Anti-gender Movement and the Istanbul Convention in Slovakia and Czech Republic

• In Event: Anti-Feminism

Abstract

With the creation of the Council of Europe’s Convention on Preventing and Combatting Violence against Women and Domestic Violence, more commonly referred to as the Istanbul Convention, in 2011, countries across Europe that have signed and ratified it have actively made efforts to enact policies that align with the convention’s pillars of prevention, protection, prosecution, and coordinated policy making. But with this rise in countries enacting these gender equality protections to end violence against women and domestic violence, there has been an emergent anti-gender movement that has parallelly risen. Because of such, some countries have merely just signed the convention and have yet to ratify it, thus not taking the same measures along the convention’s lines to instill protections to aid in combatting gender-based violence within their countries. From this, the puzzle that emerges asks how the anti-gender movement has affected the ratification of the Istanbul Convention in some states. To explore this, I use a comparative case study, using expert interviews and process tracing, to look at the cases of Slovakia and the Czech Republic. From these cases, I explore how the anti-gender movement has played out in both states and how it has in turn affected the states’ pursuit of ratification of the convention by looking at how critical actors, the women’s movement and the anti-gender movement, political parties, and the public have shaped and influenced the dialogue around the convention. Through this I look at the dialogue around the Istanbul Convention and the claims that have been made about what it does or intends to do, such as threaten the traditional conception of the family and traditional values, open up the way for same-sex marriages, LGBT rights, as well as forcing a definition of gender that is not culturally/socially accepted in either state, and how this shapes a state’s willingness to ratify it. Additionally, I touch on broader issues of how the anti-gender movement is linked to nationalism and rising right-wing populism in both countries.

Author

• Sydney Smith, Washington State University