9. Anti-Gender Mobilizations with an Ethno-Nationalistic Hangover

In their recent study, Corrêa, Paternotte, and House claim that anti-gender mobilizations cannot be reduced to a backlash phenomenon. They warn against a mechanistic and unilinear understanding of history that portrays feminist and queer struggles as won—everywhere and in the same or, at least, similar way—to which the empire strikes back, as it did many a time before. Instead of being simply reactive or reactionary, anti-gender politics is productive of a new political order of which gender is one, but excessively important cornerstone (Corrêa et al., 2023; see also Paternotte, 2020). As Butler claims in their Who’s Afraid of Gender?, ‘gender’ is a battlefield in a larger restoration project that ‘seeks to shore up authoritarian regimes as rightful forms of paternalism, the dream come true’—a dream that will put an end to ‘the implacable anxiety and fear that afflict so many people experiencing climate destruction firsthand, or ubiquitous violence and brutal war, expanding police powers, or intensifying economic precarity’ (Butler, 2024, 15).

This is, indeed, the state of the world today. But, in the post-Yugoslav space, it has been seen before. Perhaps the Balkans were the avant-garde of Europe (Velikonja, 2022)?¹ What seemed to have been an exceptionally Yugoslav ‘powder keg’ experience a few decades ago now echoes hollowly throughout the world. Add to this the peculiar position of Eastern Europe, a bastion of illiberalism (Norocel & Paternotte, 2023). In the post-socialist Europe, re-traditionalization as restoration is not a new project. In fact, at the time when the world was thought to be becoming a freer place, post-socialist Eastern European states and churches grew brazenly close, previous welfare regimes that had many elements of gender equality crumbled, states entered an economically and socially devastating process of restructuring in an attempt to ‘return to Europe’ as fast as they could. This return involved obliterating their actual pasts, which paved the way for a construction of a grander, better and more glorious past that never was. These constructions would prove particularly useful when the return to Europe reversed direction (Zaharijević et al., 2024). The return from Europe can be equated with illiberalism. One should not be particularly surprised that one of the first texts to introduce the concept of illiberal democracy, Zakaria’s article “Rise of Illiberal Democracy” (1997), begins with reflections on the elections in Bosnia and Herzegovina in the autumn of 1996, only a year after the war ended.²

In much of Eastern Europe, which is particularly noticeable in Hungary and Poland, re-traditionalization has gone hand in hand with the rise of illiberal democracies (Bogaards & Pető, 2022). In recent years, anti-gender mobilizations play one of the central roles in consolidating illiberal power structures. By framing gender equality as a foreign imposition and a threat to national identity, political actors have been able to galvanize support for broader agendas that undermine democratic norms and pluralism.

Is then the backlash hypothesis applicable to the post-socialist world? To us it seems that the backlash perspective is misleading, because it assumes that progressive actions necessarily precede and provoke conservative reactions. The post-Yugoslav space in particular presents a critical challenge to the notion that anti-gender mobilizations universally follow the same trajectory. In this context—aside from a few exceptions—the progress cited by the proponents of the backlash position never fully materialized. Here, anti-gender rhetoric arises not primarily as a response to feminist achievements but as part of a broader process of re-traditionalization, deeply rooted in ethno-nationalist frameworks that predate the global rise of anti-gender campaigns.

If a backlash exists, it is directed against the socialist heritage, particularly regarding gender equality promoted by the socialist ‘state feminism’. This backlash took the form of re-traditionalization, which began in the early 1990s and was particularly exacerbated by the wars. From this perspective, anti-gender campaigns are not to be seen as a backlash but rather as a re-traditionalization process on steroids, intensified and refreshed by new powerful rhetoric, strategies, and actors. ‘Gender commissariat’ of today is as foreign, as treacherous, as disloyal to the nation and national values as feminists and queer activists were in the 1990s. But there is a difference: the old national values today bear the name of ‘traditional values’, and the once hyper-militarized patriarchy now strives for the restoration of the ‘natural family’.

There are both continuities and disruptions when comparing this phase to the initial wave of re-traditionalization in the early 1990s. During that earlier phase, the focus was on distancing from the ‘socialist project’ and the perceived backwardness of Eastern Europe, aiming instead for integration into a ‘united Europe’ founded on democracy and the rule of law. Simultaneously, there was an effort to restore religious institutions, which sought to reclaim their role as public intellectual authorities, morally adjudicating on significant social issues after decades of being relegated to the private sphere under what was perceived as oppressive communist rule. The first wave of re-traditionalization was overtly traditionalist, rejecting feminist progress and socialist equality policies and promoting the idea that women should remain in domestic roles. In contrast, today’s re-traditionalization, strengthened by anti-gender rhetoric, employs a more subtle language. It does not directly advocate for ‘women at the stove’, but rather acknowledges a certain degree of equality, only to later argue that anything beyond their narrow definition of equality is excessive, constituting privileges or additional rights that must be resisted. The discourses have therefore changed. They also seem to have arrived from elsewhere. However, when the post-Yugoslavs translate the global anti-gender narrative matrix into their own languages, they already have quite fitting pre-existing frames for these translations. In this vein, we also cannot attribute a distinctly new productive nature to anti-gender campaigns in the former Yugoslav region. Their productivity lies in sustaining and advancing the heteronationalist narratives of return that have existed since the late 1980s, extensively contributing to the dissolution of Yugoslavia and the wars that followed.

The post-war and post-conflict context is particularly significant here, as our study aligns with discussions on ‘masculinist identity politics’ (Sauer, 2020, 2025), one of the key structural drivers of anti-gender mobilizations. In the post-Yugoslav space, this politics gains an added dimension shaped by the deep influence of nationalist and war discourses on masculinity. Unsurprisingly, war veterans have emerged as prominent anti-gender actors, invoking a narrative of the masculinity in crisis. They promote a vision of restored masculinity rooted in rigid, hierarchical gender roles, relying more heavily than their Western counterparts on hypermasculine, militaristic, and paternalistic ideals that frame men as aggressive protectors of the nation—now rebranded within an anti-gender framework.

