Conny Roggeband

University of Amsterdam | UVA · Department of Political Science

De-democratization and hostility to gender equality alter relations between states and feminists. State feminism, which focuses on cooperation between feminists and states, needs amendments for applicability in such contexts. We propose the integration of anti-gender actors into the analysis. We also suggest moving away from the assumption that tra...

Debates on the Istanbul Convention also have consequences for the violence against women policy field. By analyzing newly adopted or amended violence against women policies and laws and their framing this chapter assesses how these changes mirror anti-Convention positions, how they reflect or neglect the spirit and letter of the Convention. Next to...

This chapter discusses the theory and research that pertains to our study and proposes a conceptual framework for the analysis. It engages with the literature on violence against women and its emergence and framing as a policy issue, as well as with the literature on feminist advocacy on violence against women and its role in policy processes engag...

In this chapter, to understand the nature and dynamics of the attacks against the IC, we first reconstruct the process of contestation in each country separately. Countries are discussed in chronological order based on when contestation of the Convention intensified (Poland in 2012, Croatia in 2016, Hungary in March 2017, Bulgaria in September 2017...

The Istanbul Convention on violence against women and domestic violence has become a central site of contention over gender equality. Resistance and protest to the Convention are particularly strong in Central and Eastern Europe where, in some countries, conservative actors successfully prevented the ratification, or in the case of Poland they prop...

This concluding chapter discusses the implications of debates around the Istanbul Convention for the politics and policies on VAW, but also situates this in broader processes like the war on gender and its consequences for democracy and de-democratization. We contribute to the literature on anti-gender movements both by providing a systematic compa...

This chapter examines how women’s movements and actor constellations involved in combatting violence against women in Bulgaria, Croatia, Hungary and Poland were impacted by the opposition to the Istanbul Convention. On the one hand, emerging anti-gender and anti-Istanbul Convention mobilization altered the relations between women’s movements and st...

Scholars and NGOs have been raising alarms about the increasing political restraints that civil society organizations face globally. In this paper, we argue that closure is in fact a selective mechanism: governments attempt to reorganize civic space through a dual process of selective in‐ and exclusion of civil society organizations. Civil society...

Scholars have often oscillated between celebrating the transformative potential of solidarity and recognising the ambivalent nature of cooperation for disadvantaged and marginalised groups. How can we make sense of these differences? This article addresses this question by unpacking intersectional solidarity along two dimensions: the ways issues ar...

In this meticulously documented study, Krizsán and Roggeband demonstrate how the Istanbul Convention mobilized conservative forces, fostered intricate ties between autocratic states and nonstate actors, refigured civil society to advantage anti-equality activists, defunded feminist organizations providing services to abused women and shifted resour...

In Latin America and Southern Africa, norms on violence against women have developed with ups and downs, not simply in reaction to global norms, but sometimes even preceding global norm diffusion or surpassing it in terms of scope, framing and binding character. The classic global-to-local account with a single source of norm creation cannot captur...

Trends of de-democratization across Europe and the Americas have emerged along with opposition to gender equality and threats to previous gender equality policy achievements. Yet, de-democratization is rarely analysed through the lens of gender equality and, so far, efforts to systematically examine the implications for inclusive democracy and the...

This chapter looks at gender equality norms in regional governance, comparing two types of gender equality norms, i.e. on violence against women and gender mainstreaming, in four different regional organizations (EU, OAS, SADC and Mercosur). We argue that the existing governance landscape is an important explanatory factor for the unevenness in whi...

Two decades after transition to democracy, countries in the Central Eastern European region are now experiencing democratic backsliding. De-democratization processes not only challenge democratic institutions but can also be seen as a form of cultural backlash against social and political changes that took place during the last decades. Gender and...

This paper explores current contestations of women's rights and the implications thereof for international legislation. While contestation over women's rights is a far from new phenomenon, over the past two decades opposition to gender equality has become better organized at the transnational level, mobilizing a dispersed set of state and non-state...

Gender and politics literature has a strong focus on policy progress and the conditions that facilitate progressive change. Yet, increased opposition to gender equality makes it urgent to examine if and how current attacks affect existing gender-equality policies and institutions. We develop a conceptual framework to map patterns of backsliding of...

This chapter discusses the insights yielded by studies examining inter‐ and intra‐movement diffusion, with an eye toward understanding what diffuses, through which channels, and the catalysts to the diffusion process. It also discusses the relationship between cycles of protest and diffusion, and the still nascent tradition of understanding the imp...

