Special Issue on Illiberalism and Gender in Post-Communist Europe Edited by Matthijs Bogaards and Andrea Pető

Central European University's (CEU) Matthijs Bogaards and Andrea Pető edited a special issue on Illiberalism and Gender in Post-Communist Europe of Politics and Governance, No. 4. Vol. 10. 2022. Bogaards is an Associate Professor in CEU's Department of Political Science and the Doctoral School of Political Science, Public Policy and International Relations as well as a CEU Democracy Institute Research Fellow. Pető is a Professor in CEU's Department of Gender Studies and a CEU Democracy Institute Research Fellow.

The papers included in the issue were presented during a conference with the same title in November 2021 at CEU's Vienna campus supported by the Fritz Thyssen Foundation. The recently published issue is Open Access and can be found here.

Illiberalism as a challenge to democracy is well documented. The proliferation of illiberal democracies around the world has been studied since at least the 1990s. Less well-known is the relationship between illiberalism and gender. Recent events in such countries as Hungary and Poland show that the attack on liberal democracy is also an attack on gender equality and the LGBTQT community.

The eleven articles of this special issue with an introduction seek to explore the relationship between illiberalism and gender, focusing on a region where gender progress is under threat from de-democratization: post-communist Europe. The contributions to this special issue will investigate the gendered working of illiberal institutions as well as the policies, mechanisms, and discourses used to (re-)construct gender as a threat to populist and nationalist visions of the polity, society, family, and individual. The contributions will demonstrate illiberalism’s impact on gendered issues in a broad range of social, economic, and political spheres, including the labour market, culture, academia, the legal system, foreign policy, and security. They will do so from a variety of perspectives and a diversity of academic backgrounds, together building the first systematic examination of the relationship between illiberalism and gender in post-communist Europe.