It has been persuasively shown that the language and strategies of anti-gender mobilizations around the world have a truly transnational character. Indeed, anti-gender politics can be described as a huge translational project.³ Although it poses as nationally redemptive politics fixed to a particular tradition, its script is the same, regardless of the many local inflexions. The post-Yugoslav space, carved into seven small states that claim to have seven entirely different traditions—all of them newly discovered in opposition to their shared history and bolstered through wars—has a fully translatable anti-gender agenda. For example, Croatian and Serbian ‘traditions’, although apparently they should have no points in common, appear astonishingly similar in their opposition to ‘gender’. This translatability can also be observed in other countries in the region, despite their purportedly distinct cultural and historical identities.

The texts gathered in this volume show that anti-gender narratives appear in an almost verbatim form. The similarity of languages and the secret bond that binds the post-Yugoslav space is not sufficient to account for this. The same logic and the similar, if not the same framing can be found in countries as far as Brazil or Russia. One cannot ascribe this only to the lack of inventiveness of the anti-gender actors. Rather, we should see this as an ideological import–export, that sometimes has an overtly political, sometimes a merely cultural form. Close to home, we have Viktor Orbán, who has consistently used anti-gender rhetoric as a central strategy in his political campaigns. Relatively recently, at the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) in Budapest in 2023, he referred to gender as a ‘progressive virus’ and claimed to have found a ‘vaccine’ against it, underscoring the centrality of such narratives to his platform (Orbán, 2023). Serbian President Aleksandar Vučić and Slovenian politician Janez Janša, both of them close allies of Hungary’s Orbán, are attentive to this message. Brian Brown, then the president of the World Congress of Families, visited Serbia as early as 2016 in an attempt to install the yearly ‘Walks for the family’ (Beta, 2016). WCF’s chosen associate was the small, ultra right-wing party that models its politics on Germany’s AfD. Once it became clear that they lack agility in the Serbian political arena, WCF changed partners. Together with Angela Gandra Martins, Brazil’s Secretary of State for Family in Bolsonaro’s government, Brian Brown participated at a large event organized under the auspices of the Vučić’s ruling party and several Serbian ministries in the fall of 2022 (iFamNews Serbia, 2022). Interestingly, the event gained unexpectedly little visibility in Serbia itself, which may be ascribed to the volte face politics of the ruling regime.

In the meantime, however, certain post-Yugoslav actors also became prominent exporters of the transnational anti-gender mobilizations. Croatian anti-gender actors occupy very significant positions in the transnational networks. Željka Markić serves as one of the two European coordinators of the Vision Network, formerly known as Agenda Europe.⁴ In autumn 2024, one of the network's closed-door conferences took place in Zagreb, Croatia’s capital, and was met with feminist protests under the slogan, ‘Not in our city, we know your agenda’ (Tesija, 2024). More recently, in December 2024, Croatian Member of the European Parliament Stephen Bartulica was elected president of the Political Network for Values (Hernández, 2024). He has played an important role in one of Croatia’s earliest anti-gender successes—the 2013 referendum that constitutionally defined marriage as a union between a man and a woman.

This book can be read in different ways. It will be indispensable for the researchers who focus on concrete country cases, especially those that until now did not receive enough attention. The differences that exist between the countries that used to be one country can be productively applied in comparative projects—those that focus on religions, regions, levels of ‘Europeanization’, or the role of ethno-nationalism in anti-gender mobilizations. We propose a reading which positions the post-Yugoslav space as a miniature showroom of how anti-gender politics germinates and branches out. In other words, the collected volume shows how the implementations of discursive and policy strategies lead to complementary results in purportedly emphatically different contexts, although at a different pace.

This is also one of the reasons why we insisted on the term anti-gender mobilizations in the title of this book. We intentionally refrained from using the term ‘anti-gender movements’ despite the fact that a significant portion of contemporary scholarly discussions on the phenomenon of ‘gender ideology’ refer specifically to a particular form of movement (or countermovement [Corredor, 2019]). The use of this term might imply that one is dealing with a social movement. However, today’s anti-gender politics is administered by a wide variety of actors and is not reducible to a more or less spontaneous or organized coming together of people with shared values and societal visions. The term ‘campaign’ (Kuhar & Paternotte, 2017), previously chosen to illustrate that the anti-gender project is not a bottom-up mobilization by civil society actors alone, also has its limitations, reflective of the rapid transformations in the field of anti-gender politics. Campaigns may imply that the anti-gender project manifests as one-off organized protests focusing primarily on specific actions, making insufficient room for the states’ enforcement of a new political order—something we have in the meantime witnessed in Brazil, Poland, Hungary, Argentina, Russia, and elsewhere.

If the post-Yugoslav space is understood as a miniature that provides an insight into how anti-gender politics evolves and spreads, we discern many and different types of actions that fall under the anti-gender rubric. Thus, there are state actors that tactically use ‘gender ideology’ to aggravate the status of gender equality. There are groups turned into parties, warping the political centre further to the right. There are ‘real’ concerned citizens, amassed by a throng of ‘virtual warriors’ and ‘faux’ concerned citizens, invented by conservative intellectuals, influencers, and media pundits. There are church officials who work as the background support, and those who are vocal but try to appear as human rights activists, and yet those who lead the ‘people’ in mass rallies in all respects resembling nationalist meetings of yore. There are those who express concern for our children and our women, and those who proudly display rampant patriachalisms. In some cases, anti-gender discourses blend with the good old ethno-nationalist antifeminism and homophobia, in others they appear as whitewashed appeals to common sense and freedom of speech. In some countries, such as Croatia, we indeed see a formation of a solid countermovement, in others, such as North Macedonia, we see an accelerated synergy of actions, while in Serbia there is a complete societal capture (Cvetičanin et al., 2023) in which anti-gender campaigns play a significant role on demand. Despite many differences arising from the national contexts—related to religious activism, political culture, recent economic and political developments, or the position with regard to the EU—in all the seven states we observe certain kinds of mobilizations revolving around gender.

