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.

This paper examines how the term ‘gender’ has been re-signified by the right-wing actors in contemporary struggles around globalization. First, we offer a chronology of debates concerning global diffusion of gender norms, tracing the consolidation of various groups into the anti-gender movement. The next section discusses how gender and globalization intersect in discursive strategies of anti-gender actors. We show that they target international institutions and norms portraying them as a western cosmopolitan force, claiming to speak on behalf of local populations and obfuscating their transnational embeddedness. The aim is to moralize and blur the boundaries between the local and the global—a strategy we call chameleon tactics. The final part examines how chameleon tactics unfolded in the specific context of the 2019 ICPD25 Summit in Nairobi, Kenya, and how an anti-globalist frame was used to blur the global identity of anti-gender organizations present there.

In the contemporary world, the topic of women’s rights has often been employed and manipulated in debates on religious freedom. In her article Rola El-Husseini shows that whereas Western politicians have promoted liberal values, including religious freedom, internationally, they have rarely uphold these principles domestically. Often, these values have been applied selectively, leaving Muslim communities—especially Muslim women—without the protections usually afforded by liberal democracy. This contribution discusses how opposition to women’s rights unfolds in contemporary Poland, where the Catholic Church has been instrumental in opposing women’s and minority rights. In the conclusion, it poses the question of whether we truly need more freedom of religion, or whether maybe what we should strive for is more freedom from religion and a firmer division between the state and the church, indiscriminately of what type of church or religious belief this may be. Such a perspective is rooted in the recognition that so far every religion has contributed to infringing women’s rights, and establishing and reinforcing social hierarchies.

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.

The shrinking of civil society-a problematic trend in a growing number of countries-often involves enacting legal measures to curtail the activity of civil society organizations and vilifying and/or harassing such organizations. Poland has been at the forefront of this trend since 2015. This article examines the mechanisms promoting elite replacement in Polish civil society, with a specific focus on the ways in which civil society actors have responded to these changes and the effectiveness of the state's efforts to establish new hierarchies of power. The article discusses the complex relation between research on civil society and elite theory, and examines the anti-elitist discourses concerning Polish civil society and the strategies employed by the state to gain more control over the third sector. Next, the analytical section focuses on the ways in which civil society actors respond to state-sponsored elite change and examines three types of relations between the state and NGOs in contemporary Poland: (1) resistance, (2) assimilation, and (3) opportunistic synergy. In closing, the article shows ways in which analyses of the transformation of civil society in Poland and other countries can be enriched by drawing on elite theory.