Politicizing Gender and Democracy in the Context of the Istanbul Convention

The Istanbul Convention on violence against women and domestic violence has become a central site of contention over gender equality. Resistance and protest to the Convention are particularly strong in Central and Eastern Europe where, in some countries, conservative actors successfully prevented the ratification, or in the case of Poland they propose withdrawal from ratification. The introduction presents the research puzzle of the book by placing these controversies in the context of the politics of violence against women and the adoption of international norms in CEE countries. It presents and justifies the selection of the four analyzed country cases, describes the qualitative methodology used in the book and shows how the book contributes to a variety of debates in the literature.

This chapter discusses the theory and research that pertains to our study and proposes a conceptual framework for the analysis. It engages with the literature on violence against women and its emergence and framing as a policy issue, as well as with the literature on feminist advocacy on violence against women and its role in policy processes engaging with it. It also discusses the connection of violence against women and this policy area to democracy. Matching this, the chapter refers to literature on anti-gender campaigns and its relation to de-democratization and policy backsliding, as well as emergent research on resilience to such backsliding. The book aims to enrich and interlink three sets of literature: on anti-gender mobilization, on feminist resilience and on violence against women policy change, in the context of Central and Eastern European new member states of the EU.

In this chapter, to understand the nature and dynamics of the attacks against the IC, we first reconstruct the process of contestation in each country separately. Countries are discussed in chronological order based on when contestation of the Convention intensified (Poland in 2012, Croatia in 2016, Hungary in March 2017, Bulgaria in September 2017). Next, we compare and contrast the constellations of oppositional actors, their strategies and the frames they use to challenge the Convention. While retaining our focus on distinctive national features, we discuss the transnational embeddedness of these oppositional campaigns. The final section teases out the emerging transnational aspects from the national cases.

This chapter examines how women’s movements and actor constellations involved in combatting violence against women in Bulgaria, Croatia, Hungary and Poland were impacted by the opposition to the Istanbul Convention. On the one hand, emerging anti-gender and anti-Istanbul Convention mobilization altered the relations between women’s movements and states and redefined the context in which women’s rights advocacy could be done. On the other hand, the openly hostile and highly gendered attacks impacted women’s movement capacities and strategies. They imposed threats on women’s rights activists, curtailing their capacity and space to act, but also resulted in new strategies and frames, and catalyzed new, often more powerful coalitions of resistance, depending on tradition, strength and capacity of preceding women’s rights organizing.

Debates on the Istanbul Convention also have consequences for the violence against women policy field. By analyzing newly adopted or amended violence against women policies and laws and their framing this chapter assesses how these changes mirror anti-Convention positions, how they reflect or neglect the spirit and letter of the Convention. Next to a formal policy analysis, we also analyze patterns of policy practice in the four countries including implementation, budgets and policy inclusion and the impact of the anti-gender discursive context on implementation practices. We find that while policy backsliding cannot be detected unequivocally through an analysis of formal policy changes it is much more manifest if looking at policy practices. Here, we find an increasing appropriation of the violence against women policy field including implementation, services and budgeting by actors without expertise in the field or who are outright hostile to policy objectives of the Istanbul Convention. This comes at the expense of marginalizing or excluding women’s rights organizations and their expertise that previously played central roles in combatting violence against women.

This concluding chapter discusses the implications of debates around the Istanbul Convention for the politics and policies on VAW, but also situates this in broader processes like the war on gender and its consequences for democracy and de-democratization. We contribute to the literature on anti-gender movements both by providing a systematic comparative analysis of anti-gender attacks and their consequences for gender policy in four countries, but also by disentangling the dynamics of these contestations in a gender-equality field, VAW, which is not a prime target of anti-gender contestations. We identify how attacks on gender, a core component of many current de-democratization processes, undermine gender-equal democracy. The contestations in the field of VAW and their policy consequences have become a fundamental component of democratic erosion with specific consequences for women.