Reflecting on the moment in which we find ourselves—in which we witness both top-down and bottom-up anti-gender actions, in the East and the West and in the Global South, where anti-gender palaver penetrates not only the far-right but also the centre and left political discourses, when it moves both the ‘people’ and the ‘elites’, leaving the fringes of the political life—we propose the term ‘mobilization’ as a proper descriptor of the state of anti-gender politics today. Although vague, the term may more accurately encompass the diverse range of campaigns, the wide array of anti-gender actors involved, the complicity between the state and actors, and the transformation of these actors into political players aiming to compete for and become part of the state apparatus. Ultimately, the term ‘mobilization’ is broad enough to incorporate minor or proto-actions, one-off or full-fledged campaigns, social or political movements, as well as government initiatives, all of which lead to a restructuring of the political life that we can observe today.

The cases discussed in this book cannot be unified into a single movement or even a series of parallel movements. Therefore, it is essential to distinguish between varying degrees and forms of mobilization, which in some cases remain in a nascent stage or, as some authors in the book emphasize, in the form of proto-anti-gender mobilization. In these cases, conservative initiatives are still largely rooted in nationalist and religious discourses, where gender is neither necessary nor a priority, as the ‘old’ ethnopolitical frameworks still function as effective mobilizing tools. Nonetheless, it is evident that in others—most notably Croatia and Slovenia—there exists a discernible anti-gender mobilization that amalgamates various conservative, religious, and far-right actors. We propose three main lines through which anti-gender mobilizations in seven successor states of Yugoslavia can be distinguished.

The first line is religious. The fact that the anti-gender idea originated in the context of the Roman Catholic Church may explain why anti-gender frames first gained traction in Croatia, where national identity is closely intertwined with Catholic identity, and in Slovenia, the second predominantly Catholic country in the region. This aspect must also be understood in the context of the new evangelization and the strategic action plans of the Slovenian and Croatian Roman Catholic Churches for the re-evangelization of secularized areas, in which lay Catholics play a significant role. The countries with the Orthodox majority were slower in response. For example, the Serbian Orthodox Church issued no official statement which would comprise anti-gender elements until 2018. Although blatantly crude in its opposition to any form of emancipation, the Orthodox Church remained focused on larger national issues and began to couple them with the social ones—now gathered under the umbrella of ‘gender ideology’—only when these could be proclaimed to be a top national priority. For now, this is the case in Serbia and North Macedonia, while Montenegro has more pressing concerns. In addition, organizing on ground was mainly reserved for the ‘progressives’, as the active engagement of the ‘concerned’ believers is generally rare in Orthodox tradition. This also explains why anti-gender vocabulary entered the political arena primarily through the societally marginal channels, created by the ‘concerned’ intellectuals who, despite invoking ‘Orthodox values’ were never openly endorsed by the Church until their collaboration became politically opportune. Finally, in the countries with the Muslim majority, Bosnia and Herzegovina and Kosovo, anti-gender mobilizations are by far the slowest to emerge.

The second line, which geographically overlaps with the religious one, concerns membership of the European Union. In the member states, the anti-gender discourse is closely intertwined with Euroscepticism, a phenomenon not unique to them. With the increasing shift of the European Union to the right and even to the radical right, Euroscepticism is deepening, although manifesting in different ways. In the context of post-Yugoslav member states, Euroscepticism is associated with resistance to ‘identity politics’ and ‘political correctness’, and with the spread of fear-based politics that warn of the threat to family and traditional values posed by progressive European equality policies. This also serves as an entry point for nationalist actors who join anti-gender mobilizations because they see ‘gender ideology’ as an attack on national authenticity. Anti-gender Euroscepticism, predominantly observed in Croatia and Slovenia, therefore stems from criticism of the current state of affairs in the EU, coupled with a desire to reform the Union rather than reject it outright. On the other hand, in the states-candidates for the EU membership, the politics is increasingly shaped in terms of disenchantment, fatigue, or outright opposition to ‘European values’. The long-standing societal disjunction between traditionalists/ethno-nationalists and pro-European liberals, established in the 1990s and solidified in the 2000s, is giving way to a tacit or a vociferous rejection of the EU, either because it infringes on national sovereignty, or because it prioritizes stability, legitimizing the authoritarian predatory regimes in power. Rather than opposing European identity politics, they want to be let alone to foster their own, so profoundly different, identity. In this, most of the EU candidates, except for Kosovo, lean on Russian guidance.

The third line that divides the post-Yugoslav space into two groups—although we should speak of a continuum rather than a binary division—is the issue of the ethno-nationalist framework and its entanglement with anti-gender discourses. In geographical terms, this line of division differs from the previous two, and refers more to the pace of the penetration of anti-gender vernacular. On the one hand, there is an almost complete overlap of the two frameworks: yesterday’s crude ethno-nationalists are today’s warriors against gender equality, having readjusted their narrative to fit into a global frame. In their discursive framings, the EU member states, Croatia and Slovenia, resemble Poland and Italy more than their post-Yugoslav neighbours in construing their main societal divide. Serbia and North Macedonia, the non-members, blend the older forms of ethno-nationalism, anti-EU and anti-gender elements, producing a novel form of hyper-nationalist grievance politics. On the other hand, in Bosnia and Herzegovina, Kosovo, and to some extent Montenegro, we see how the unimpeded dominance of the ethno-nationalist framework prevents the flourishing of the anti-gender framework. The war produced institutional ethnic shape of Bosnia and Herzegovina, Kosovo’s contested statehood, and the perseverance of the national divide in Montenegro seem to keep the old ethno-nationalisms in place as the strongest force for which anti-gender embellishments are not necessary—yet.

The fact that the seven countries once shared the same legislation does not seem to play a significant role in contemporary anti-gender movements. What plays a more substantial role, however, is what the countries did with this legislation after the dissolution of Yugoslavia. For instance, several countries have retained the constitutional right to abortion, which stands in the way of active and effective anti-gender mobilization against it. The Croatian case, neatly documented in this volume, shows the direct lineage between early anti-abortion and today’s anti-gender mobilizations. Thus, although abortion has the power to stir conservative reactions, the real breakthroughs in public attention are mainly achieved in the legislative areas that were not regulated by Yugoslav legislation: same-sex partnerships, antidiscrimination, sex/gender education, non-sexist language, gender-based violence, and the like.

