Democratic backsliding and backlash against women’s rights: Understanding the current challenges for feminist politics:UN Women, Expert Group Meeting, Sixty-fourth session of the Commission on the Status of Women (CSW 64), ‘Beijing +25: Current context, emerging issues and prospects for gender equality and women’s rights’, New York, New York, 25-26 September 2019

Trends of de-democratization across Europe and the Americas emerge along with opposition to gender equality and threats to previous gender equality policy achievements. Yet de-democratization is hardly analyzed through the lens of gender equality, and so far, efforts to systematically examine the implications for inclusive democracy and the representation of gender interests is fragmented. Backsliding in gender policies and on state commitments to gender equality, and new forms of feminist engagement with hostile states and audiences also raise new challenges to the literature on gender and politics. In this paper we propose a conceptual framework discussing two conceptually interesting realms: backsliding in gender equality policies and the emerging political space for feminist responses to backsliding. We illustrate our framework with empirical observations from four backsliding or temporarily backsliding Central and Eastern European countries: Croatia, Hungary, Poland and Romania. We aim to contribute to understanding gendered aspects of de-democratization and illiberal democracies functioning

The Violent Implications of Opposition to the Istanbul Convention

This paper focuses on campaigns against the Council of Europe Convention on preventing and combating violence against women and domestic violence (Istanbul Convention). These campaigns not only obstructed ratification processes in a number of countries, but also that the openly hostile and highly gendered attacks had a direct impact on women’s rights activists and their work, seriously hindering their work, but also affecting their well-being and safety. In this paper we explore the violent implications of the campaigns against the Istanbul Convention which are part of wider anti-gender campaigns. We argue that the violence of the campaigns and the violent implications should be considered gendered political violence, which effectively marginalizes women and other targeted groups and obstructs their participation in society and politics and as such is central to current autocratization tendencies and undermining of democracy

The Selective Closure of Civic Space

Scholars and NGOs have been raising alarms about the increasing political restraints that civil society organizations face globally. In this paper, we argue that closure is in fact a selective mechanism: governments attempt to reorganize civic space through a dual process of selective in- and exclusion of civil society organizations. Civil society organizations identified as critical of or even anti-government face obstruction and restraints, whereas simultaneously the space and state support for organizations identified as pro-government is expanded. Governments instrumentalize certain civil society organizations to their own benefit: they are sponsored and used to influence the realm of civil society in ways that directly legitimize state power and maintain an appearance of democracy. We illustrate our claims by discussing the reorganization of civic space in some countries of Central and Eastern Europe through the case of women’s rights activism.https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/1758-5899.1297

Framing immigration and integration: Relationships between press and parliament in the Netherlands

This article examines how the salience and framing of political issues in the press and in parliament influence each other and how this salience and framing is influenced by key events outside the media and parliamentary realms. The case focused on is the debate on immigration and integration in the Netherlands between 1995 and 2004. The empirical analyses are based on a computer-assisted content analysis of both parliamentary documents and newspaper articles. Results show bidirectional causal relationships between media and parliament. In the case of salience only long-term influence relationships are found, while framing influences follow an interesting pattern: an increase in the use of a frame in one arena leads to an increase in the other arena only if this frame has already been used regularly in the latter arena. External events have more considerable and consistent impact on issue salience and framing in both arenas. Copyright © 2007 Sage Publications