Trends of de-democratization across Europe and the Americas are emerging, along with opposition to gender equality and threats to previous gender equality policy gains. Yet de-democratization has been barely analysed through the lens of gender equality, and so far, efforts to systematically analyse the implications for inclusive democracy and the r...

The article takes the case of protest against water privatization in Ireland to show that protestors with high levels of instrumental motivation as opposed to ideological motivation are more likely to protest. In order to explain this we uniquely combine Klandermans’ social psychology of protest with Gramsci’s theory of hegemony. By bridging these...

Varieties of Opposition to Gender Equality in Europe. As part of Taylor & Francis’ commitment to promoting this book I have the opportunity to share the full text of this book for the next 60 days. Using the following unique links, you can share the book in its entirety. https://rdcu.be/0FwM Those you share the links with will be able to read the...

The article analyses the categorization of “Moroccan youngsters” as a problem group in the Netherlands. Since the 1990s Dutch-Moroccan boys and young men are set apart as a problematic group that presents a social and security threat and an emblem of the failure of multicultural society. We analyse the intersectional “category politics” of Dutch po...

What are the factors that shape domestic violence policy change and how are variable gendered meanings produced in these policies? How and when can feminists influence policy making? What conditions and policy mechanisms lead to progressive change and which ones block it or lead to reversal? The Gender Politics of Domestic Violence analyzes the em...

When we published the first edition of this handbook a decade ago, we noted the rapid growth of scholarly interest in social movements and collective action in particular since the 1990s and the proliferation of social movement studies across the social scientific disciplines. In the decade that lies between the first and second edition of this han...

Two editors of the Dutch Journal for Genderstudies spoke with pioneering politician and feminist activist Hedy d’Ancona and the Dutch Minister for Equal Opportunities and gender scholar Jet Bussemaker about the development of Dutch gender equality policies. They discuss how successful Dutch policies have been in changing the gendered division of la...

This handbook provides a broad and comprehensive overview of the study of social movements and collective action, discussing the different disciplinary approaches that have developed. In addition to updated discussions of topics that were included in the 1st edition, this handbook includes substantial advances in the research and scholarship in the...

Abstract In this special issue, we evaluate the integration of gender in academic education in the Netherlands, focusing mostly on disciplinary study programmes. We show that while gender has become a permanent feature of Dutch academic teaching, there are substantial differences between disciplines and universities. We observe that the integration...

Abstract Over the past decades, gender and politics has become a vibrant and recognised international research field. Scholars have shown that gender is central to politics. Gendered equalities and inequalities are shaped and reproduced in political processes and institutions. In this article, we examine to what extent gender perspectives and insig...

Latin American feminists brought up the issue of violence in the 1970s under military rule or situations of armed conflict. These contexts made feminists specifically concerned with state violence against women. Women's organizations pointed to torture and rape of political prisoners and the use of rape as a weapon of war and connected these forms...

What have been the losses and the gains of the shift from women’s studies to gender studies for political science in The Netherlands? What are present-day opportunities and how should we move forward? Our systematic analysis of the Bachelor programmes offered by four Dutch political science departments shows that gender is not a central feature in...

This explorative study focuses on how first- and second-generation migrant women of Turkish and Moroccan descent in the Netherlands cope with increasing stigmatization - both individually and collectively. This study applies stigma coping responses identified in the psychological literature to qualitative interviews and focus group discussions with...

In this paper, we analyze political debates about headscarves and honour-related crimes in France and the Netherlands. We seek to explain why and how France and the Netherlands have come to unevenly politicize headscarves and honour crimes. Moreover, we try to understand how the argument of gender equality is increasingly used by different actors i...

Case studies of urban squatting in the United States and The Netherlands, and the fight against sexual violence in Spain and in The Netherlands, form the empirical basis of an analysis of the features and development of autonomous and institutionalized social movements, and the interaction between them. Autonomous and institutionalized social movem...

'This innovative study brings together insights from regional institutionalism and norm diffusion to illuminate the compley geometry of global gender equality norms. Employing a unique comparative empirical examiniation of four regional institutions, the collection reveals the multi-level, multi-actor, and multi-directional processes of gendered no...

: This paper applies a political process approach to analyze existing evaluations of gender mainstreaming (GM) efforts by (non) governmental agencies in Dutch development cooperation. This analytical framework looks both into structural elements (in terms of political/organization opportunities) and agency (in terms of mobilizing actor constellatio...

This book analyses the diffusion of norms concerning gender-based violence and gender mainstreaming of aid and trade between the EU, South America and Southern Africa. Norm diffusion is conceptualized as a truly multidirectional and polycentric process, shaped by regional governance and resulting in new geometries of transnational activism.