Studies on the anti-gender movement often cite the mass French protests organized by the ‘Manif pour Tous’ network in 2012 and 2013 as a pivotal moment when the discourse on ‘gender ideology’ entered the broader public sphere. Similarly, the high-profile Croatian referendum in 2013 on the constitutional definition of marriage can be considered a significant breakthrough in bringing this discourse to public attention. However, the roots of anti-gender mobilizations in the post-Yugoslav space are somewhat older, dating back to the latter half of the first decade of the new millennium.

The term ‘gender ideology’ first appeared in the debate on sex education in Croatia in 2006 (Hodžić & Štulhofer, 2017), coinciding with the formation of the initial groups of ‘concerned parents’ who would play a crucial role in the Croatian anti-gender movement in the subsequent years. In 2006, however, the term ‘gender ideology’ was not yet widely known or used as a central rhetorical figure for the nascent movement. In Slovenia, the first anti-gender groups emerged in the autumn of 2009, when the Slovenian government introduced a draft reform of the Family Code, which included a proposal for marriage equality. The origins of anti-gender mobilizations in Croatia and Slovenia can be clearly linked to the religious context of these two predominantly Catholic countries as the idea of the existence of some kind of ‘gender agenda’ originated within the Roman Catholic Church (Kuhar, 2015).

The Orthodox Church’s engagement with these issues has a different trajectory. National issues take precedence over social ones, and the position of the Church in political matters, despite the proclaimed secularity of the state, is always significant. The synergy between the national churches and the states, together with the churches’ ecclesiastical populism (Kolov, 2024), modifies the behaviour of the church officials. This is clearly shown in the case of Serbia, where in the first decade of the new millennium the Serbian Orthodox Church pursued the ‘politics of silence’ on matters of ‘homosexualism’, becoming increasingly vocal in 2009, when the Antidiscrimination Law—the EU condition for visa liberalization—was debated in the Parliament. The argument was framed as a mixture of Serbian tradition and human rights, but the coarseness of the Church’s homophobia came to the fore already the next year, on the occasion of the first successful Pride March, termed as ‘parade of shame’, ‘contamination of the capital by Sodom’s pest’, ‘declaration of war’, even ‘genocide’ (Jovanović, 2022, 439). In a captured society that Serbia gradually became under the authoritarian rule of Aleksandar Vučić, synergic relation between the state and the church turned into a form of church-capture: silent during the moments when ‘tactical Europeanisation’ prevailed (openly if not enthusiastically supporting the lesbian PM, cf. Zaharijević & Antonijević, 2024; Jovanović, 2022; Slootmaeckers, 2023), true to itself when allowed to freely express its anti-emancipatory sentiments with the turn of the political tide in 2022, after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. Ever since, despite the flood of unresolved national political issues in which the Church’s interests normally lie, Serbian Orthodox Church has been leading the battle against gender ideology, focusing primarily on gender sensitive language. The echoes of this reverberate in the neighbouring Orthodox countries, albeit in different, politically fitting ways—primarily in Montenegro and the Serbian part of Bosnia and Herzegovina (Republika Srpska), but also in North Macedonia.

This also explains the Serbian curiosity—the fact that ‘gender ideology’ arrived in 2017 in a fully secular guise, spearheaded by conservative intelligentsia. In Montenegro, the term first appeared in 2019 in connection with the baptism of a transgender person, rapidly transforming into a tool against emancipatory politics in the hands of Serbian Orthodox priests. In North Macedonia, it surfaced in 2017 in the context of the Istanbul Convention, echoing Croatian battles around its ratification, but became more pronounced in 2020 with the educational reform targeting gender-sensitive and comprehensive sexuality education. In all three countries, very negative reactions to pride parades also played a significant role in introducing anti-gender discourse.

In Bosnia and Herzegovina, the main conduit for anti-gender ideology is the Catholic Church, although with a limited reach, as well as, of recent, the Serbian Orthodox Church in the entity of Republika Srpska. Similarly, in Kosovo, these two churches have almost no resonance, since the majority of the population identifies as Muslim. Both countries are, however, characterised by a strong opposition to furthering LGBTQ equality, which opens the doors widely to the adaptation of political homophobia into gender ideology discourse. In Bosnia and Herzegovina, Montenegro, and Kosovo, as the chapters in this book demonstrate, there are emerging signs of anti-gender rhetoric in political contexts, which is likely to evolve into full-fledged anti-gender mobilization in the coming years, similar to what we currently observe in Slovenia, Croatia, Serbia, and North Macedonia, where anti-gender mobilizations grew from isolated critiques and campaigns to structured, influential mobilizations, reflecting broader socio-political dynamics and the persistent influence of conservative and religious ideologies.

Marriage equality, which has often served as a catalyst for anti-gender campaigns in Europe, did not play a prominent role in the post-Yugoslav space, except for Slovenia and, in part, Croatia. Instead, the focus has predominantly been on education—whether it be sex education, gender-sensitive education, or education about gender-based violence. The reason for this is twofold: first, the issue of marriage equality (as opposed to civil partnerships) has not yet reached the top of the political agenda in most of these countries. Nonetheless, certain cases, such as Serbia and Kosovo, testify that civil partnerships can be as inflammatory, igniting or flaring up anti-gender discourses. Second, the primary anchor for anti-gender mobilization became the image of the ‘innocent child’, closely linked to educational issues and its place in the school system. This framework facilitated mobilization in Croatia as early as 2006 under the pretext of protecting children, a tactic also employed in Slovenia, albeit through the lens of same-sex adoptions. Notably, the Slovenian movement even incorporated children into the name of their campaign: ‘Za otroke gre!’ (‘Children Are at Stake!’). In contrast, although education features prominently in the eastern parts of the post-Yugoslav space, the trope of the innocent child merged easily with the politically more conspicuous figure of the family and nation under threat. The focus on education is significant, as it plays a crucial role in social (re)production alongside other institutions like family and church. According to Bourdieu and Passeron (1977), education is uniquely effective in securing social reproduction because it presents itself as an objective and impartial space, while actually transmitting the cultural capital of dominant classes and reinforcing existing social hierarchies. This role of education is particularly evident in debates around sex education and gender-sensitive education, which highlight tensions within this triad of social (re)production, as education may diverge from the values upheld by the family and church, leading to conflicts over societal norms.

