How can democratic actors and institutions counteract the recent backlash against gender equality and LGBTQ+ rights? The fact that the erosion of these rights represents a central feature of democratic backsliding is well-established. Yet, the factors underpinning democracies’ ability to withstand attacks against marginalised groups have received little attention. Our aims are threefold: (1) to shift the existing focus away from democratic backsliding and towards democratic resilience; (2) to broaden the concept of democratic resilience and demonstrate its contribution to gender scholarship; (3) to identify and classify cases of success and failure of democratic resilience across political and geographic contexts.
The workshop aims to bridge several conceptual and empirical gaps in the study of democratic erosion. On the conceptual side, scholarship on gender currently lacks a systematic effort to theorise democratic resilience against ‘anti-gender’ campaigns. Extant literature on ‘anti-gender’ politics (Kuhar and Paternotte 2017, Krizsán and Roggeband 2019, Corrêa 2021, Krizsán and Roggeband 2021) has focused primarily on the conditions underpinning democratic backsliding on gender equality in Europe and Latin America. Meanwhile recent work by Kantola and Lombardo (2024) has begun to focus on feminist institutional responses to backsliding in parliaments in Europe. However, specific conceptualisations of democratic resilience remain largely absent. Conversely, the literature on democratic resilience (Boese et al. 2021, Lührmann 2021, Merkel and Lührmann 2021) tends to neglect gender as a core dimension of autocratisation. On the empirical side, we currently lack country case studies, as well as comparative studies of democratic resilience as far as gender equality and LGBTQ+ rights are concerned (for an exception, see Chiva 2023). Furthermore, despite ample evidence of the importance of international and transnational linkages for democratic backsliding from the perspective of gender (Velasco 2023, Ayoub and Stoeckl 2024), there are currently no studies of whether and how resilience manifests within these arenas. Within this context, given just how central gender is for current trends towards autocratisation, it has become imperative that we investigate, classify, and conceptualise democratic resilience vis-à-vis gender equality and LGBTQ+ rights systematically and in depth.
Ayoub, Phillip, and Kristina Stoeckl. 2024. The Global Fight against LGBTI Rights: How Transnational Conservative Networks Target Sexual and Gender Minorities. LGBTI Politics. New York: New York University Press.
Boese, Vanessa A., Amanda B. Edgell, Sebastian Hellmeier, Seraphine F. Maerz, and Staffan I. Lindberg. 2021. ‘How Democracies Prevail: Democratic Resilience as a Two-Stage Process’. Democratization 28 (5): 885–907.
Chiva, Cristina. 2023. ‘Gender and Democratic Resilience against Autocratisation: The Case of Romania’s “Gender Identity” Bill’. European Journal of Politics and Gender 6(3), 395-413.
Corrêa, Sonia. 2022. Anti-Gender Politics in Latin America in the Pandemic Context. Rio de Janeiro, RJ: Associação Brasileira Interdisciplinas de Aids - ABIA.
Kantola, Johanna, and Emanuela Lombardo. 2024. ‘Feminist Institutional Responses to Anti-Gender Politics in Parliamentary Contexts’. International Feminist Journal of Politics, July, 1–25.
Krizsán, Andrea, and Conny Roggeband, eds. 2019. Gendering Democratic Backsliding in Central and Eastern Europe: A Comparative Agenda. Budapest: CEU Press.
Krizsán, Andrea, and Conny Roggeband. 2021. Politicizing Gender and Democracy in the Context of the Istanbul Convention. Gender and Politics. Cham, Switzerland: Palgrave Macmillan.
Kuhar, Roman, and David Paternotte, eds. 2017. Anti-Gender Campaigns in Europe: Mobilizing against Equality. London ; New York: Rowman & Littlefield International, Ltd.
Lührmann, Anna. 2021. ‘Disrupting the Autocratization Sequence: Towards Democratic Resilience’. Democratization 28 (5): 1017–39.
Merkel, Wolfgang, and Anna Lührmann. 2021. ‘Resilience of Democracies: Responses to Illiberal and Authoritarian Challenges’. Democratization 28 (5): 869–84.
Velasco, Kristopher. 2023. ‘Transnational Backlash and the Deinstitutionalization of Liberal Norms: LGBT+ Rights in a Contested World’. American Journal of Sociology 128 (5): 1381–1429.
1: How can we conceptualize democratic resilience in the face of anti-gender forces?
2: What are the types of resilience and how do they unfold at various levels of governance?
3: What are the pathways to democratic resilience and the actor constellations driving them?
4: When and how do actors succeed in preserving democracy from a gendered perspective?
5: Equally importantly, when and how do actors fail in their efforts to preserve democracy?
1: Successful resilience against ‘anti-gender’ democratic backsliding
2: Partially successful and/or failed attempts to counteract ‘anti-gender’ policies and actors
3: Country case studies, policy case studies and comparative case studies are equally welcome
4: How democratic actors adapt their goals and strategies over time to counteract autocratization
5: Conceptualizations of democratic resilience from a gender perspective
6: Typologies of democratic resilience from a gender perspective
7: Analyses of democratic resilience at transnational and/or international levels (such as the EU, the UN etc)
8: Gender and democratic resilience in conflict and post-conflict contexts