In this chapter, I examine the development of regional policies to combat domestic violence in Latin America and explore the role of (trans)national feminist networking in the travelling and negotiation of the OAS regional norm on violence against women. The questions that guide this chapter are: what actor constellations emerged both at the region...

We begin this concluding chapter with a reflection on the quality of the regional gender equality norms that are investigated in this volume. We then continue by considering what the regional level adds to norm diffusion processes and how the regional level intersects with the global and national processes. Subsequently, we will look at the ‘landsc...

This book investigates the diffusion of two gender equality norms. It traces how norms concerning gender-based violence travel between the global and the regional level as well as within regions with regard to the EU, South America and Southern Africa. It also investigates the dynamics concerning gender mainstreaming in development aid and trade ne...

Are the dynamics of contention changing? This is the question confronted by the contributors of this volume, among the most influential scholars in the field of social movements. The answers, arriving at a time of extraordinary worldwide turmoil, not only provide a wide-ranging and varied understanding of how social movements arise and persist, but...

This article seeks to understand differences in the evolution of policies to combat domestic violence against women in the Netherlands and Spain. Although policy change is often viewed as incremental change toward more progressive policies, the two countries studied here reflect opposing dynamics. The Netherlands moved from being a pioneering count...

Diffusion is often conceptualized as a random, voluntary, almost “natural” process, which is reflected in synonyms such as “contagion,” “spread,” or “flow.” In this chapter, instead, I want to draw attention to diffusion as a strategic process and highlight the crucial role of “framing” in this. In line with Schneiberg and Soule (2004), I see diffu...

Based on a case study of eight migrant women’s associations, this article examines how migrant women’s organizations in the Netherlands negotiate their way through the contradictory policy frame that positions migrant women as both victims and agents of change. While the state tries to engage migrant women’s organizations in its policy, mainly as a...

While gender and ethnic inequality have been extensively studied in the context of organizations, research into how the intersection of these and other identity categories (re)produces inequality in organizations is still scarce. In this article, we examine inequality from an intersectional perspective in the context of a diverse and multifaceted o...

Researchers and students from divergent academic disciplines share an interest in the study of social movements and collective action. Through a variety of disciplinary approaches and techniques, researchers seek to understand the emergence and development of collective action. In the last few decades, the field of social-movements-studies has prol...

Cross-national traffic of ideas and practices contribute to the spread of collective action across borders. These processes have only recently become the subject of study and theoretical discussion. The theoretical models that have been developed so far fail to take into account the complex nature of intercultural communication. No attention is pai...

This study examines the impact of feminist pressure and European Union (EU) policies on national policy changes, such as the introduction or extension of public childcare provision, parental leave, and part-time work legislation. We compared six countries on the basis of Qualitative Comparative Analysis and found that women's political pressure, es...

In reflecting on the distinctive way in which historians have approached the study of social movements and collective action, we call attention to a number of issues that have been addressed in the literature on history as a discipline. A distinction that has often been made between the disciplines of history and the social sciences concerns the ge...

Over the past decade, there has been a major shift in Dutch gender equality policy to an almost exclusive focus on migrant women. Simultaneously, the focus of ‘minority policies’ has shifted more and more towards gender relations. The appearance of migrant women at the top of the political agenda is remarkable. In this article we examine how this c...

This article examines how the salience and framing of political issues in the press and in parliament influence each other and how this salience and framing is influenced by key events outside the media and parliamentary realms. The case focused on is the debate on immigration and integration in the Netherlands between 1995 and 2004. The empirical...

In this article we reconstruct how the issues of migration and integration have been framed in the Dutch public debate over the last decade. We examine the patterns in both the parliamentary arena and the media and look at similarities and differences between them. On the basis of two contradictory theories, we formulate hypotheses about overlap an...

Over the past decade, there has been a major shift in Dutch gender equality policy to an almost exclusive focus on migrant women. Simultaneously, the focus of 'minority policies' has shifted more and more towards gender relations. The appearance of migrant women at the top of the political agenda is remarkable. In this article we examine how this c...

This article applies a political process approach to the analysis of pioneering Dutch efforts to develop and use gender impact assessment (GIA). Analysing the success and failure of the Dutch GIA, both at the level of structure (in terms of political opportunities, including discursive opportunities) and at the level of agency (in terms of mobilisi...

Cross-national traffic of feminist ideas have contributed to a growth of the international women’s movement and has shaped national movements. These processes have only recently become the subject of study and theoretical discussion. The theoretical models that have been developed so far fail to take into account the complex nature of intercultural...