Other significant factors facilitating anti-gender mobilizations in some of the former Yugoslav states are connected to broader geopolitical changes, primarily Russia’s strategic repositioning as an ideological counterpoint to the European Union. While the EU is perceived as propagating feminist and LGBTQ ideas—sometimes derogatorily referred to as ‘Gayropa’—and setting respect for LGBTQ rights as a condition for EU membership, Russia presents itself as the antithesis to these values, exemplified by its infamous anti-gay legislation, later also adopted by Bulgaria and Hungary, a beacon of illiberal democracy and the neighbourly exemplar to emulate.

While anti-gender mobilizations in Slovenia and Croatia, both EU members, do not align with the growing anti-EU stance, this sentiment is significantly more pronounced in Serbia, North Macedonia, and, to some extent, Bosnia and Herzegovina, especially in its Serbian entity. Anti-gender actors in Slovenia and Croatia may criticize Brussels and accuse the EU centres of power of propagating ‘gender ideology’, but these critiques are aimed at reforming the EU to return to its ‘Christian roots’, rather than dismantling it or proposing leaving the EU.⁵ Anti-gender actors highlight the unfulfilled promises of economic and social convergence with the developed West, and the fact that, as noted by Zacharenko (2019), ‘what was imported instead, often with a patronizing attitude, were lessons on “correct” attitudes and values’. Such actions are part of a general sovereignist course within the EU.

The situation differs in the EU candidate countries, where prolonged accession processes left people distrustful about the prospects of joining the EU. These sentiments have deepened during economic crises and have been co-opted by populist and anti-gender actors that now portray Europe as the source of all societal problems, positioning Russia as a relevant alternative. Pro-Russian sentiments are particularly strong in Serbia, but they have an important role in Montenegro, Republika Srpska, and North Macedonia. It is important to emphasize that the EU, with its endless promises, actually inadvertently enables the ‘productive’ collaboration between the anti-EU stance and neo-conservative shifts. Alongside other forms of colonization, we can also speak of the ‘bureaucratic colonization’ which fuels anti-gender movements. Candidate countries are perceived as colonies of European mandates, particularly those from Brussels. This ambivalent attitude towards the EU includes a strong emphasis on protecting national authenticity and sovereignty against Western ideas and concepts.

Engagement with ‘gender’ ideas is portrayed as an internal enemy betraying national interests and capitulating to the West. This approach mirrors the anti-gender narratives observed in Poland, Hungary, Bulgaria, Romania and elsewhere where illiberal transformations have leveraged similar rhetoric. Anti-gender actors present themselves as defenders of the broader community, resisting ‘gender ideologists’, who allegedly bow to the foreign interests (such as conspiracies led by George Soros) and foreign institutions (the EU, Western embassies etc.). This framing not only delegitimizes progressive political figures and voices but also vilifies marginalized social groups, reinforcing nationalist and xenophobic sentiments.

The anti-gender mobilizations in the post-Yugoslav space exhibit significant continuities with the nationalist and religious-conservative ideologies of the 1990s. In other words, the ethno-nationalist context of the anti-gender movements in the former Yugoslav space places anti-gender strategies within the old framework of nationalist struggles, interpreting the nation through a ‘blood and kinship’ perspective (Mihelj, 2004). This perspective is fundamentally based on an understanding of the traditional family as the cornerstone of the nation, with reproduction as its primary function.

In this part of the world, ‘trad wives’ were rediscovered a long time ago, if—for the reasons of the general precarity of the post-socialist populations hit hard by wars—almost exclusively at a symbolical level. Post-Yugoslav ‘trad wives’ were supposed to reject the devious socialist behaviour that turned them into workers and breadwinners, to return home and be catered for, give birth to as many (Serbian, Slovenian, Croatian, etc.) children, since the nation was in dire need of repopulating, having shrunk from its previous Yugoslav size to always too small a numbers of Serbs, Slovenes, Croats, etc. However, compared to today’s ‘trad wives’, there was nothing alluring about their situation: in the process of inventing our own true traditions, traditional wives were supposed to embody the epic poetry characters whose life was one of endurance, suffering, and self-sacrifice—for the nation. Although it is hardly imaginable that women believed it was their sacred duty to bear sons to die in the national battles, this was the symbolic frame of the new womanhood in the militarized 1990s—everywhere except for Slovenia. Those who openly rebelled against it or desired families with a different form were seen as the enemies of the nation-building. Feminists and queers, especially when they overtly opposed the war, were an obstacle in the project of ‘Making our country great again’.

Although the transnational language of ‘gender ideology’ differs—not only in terms of vocabulary (gender⁶ was never a concept used in the older ethno-nationalist framings), but even more so in terms of its polished outlook in comparison with the rough wartime patriarchalisms—the old frame proved porous and capable of stretching. Therefore, we can draw a direct line between the internal enemies from the period of the making of our country great again and today—when our country is under threat, yet again. Internally, the threat comes from the supporters of ‘gender ideology’, who are accused of undermining the nation from within, deteriorating its demographic composition and conflicting with the nation’s cisgender, heteronormative authenticity. The internal supporters’ cohort is quite diverse and comprises of ‘all those who supposedly back [the non-conforming familial practices], be those feminists, LGBTIQ+ groups, “vicious individuals” who fund or allegedly promote their visibility, the states that play according to “dictates from above”, the elites that lobby against majoritarian ways of life, the immigrants that threaten to replace “us”, or the corporations that finance depravity—[all of whom] loom as a far greater danger to society than the lack of systemic support for the betterment of lives and preservation of those equalities already achieved’ (Zaharijević et al., 2024, 582). This long list of evildoers shows as well that the old external enemy evolved beyond the ‘neighbouring nations’ of the 1990s to a transnational level, functioning as an ‘empty signifier’ akin to ‘gender ideology’. The external enemy is sometimes represented by Brussels and the European Union, Western LGBTQ and feminist movements, Soros, or Western values more broadly. Nonetheless, the pattern of articulating gender issues as instruments of oppression, most often Western, fits in the ethno-nationalist (war) frame.

