For Family, God, and Country: A Comparative Study of the Emergence of Anti-gender Movements in Southeast Europe

My PhD project investigates the emergence of anti-gender politics in Southeast Europe. Specifically, I explain the development of the movement’s collective identity through its framing and ideology, its collective actions and practices, as well as the networks and relations of its main actors. How and why do anti-gender movements emerge and mobilize? What is the role of the radical right and of churches in anti-gender contention? How does the relationship between churches and radical-right movements vary across national contexts? I adopt an interpretivist approach and utilize the research agenda bridging the scholarship on social movements with that on the radical right. Developing an agentic and constructivist analytical framework, I pay special attention to the actors’ perceptions of political and discursive opportunity structures, as well as their strategic mobilization of resources, frames, and networks. To answer my research questions, I conduct a comparative case study analysing anti-gender mobilization in three similar cases: Croatia, Bulgaria, and Serbia. The differences in the occurrence of gender backlash in Southeast Europe are puzzling given the similarities in the predominance of religious nationalism, high trust in churches, and conservative positions on morality issues of local populations. I argue that differences in church-state-society relations together with a variation in contingent political and discursive opportunity structures influence actor’s strategies differently. While some opt for movement mobilization, others prefer lobbying the halls of power and participating in party politics. The goal of my comparison is thus to shed light on diverging trajectories of anti-gender politics. I triangulate protest event analysis, semi-structured interviews with anti-gender leaders, and qualitative content analysis to answer my research questions. I contribute to the existing literature on radical-right movements and movement parties, and particularly, I argue for the importance of analysing religious agency in contemporary illiberal politics. In addition, I add to the literature analyzing the backlash against gender equality and democracy by exploring previously neglected Southeast European (SEE) cases of anti-gender mobilization. Accounting for the developments in SEE helps us to overcome the bias in existing literature that takes CEE countries like Poland and Hungary as representative for Eastern Europe. Finally, I join the calls to go beyond externalist analyses of radical-right actors by using an emic approach to capture the internal complexity and self-understanding of the anti-gender movement via qualitative interviews. In fact, my findings point to the importance of intramovement relations and relations with mainstream conservative actors as more relevant for the emergence of collective mobilization than a movement-countermovement framework would allow.