and various forms of protests against gender-based violence, including feminist organising, and intersectional alliances and coalitions across inequalities and domains, e.g. across gender, ethnicity and sexuality, and across civil society, polity and knowledge production. While in the 1990s, the transnational feminist movement succeeded in conceptualising gender violence as a violation of women's human rights grounded in unequal power relations between men and women, we are now witnessing a development with localised and fragmented movements, online and offline. The panel also welcomes papers specifically addressing violence as opposition to gender equality, and the feminist, intersectional, and coalitional resistance to that development. The production of online/offline gender-based violence This panel looks at developing and developments within feminist violence theory, with the help of the production of violence on inter-state, i.e. violence between states (e.g. war), intra-state, i.e. violence within states, (e.g. state-citizen violence), and inter-personal violence, i.e. violence between persons (e.g. assault, murder, sexual violence), at online/offline levels; their interconnection and relation, and implications thereof for politics and gender equality. It welcomes papers on the concept and measurements of violence, including how to define and conceptualise and empirically explore multiple forms of violence and their relation (e.g. physical violence, sexual violence, technology facilitated violence/digital violence, etc.). Men, masculinities and violence This panel explores men and masculinities in the politics, protest and production of violence. This would include papers that examine the structural, organizational, group-based and/or interpersonal place of men, different men, and masculinity, different masculinities, in the politics, protest and production of violence. It welcomes papers that range from analyses of the individual and group constructions of masculinity and violence amongst politicians and political leaders to studies of men in war, militarism and globalizing violences, across time (historically) and space (transnationally). Right-wing populism, anti-gender, and gender-based violence. This panel explores authoritarianism, and nationalist far-right parties’ appropriation of gender-based violence discourses to fit their racist and anti-LGBTIQ+ aims, whereby migrant and minority men as the ‘producers’ of violence towards (national) women, while simultaneously opposing existing gender equality and gender-based violence policy. It would be open for papers that examine the renewed (right-wing fuelled) politicization and re-framing of violence, feminist backlash and re-legitimization of gender-based violence, and the outcomes of this process in terms of reframing, alignment of actors, institutional arrangements and public policy on gender violence.