The chapter on Croatia is particularly useful in highlighting this continuity, demonstrating that the anti-gender strategies related to abortion are indeed a consequence of unsuccessful anti-abortion mobilizations in the 1990s. Deeply rooted in the legacy of religious-conservative activism, but donned in new, more civilian clothes, Croatian mobilizations are characterized by the proactive and anticipatory strategies that leveraged democratizing and Europeanizing shifts to reformulate their agendas. Instead of being merely reactive, they adopted an assertive stance on abortion, seeking suitable political opportunities to address this ‘old issue’ with ‘new strategies’—more secular, human rights oriented and employing social welfare responsibility frames. The link between ‘old’ and ‘new’—old-style homophobic statements of ethnonationalist politicians and religious leaders and the laundered statement on the threat to the human rights of the majority—is emphasized in the Bosnian case too, which in terms of pace stays far behind the Croatian one.

In Serbia, the discourse against ‘gender ideology’ relies heavily on the old tropes of domestic traitors and foreign mercenaries. The one figure that connects the traitors and mercenaries today and in the 1990s is Soros, this almost ubiquitous perpetrator against national sovereignties around the world. Anti-gender actors also remained tied to one of the most powerful social tropes—that of the victim—used lavishly in all corners of the post-Yugoslav space. All post-Yugoslav states fought to establish their national majorities using various strategies—from constitutional redefinitions, erasures of legal status, creation of artificial ethnic divisions, to ethnic cleansing, war related displacements, and war crimes (Shaw & Štiks, 2013). This led not only to the material and symbolic destruction of far too many lives, but also produced an enduring victimhood narrative that was carefully groomed for the maintenance of ethnopolitics. The narrative of us against them, others (especially minorities) having more rights than they deserve or are due, of us being the greatest victims whose redemption always remains postponed, is part and parcel of the majoritarian discourse in the post-Yugoslav space. We find it in Sarajevo, where queer people are supposedly safer than a woman in a hijab: nobody cares for her safety, whereas the entire city shuts down for the Pride march. We see it in Ljubljana, where concerned citizens co-opt the language of feminist and queer movements, portraying themselves as a minority in their own country. We find it in Belgrade, where anti-gender intellectuals claim that theirs is a minority scientific viewpoint, because ‘gender ideology’ dominates Serbian academia, which turns them into isolated heroes who dare speak truth to power. We encounter it in Zagreb, where the Croatian Catholic Church depicts itself as a silenced actor. We see it in Skopje, where our children with disabilities, our homeless, and our hospital patients are discriminated against by the state that hazards them to discuss the discrimination of LGBTQ people—presumably not ours, presumably never homeless, never with disabilities, or in need of hospital care. As patently preposterous as these claims are, they all tie in well with the already neatly developed post-Yugoslav victimhood narratives.

In some contexts, however, ethno-nationalist tensions—including those between religious denominations—remain pivotal mobilizing elements in maintaining the old grievances. There, ‘gender ideology’ is not yet necessary since old strategies remain effective and operational. Despite detectable differences, it is evident that the anti-gender mobilizations in the post-Yugoslav space thrive on an interplay of heteronormativity, patriarchy, and ethnic divisions—restored and intensified during and after the wars of the 1990s. This continuity, however, does not preclude changes. Unlike the 1990s, when gender and sexuality were not primary ideological battlegrounds, modern anti-gender mobilizations have reframed homophobic sentiments to target ‘gender ideology’, thereby attracting new supporters across a wider demographic. Strategic shifts in rhetoric are designed also to direct the politics of fear (Wodak, 2015) towards even more fundamental dimensions of identity, such as gender. Consequently, heteronationalist narratives from the 1990s have been and, we fear, will be repackaged further to suit contemporary contexts. Notwithstanding cultural, economic, and political changes, homophobia and patriarchal regimes have remained robust structures, enabling anti-gender mobilization to persist as a continuation of old struggles in new garbs.

Our research corroborates the findings of the majority of studies on anti-gender movements and its actors. The post-Yugoslav anti-gender network comprises various actors from civil society (‘concerned parents’, ‘concerned citizens’, ‘silenced citizens’), right-wing intellectuals, religious communities, and political parties. In both Slovenia and Croatia, the initiators of the movement were newly formed groups of concerned parents operating under the aegis of the Roman Catholic Church. However, this relationship, particularly in Slovenia, is mostly kept in the background in a supporting role—partly due to secularization processes and the Church’s diminishing influence in the public sphere. This is, however, not the case with all religious institutions. In an ultimately successful assault on the Gender Equality Law, overturned in the summer of 2024, the Patriarch of the Serbian Orthodox Church had the most prominent role, consistently stating that the Law imposes an artificial way of life that goes against the grain of Serbian identity. The monster created of the Law is, for example, captured in the Patriarch’s claim that ‘people who live here do not accept that mothers and fathers become parents number 1 and 2, perhaps even 3 and 4. We do not want our children not to know who their mother is, who a father is, and by that not knowing who they themselves are’ (Danas, 2024)—where there were absolutely no traces of such a possibility in the Gender Equality Law passed in 2021. After a long period of silence, and more than a year after the Law’s passing, the Church took over the shepherding role from conservative intellectuals, wholeheartedly supporting the litanies of grave and solemn masses, organized as a response to the EuroPride March in the autumn of 2022 (the ‘concerned citizens’ of Serbia walked behind the banner ‘Take your hands off our children’, overseen by saints, chetnik Draža Mihailović, and Vladimir Putin on posters). These magical mass purifications with incense and chanting were also seen in North Macedonia, where the Macedonian Orthodox Church mixes common sense argumentation with mystical portrayal of the demonic forces that bring about death and slavery to the Macedonian people.

The groups of concerned citizens have been joined by others, primarily nationalist groups and far-right parties, but also, as in the case of North Macedonia, humanitarian organizations. War veterans’ groups (e.g. in Croatia) also play a specific role, advocating for the nativist, traditionalist visions of the ‘country they fought for’ and incorporating anti-gender rhetoric.

