This article aims to shed light on the forms and effects of anti-gender politics in a country that is widely regarded as being gender-equal. The empirical focus is on political debates and policy changes concerning gender equality and the rights of marginalized sexual and racial groups in Sweden between 2020 and 2024. The existing literature on the anti-gender trend focuses mostly on the discourses and strategies of ultraconservative actors. In contrast, we examine the perspective of gender-progressive institutional actors to gain a better understanding of how the political elite perceives ongoing change and the impact of this trend on liberal democracy. We conducted a thorough analysis of parliamentary debates and interviewed parliamentarians and employees of state institutions. Our findings demonstrate that anti-gender politics in the country is inextricably linked with the use of political violence and the further normalization of exclusion. Thus, we argue that struggles around gender in Sweden can be framed as a case of insidious de-democratization. This trend is defined as a set of relatively small-scale discourses and practices that further discrimination, silencing, and intimidation of already marginalized groups, and have gradual and cumulative effects of eroding the normative foundations of liberal democracy.

In recent years, there has been a wave of opposition to feminism, gender equality, and minority rights in various national and international contexts. While there is a growing number of works that examine anti-gender campaigns, less attention has been devoted to the potential consequences of the anti-gender mobilizations for the internal relations within socially progressive (feminist and LGBTQ+) organizations. The present article examines how the discursive boundary making within the progressive camp unfolds in the context of increased polarization around gender in two countries: Italy and Sweden. Instead of adopting a movement-countermovement view, we propose conceptualizing the discursive struggles around gender through the lens of a "field of contention." Such a perspective allows us to see that the field of contention around gender is currently undergoing an intense process of transformation: the discursive boundaries between the feminist movement and the anti-gender movement have become increasingly blurred, and there are instances of discursive overlap between these two broad communities, which at times lead to cooperation across the boundary, all the while strengthening divisions within progressive movements.

Hur organiseras lojalitet i en individualiserad tid? I en ny satsning från Score utforskas hur värdegemenskaper skapas och upprätthålls genom organisation som kan, men inte måste, ske inom ramen för formella organisationer. Särskilt fokus läggs vid diverse elitutbildningar och företag, och deras alumninätverk. I denna rapport presenteras en preliminär litteraturöversikt med syfte att ge en första bild av inom vilka sammanhang som denna organisering av lojalitet kan ske samt hur lojalitet i denna kontext kan förstås.

För att få grepp om studiens objekt inleds litteraturöversikten med en presentation och diskussion av hur lojalitet kan förstås teoretiskt. Därefter redogörs för hur lojalitet, värdeskapande och identitetsskapande inom olika typer av organisationer har förståtts och studerats tidigare. Utifrån satsningens fokus på medlemskap som en del av partiell organisation och därmed ett viktigt analytiskt redskap berör litteraturöversikten också huruvida tidigare forskning intresserat sig för och givit några svar på frågan om det går att organisera lojalitet efter ett avslutat medlemskap, genom så kallade alumninätverk.

The European Union has become an important arena for international politics. Various actors try to influence the European-level executive and legislative authorities. Lobbyists in Brussels are not the only type of actors promoting the interests of others. Today, national-level social movement actors too are present at the European level, pushing the interests of various citizen groups and social issues. To do so, however, they need to adapt to the European Union’s multilevel governance system by speaking with one voice. As this thesis demonstrates, at the national level this adaptation may entail a number of organizational challenges for movements.

Organizing the Voice of Women regards national-level social movements adapting to international structures. Taking the cases of the Swedish and the Polish women’s movements and their relation to the European Union as examples, the analysis follows two separate, yet similar, processes of forming and maintaining nationwide meta-organizations – that is, organizations of organizations – that can speak for the two respective movements. Through the cases of the two women’s movements’ adaptation to international structures, the study explores the challenges involved when a new layer of organization is added to a social movement.

The results show that organizing the voice of the Swedish and the Polish women’s movements has been particularly challenging when conditions such as a tradition of umbrella organizing and stable financial resources are absent at national level. The results also show that competition and conflicts are apparent in both cases and inherent in meta-organizations, and that they have been possible to deal with differently depending on the two movements’ national settings. With an organizational perspective on social movement coalitions, this study contributes to the classic question of institutionalization, formalization and bureaucratization of social movements. It ultimately asks what it means to organize a field of social movement actors and what happens at the junction of organization and social movement, at the intersection of national and international interests. A wider implication of the study is that the issues it highlights are to be expected whenever the internationalization of national movement activities takes the form of meta-organization.