The IPSA World Congress theme calls for taking a transboundary approach to the study of politics. Since 1995, the Beijing Declaration and Platform for Action has provided a transboundary normative framework for women’s rights and gender equality, supported by highly integrated global activist networks and insiders in transnational governance institutions.
The past 25 years, however, have seen an increase in the transboundary organization of anti-gender movements that bring together conservative religious actors and those on the radical right. In the context of rising populism, these transboundary organizations have mobilized against gender ideology, in the name of protecting family values and traditional gender roles.
Similarly, transboundary crises, such as pandemics and climate change, have had contradictory effects. For example, while the COVID-19 crisis highlighted the centrality of care work, mainly carried out by women as unpaid or front-line workers, governmental responses like post-pandemic economic stimulus programs set back progress in achieving gender equality in many regions.
For this session, we invite contributors to explore ambivalent and contradictory mobilization around gender equality and the effects of national and transnational crisis management. We especially encourage proposals addressing mobilization against gender equality agendas and reproductive rights in different regions of the world, the relationship between transboundary organization and local actors, and repertoires of action and resistance.
It is our hope that there will be at least one panel addressing the way in which transboundary regional organizing has supported or contested gender equality agendas in Latin America, while a comparative focus on other regions is more than welcome.