It is significant to note that some anti-gender groups have later transformed into political parties (Hrast in Croatia, or Glas za otroke in družine in Slovenia), or that existing parties have adopted anti-gender ideology as part of their official political agenda (Prava Crna Gora in Montenegro). Strategic alliance between church institutions, right-wing political parties, and media outlets have solidified the presence of anti-gender discourse in both public and parliamentary arenas.

There are also clear instances of opportunistic synergies (Graff & Korolczuk, 2022), where certain actors collaborate to promote anti-gender ideology to achieve specific political goals, even if they do not necessarily share the same understanding of key social issues. In Slovenia, there has been cooperation between anti-gender and anti-abortion actors, in Croatia between right-wing political parties and anti-gender actors, and in North Macedonia between right-wing parties, pro-Russian nationalists, and anti-gender actors. In Serbia, with an openly lesbian Prime minister, who served three terms—the longest service in the history of Serbian statehood –, the catch-all regime governs the scene in which various actors perform anti-gender politics on demand, when that is politically opportune. However, despite the differences, there is a common thread—the strategic use of alliances between political, religious, and civil society actors to propagate anti-gender ideologies. The actors adapt their strategies to local contexts, employing a mixture of secular and religious rhetoric to mobilize support and frame their resistance as a defence of national and traditional values against perceived foreign threats, both internal and external.

The discursive strategies employed by anti-gender actors across the post-Yugoslav space reveal a sophisticated and context-specific adaptation of rhetoric aimed at broadening their appeal and influence. In the early stages of anti-gender mobilizations, ‘gender ideology’ lacked the mobilizing power necessary to galvanize widespread public support. Consequently, anti-gender actors framed their discourse around the threats posed by ‘LGBTQ lobbies’, or ‘academic elites’, or ‘political elites’, or left-wing and pro-European political actors, or new forms of ‘totalitarianism’, presenting them as antagonists undermining traditional societal structures. Anti-gender actors strategically reference LGBTQ issues to propagate the interpretation that difficult social conditions of the ‘common people’, including poverty, inequality, and the erosion of the welfare state, are not being addressed in politics, which is now excessively focused on LGBTQ rights and issues.

Furthermore, anti-gender actors suggest that if only the heteropatriarchal system were maintained, societal conditions would improve. This notion underscores the central message of anti-gender mobilizations: the solution to all contemporary social, economic, cultural, and political complexities lies in reverting to simpler times when there was no gender, when sexuality was equal to heterosexuality, when children were nonsexual, and women spent their lives bearing children to one man who did what he had to do to put food on the table. Since such a world never really existed, its restoration is not only impossible but the discourse surrounding it serves primarily to produce and spread moral panic, further deepening the social divisions it claims to address and resolve. By presenting a return to imagined past patriarchal structures as a panacea for any and all actual issues, anti-gender discourses rely on gross simplifications: it is hardly imaginable that the world would become more stable and authentic if only progressive gender and sexual rights were rejected.

Religion has a key role in the restoration narratives. In the post-Yugoslav space, as in other post-socialist countries, the return of religion was overwhelmingly important not only in combating the deviant socialist modernity, but also in defining the new-old national identities. The anti-gender use of religion is, however, not to be equated with the old ethno-nationalist moralizing or anathemizing. Its message is broader and attempts to appeal to large swaths of populations, believers and non-believers alike. In Slovenia and Croatia, with Slovenia also being increasingly secularized, anti-gender actors tend to avoid strict ‘biblical’ and moralizing discourses, although moral arguments do appear, particularly concerning the rhetorical figure of the innocent child. The appeals to our moral responsibility to protect our children belong to this discourse. The language used does not reference religious doctrines but is predominantly secular. It partly addresses affective concerns (concerned or worried parents) and partly employs (pseudo-)scientific arguments, anchoring them in the democratic principles (violating human rights of the child and trampling the rights of parents and democratic procedures). In a bizarre twist of discursive events, it also relies on appropriation of the typically feminist and LGBTQ terminology, invoking tolerance, discrimination, human rights, freedom, etc. These human rights-related concepts are used to achieve undemocratic and anti-human rights goals, interpreting ‘freedom’ as an unassailable right to exclude and be aggressive towards those who deviate from the dominant religious dogmas and ethno-nationalist demographic ideals of the good/proper citizen.

In the countries where the more explicitly religious discourse is part of anti-gender mobilizations, it also does not dominate the entire anti-gender discourse. Even in these contexts (such as Serbia or North Macedonia), pseudo-scientific and legal discourses, as well as appeals to human rights, appear alongside religious rhetoric. The discursive strategies diagnosed in the chapter on Slovenia—reliance on conspiracy theories, scandalization, manipulation of temporal perspectives, and the deployment of affects—can be discerned in the entire post-Yugoslav region, regardless of the level of the secularization of the religious discourse in the background.

The issue of pseudo-science deserves particular attention, as it plays a crucial role in the context of anti-gender mobilizations and appears in all countries regardless of their cultural and political differences. Pseudo-science manifests in anti-gender discourses as misleading, distorted, or entirely incorrect interpretations of existing psychological, sociological, and other studies. It is almost entirely reducible to the simple labelling of professional findings that do not align with the ideological beliefs of anti-gender actors as ideological and as forms of indoctrination. Such assessments also come from scientists who exploit their academic titles to legitimize quasi-scientific anti-gender positions. In some countries, such scientific figures are renegades within their disciplines, while in others—despite their claims to the opposite—they represent the mainstream academia, with a voice in various media outlets. In some cases, religious leaders pose as public intellectuals, which allows them to productively use pseudo-scientific perspectives, blended with religious arguments—or not.

