The Puzzle of Localized Norm Transfer: How Do Interactions among Structural, Institutional and Agential Factors Shape Women’s Rights in Turkiye?

Gender equality norms are highly contested in domestic contexts, and their solid transfer becomes arduous. To mitigate this issue, this project accentuates the need for a localization process in which local actors reconstruct the norms to better fit prior local norms and enhance the appeal to the society’s prior beliefs and institutions (Acharya, 2004). With a primary objective of comprehending through which mechanisms and agential factors the communities can achieve localized transfer of international gender equality norms, this project scrutinizes the impact of cooperative activities between various actors, such as the international organizations (IOs) and the civil society on the localized transfer of women's human rights in domestic contexts, mainly related to two issue areas as violence against women and women's economic rights in the Republic of Turkiye. This project creates a theoretical model that explains the structural, institutional, and agential factors affecting the formation and the national implementation of the recommendations given through the United Nations (UN) human rights mechanisms and the localized transfer of international gender equality norms. Hence, it benefits from the Structure, Institution, Agency (SIA) Framework of analysis to examine the connection not only between various agents but also between agents and institutions and the impact of structural factors (Bakir, 2017). The theoretical novelty of the project lies in its examination of how structural and institutional multiple and interrelated causal factors and agential actions interact at domestic and systemic levels to shape policy outcomes; a perspective that has not been extensively studied in existing literature. Empirically, it explores women's human rights in an illiberal democracy and predominantly Muslim society, which helps to analyze how 'the one size fits all' approach might fail when the issue is the transfer of women's human rights in domestic contexts. Finally, this project provides policy implications for better functioning the United Nations human rights mechanisms, stronger cooperation between various actors actively working for these mechanisms at the international and country levels, and a solid localized transfer of international gender equality norms in multiple contexts.