Gender Politics, Democracy, and Violence

This section explores the ways in which gender politics are affected by and intertwined with contemporary challenges to democracy, such as the rise of extremist and populist parties, democratic backsliding, persistent authoritarianism, and political violence in different forms. All of these challenges are underpinned by key gendered considerations, and the section seeks to draw out, compare and discuss them. Many rollbacks in gender equality, attacks on ‘gender ideology’ and statements by openly misogynistic leaders take place in backsliding democracies, leading to increased attention to the interconnections between gender politics and emerging authoritarianism (e.g. Krizsan and Roggeband 2018; Korolczuk 2020). The primary focus has been on the Global North, where governments act to weaken women’s reproductive rights and criticize issues like gender studies, intersectionality, and transgender rights. At the same time, a broad and well-established autocratic strategy is to use gender equality as a tool to cling to power. Modern autocrats actively adopt gender equality reforms at an unprecedented rate (Donno, Fox, and Kaasik 2022; Bjarnegård and Zetterberg 2022), and many take pride in demonstrating the gender equality advances of their country (Tripp 2019; Valdini 2019). These advances mainly concern issues like political representation, gender quotas and (some) women’s rights, but rarely include rights for the LGBTQI+ community. These developments also contribute to challenging the construction of power hierarchies between the Global North and the Global South. A construction of learning going from the North to the South is embedded in UN the EU’s emphasis on “European values”, and developing feminist foreign policies (e.g. True and Parisi 2012, Thomson 2022). Democratic backsliding in the Global North raises the question of what constitutes gender politics progress and in which direction learning should move. In general, it remains important to further investigate the impact discourses on gender equality have on actual policy changes. How can we understand current anti-gender campaigns? In what ways does ‘gender ideology’ underpin and contribute to electoral politics and debate? How can we conceptualise the way certain autocrats adopt gender measures, and compare across cases and regions? What are the tools to help us see through the genderwashing that some regimes engage in? How can we strengthen feminist engagement (both inside and outside the state) to respond to anti-gender campaigns? Finally, political violence is a global challenge to democracy and one that is present in the Global North and South, in armed conflicts as well as in harassment of elected representatives in democracies. Yet comparisons across contexts are scarce. While the gendered aspects of political violence are increasingly well documented (e.g. Krook 2020, Bjarnegård and Zetterberg 2023), there is a need to deepen our understanding not least of intersectional aspects of political violence as well as of its impacts on democracy. The section welcomes panels and papers exploring the nexus of regime type, violence, and gender politics. We will actively encourage submission from a wide spread of methodological approaches, and diverse case studies. We aim to encourage conversations between scholars from different parts of the world, and with different perspectives on these issues. As such, our aim is that the panels in these sections will see exciting and novel debate on the status of gender, democracy, and violence in our world today.