Across the post-Yugoslav space—and globally within anti-gender movements—the legal discursive strategy is also prevalent. It is most salient in the context of the invocation of parents’ rights to raise their children as they see fit. Historically, outside the context of anti-gender movements, there have been conflicts between two rights: the right to education and the right of parents to educate their children according to their religious and philosophical beliefs. The European Court of Human Rights has adjudicated on this matter multiple times, consistently prioritizing the right to education, provided that the school curriculum is presented in a critical, pluralistic manner without indoctrination (Kuhar & Zobec, 2017). Despite this precedent, the argument of parental rights is intensely employed in anti-gender rhetoric. The focus is not primarily on a moralistic or affective frame—although these elements are collaterally targeted –but rather on a legalistic frame that cites international documents and national legislation to support this right. The argument posits that children must be shielded from information and knowledge about gender and sexuality, as such exposure allegedly threatens them, ‘sexualizes their minds’, and coerces them into changing their gender. This frame embodies a form of anti-intellectualism and anti-expertise, suggesting that parents should freely intervene in official school curricula and dictate educational content, bypassing the professional judgment of educational staff and the professional autonomy of teachers. In the countries that only recently began to allow for private elementary schooling, and without a tradition of homeschooling, this discourse clearly represents what an import from different educational contexts looks like. The lack of a coherent alternative to the proclaimed bias in the curriculum also reflects this. The solution to an ‘imposed’ education is its (often pre-emptive) banning, maintaining the status quo, justified by the traditional values that the existing educational system purportedly reflects.

Finally, there is a very recent discursive shift evidenced across the entire post-Yugoslav space. At its centre is the transgender individual. This new emphasis, primarily visual in nature, leverages imagery predominantly from the Western media, often conflating transgender identities with drag queen personas, creating confusion and misinformation. This strategy aims to elicit negative emotions, such as aversion and fear. In the context of anti-gender rhetoric, ‘trans’ has become a visual representation of the perceived transformation of Western society due to the acceptance of ‘gender ideology’. These dystopian images depict a world where traditional notions of masculinity and femininity are abolished with the purpose of generating moral panic. In the contexts where anti-gender rhetoric has been longstanding, these images serve as the purported empirical evidence supporting the claims of earlier anti-gender actors. Additionally, anti-trans frames are particularly effective in relation to the figure of the innocent child, further amplifying the intended impact. In the contexts where anti-gender mobilizations came later, ‘trans scare’ almost replaced all other issues, appearing as a felicitous argument to stall all other progressive policies.

When we initiated this project, we began with two hypotheses. The first one was that there is a ‘secret bond’ between feminist and LGBTQ organizations in the post-Yugoslav space. This bond, we further hypothesized, must be strengthened by the growth of the new type of populist politics, which due to its particularly anti-gender twist affects these actors directly. Anti-gender mobilizations in the region have been contributing to the revitalization of feminist and LGBTQ movements in these countries, solidifying the ‘secret bond’ and fostering alliance in the face of a common threat: anti-gender mobilizations. This book serves as compelling evidence of this phenomenon, as do numerous events, conferences, and workshops on this topic held across the former Yugoslav region. A notable example is the first Gender Summit in North Macedonia in the autumn of 2023, which was dedicated to the discussions on anti-gender mobilizations and on enhancing connections between feminist and LGBTQ groups.

Our second initial thesis proposed that there is a ‘hidden connection’ among anti-gender actors across the post-Yugoslav space, facilitated by gender as ‘symbolic glue’ (Kováts & Põim, 2015; Petö, 2015). This concept, one of the first and most frequently cited in anti-gender studies, explains how gender and the notion of ‘gender ideology’ unite diverse groups of actors, even when they do not fully agree on all issues or share identical ideological positions. Our comparative analysis reveals that gender functions as a particularly strong symbolic glue when anti-gender actors within individual states in the post-Yugoslav space collaborate and exchange ideas and strategies with their transnational counterparts. However, gender becomes much less sticky and powerful when it comes to cross-border collaborations among anti-gender actors within the post-Yugoslav region itself. Unlike feminist and LGBTQ movements, which have historically transcended religious and nationalist boundaries within what used to be Yugoslavia, anti-gender actors have yet to achieve similar cross-boundary collaboration as they remain predominantly confined within their religious and national frameworks. This, after all, cannot come as a surprise given the decades-old work on fortifying ethno-nationalist divisions and building different—apparently incompatible—traditions on which ‘our’ traditional values are based.

The aftermath of the wars in the 1990s, which entrenched these boundaries, continues to pose a significant barrier for anti-gender actors. This is not to say that partial collaborations are non-existent. Slovenian and Croatian anti-gender actors do cooperate, primarily united by shared religious affiliations. However, the nationalist factions within these movements are likely less supportive of solidifying bonds, given that Slovenian nationalism often emphasizes cultural superiority, progressiveness, and a more European identity compared to the rest of the ‘Balkan people’, including Croats. The Orthodox axis displays similar readiness for exchange. The colonizing role of the Serbian Orthodox Church is also significant—at least in relation to Montenegro, where it serves as the main channel for transporting anti-gender campaigns from Serbia, and Republika Srpska, with significant echoes in North Macedonia. The post-Yugoslav context thus illustrates that while gender remains central to contemporary political and cultural struggles, ethno-national divisions and religion often pose a stronger barrier to collaboration, even among those who rely on gender as a tool to advance their populist agendas. These findings underscore the limitations of symbolic glue in contexts where nationalistic and religious divisions remain deeply entrenched. In the post-Yugoslav space these boundaries stand in the way of a solid and productive ‘hidden connection’ among anti-gender actors, preventing synergistic effects of anti-gender mobilizations in the countries that once constituted a political entity called Yugoslavia. Instead, in order to preserve their restored traditions, the local anti-gender defenders of home and hearth prefer to translate from primary sources: the Vatican and EU countries in the West, and Russia and Hungary in the East.

These translations are new, but the underlying frames to which they stick are not. Despite variations in intensity and focus, anti-gender mobilizations across the post-Yugoslav space consistently reflect the enduring influence of 1990s nationalism, with its restorative re-traditionalization of gender and sexuality to uphold ethno-nationalist and patriarchal structures. Post-Yugoslav anti-gender restorations are, in that sense, to a large extent a novel way of the preservation of traditions reinvented and fortified some decades ago. Whereas, at that time, the traditions had to be defined through the negations of neighbouring ones and the erasures of the common past, their vernacular being too local, too ‘Balkan’—today they go global. Not only do they look like, as Mitja Velikonja (2022) claimed, the avant-garde of Europe and beyond, but they now borrow global matrices to preserve what was being restored in the aftermath of Yugoslavia’s dissolution in the early 1990s.