Politicizing Gender and Democracy in the Context of the Istanbul Convention. By Andrea Krizsán and Conny Roggeband. Cham, Switzerland: Palgrave Pivot, 2021. 248 pp. $74.99 (cloth), ISBN: 9783030790691.

Abstract

The Istanbul Convention on violence against women and domestic violence has become a major topic of academic discussion, with several books and journal articles published on the subject (e.g., Acar and Popa 2016; DeVido 2016;McQuigg 2017; Niemi, Peroni, and Stoyanova 2020; Ün and Arıkan 2022). Andrea Krizsán and Conny Roggeband’s book stands out because it approaches the backlash against the Istanbul Convention as a threat to democracy through a comparative study of four countries in the Central and Eastern European region (CEE): Croatia, Poland, Bulgaria, and Hungary. Politicizing Gender and Democracy in the Context of the Istanbul Convention demonstrates with convincing arguments that the Istanbul Convention has become a key site for studying contemporary anti-gender movements. Its comparative approach to national cases brings new and important insights to a phenomenon that represents global trends. This book contributes to the field by engaging with several debates that are undeniably relevant to gender and politics. While gender and politics scholars previously focused on theorizing the expansion and politicization of gender equality norms, they now also focus on the processes responsible for their stagnation and regression. Various academic publications have warned against the dangers of antigender trends, which are particularly alarming for democracy. In this book, the authors posit that because anti-gender attacks are core to democratic erosion, the status of democracy must be assessed using concepts that are sensitive to gender-equal democracies. This book is a valuable contribution as it contextualizes anti-gender politics with local examples of policy backsliding and dismantling in the CEE. Further, the book makes explicit the similarities and differences among the anti-gender movements in the four countries under analysis. For instance, the well-known rhetoric of “gender ideology”—used extensively by anti-gender actors to define the Istanbul Convention “as a tool to promote ‘gender ideology’ and foreign imposition of norms” (v)—takes different shapes in the four countries (see Chapter 3). In this way, the book