‘The West Is Trying Too Hard’: Gender and the Right-Wing Critique of Globalization

Abstract

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.

Introduction

Critiques of globalization have had a turbulent history, with some of its ardent proponents ending up becoming its engaged critics. At the outset of the 21st century, it was mostly the left—including various strands of feminism—that offered complex critiques of globalization. The alter-globalization movement highlighted the economic, social, and environmental costs of global political integration and the expansion of markets, calling out governments and transnational companies for the harm caused to local populations and the planet in the name of profit and power (Appelbaum and Robinson, 2005; Mies, 1998; Pleyers, 2010; Sassen, 2007; Steger and Wilson, 2012; Stiglitz, 2003). In the second decade of the 21st century, resistance to globalization came to take on diverse forms, among them religious fundamentalism and elements of conspiratorial thinking—including antisemitic claims that Jews are the driving force behind globalization (a view shared by much of the alt-right). Indeed, many scholars see opposition to neoliberal globalization as the root cause of the rise of the far right (e.g. Colantone et al., in this special issue; Mudde, 2019: 101; Selk/Kemmerzell, in this special issue).

Right-wing backlash to globalization is increasingly expressed through resistance to gender equality and lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer (LGBTQ+) rights as part of the global liberal order. The actors articulating such critiques form a loose network of national and transnational organizations, political parties, and religious authorities, which scholars have conceptualized as the anti-gender movement (Dietze and Roth, 2020; Goetz and Mayer, 2023; Graff and Korolczuk, 2022; Grzebalska and Pető, 2018; Kuhar and Paternotte, 2017; Scheele et al., 2022). What connects these groups and individuals is that they persistently re-signify and demonize the concept of ‘gender’, which serves them as an umbrella term for a variety of issues related to sexuality, identity, kinship, and reproduction. They see ‘gender’ or ‘genderism’ as a sinister global force which endangers local ways of life. The term is weaponized by ultraconservatives in their quest to roll back women’s rights and LGBTQ+ rights, especially in the form of transnational institutions (UN, WHO, EU) and treaties (Istanbul Convention, CEDAW).

Research shows that the strategies employed by ultraconservatives at the transnational level include the following: re-framing the very discourse of human rights so that it becomes inclusive of ‘unborn’ children and thus a vehicle for banning abortion; striving to change the content of policies on population and aid so that they oppose rather than support women’s reproductive rights; lobbying state governments to either refrain from signing international human-rights conventions or withdraw from them and cease financial aid to programs that involve contraception and abortion (Buss and Herman, 2003; Datta, 2020, 2021; Roggeband, 2023; Scheele et al., 2022).

The anti-gender movement has been examined from a number of perspectives: as a counter-movement to global feminism (Corredor, 2019; Goetz and Mayer, 2023), as a development within various religious denominations (Bracke and Paternotte, 2016; Case, 2016, 2019; Hennig, 2018), or as a political trend connected to the rise of the global right, especially right-wing populism (Dietze and Roth, 2020; Graff and Korolczuk, 2022). In this paper, we provide a critical sociological perspective on how anti-gender campaigns fit into the debates around the crisis of globalization. While much attention in the scholarly literature on globalization has been paid to economic and political trends (e.g. Gong et al., 2022; Kornprobst and Paul, 2021), our aim is to contribute to analyses which examine the role played by conflicts over cultural values (Bob, 2012; Norris and Inglehardt, 2019). We add to these debates an analysis focused on clashes over the gender order, arguing that the vilification of ‘gender’ has become a powerful frame through which globalization of liberal norms is undermined.

How do critiques of ‘gender ideology’ intersect with arguments concerning globalization? In this paper, we seek to show how anti-gender actors target international institutions and norms, portraying them as a cosmopolitan force, alien to local cultures and traditions, thus effectively moralizing the binary opposition between the local and the global, the sovereign and the transnational. Our analysis shows their activity relies on employing chameleon tactics: they position themselves as protectors of local populations, often using local representatives as their spokespersons, strategically claiming victim status vis-à-vis transnational progressive actors. Chameleon tactics might be viewed as a variant of astroturfing, which is understood as ‘manufactured, deceptive and strategic top-down activity . . . initiated by political actors that mimics bottom-up activity by autonomous individuals’ (Kovic et al., 2018: 71). However, faking grassroots mobilization is just one element of the broader strategy we analyze here. In some contexts, these actors openly admit, even boast, that they are part of political elites and act as insiders in various international institutions and on the national political scene. Depending on context and need they define themselves differently vis-à-vis the global-local binary. At the core of the chameleon strategy is a deliberate blurring of boundaries between global and local levels of activism, which enables global actors to present themselves as defenders of local values.

The article is structured as follows: in the first section we present our data and methodology, and in the next ‘Gender and Critiques of Globalization: A Historical Overview’, we offer a historical overview of how gender has figured in the process of globalization and in critiques of this trend, noting a convergence between feminist and conservative positions. We offer a chronology of debates concerning the global diffusion of gender-related norms, which is inevitably a contested process. Next, in section ‘The Anti-Gender Movement as a Global Phenomenon: The Key Actors’, we trace the emergence and consolidation of various actors into the global anti-gender movement. The two final sections are where we develop our main argument on chameleon tactics based on empirical data. In part 4, we show how right-wing actors articulate their opposition to globalization through critique of gender ideology, while section ‘Who is the Globalist? The Case of the ICPD25 Nairobi Summit’ examines how chameleon tactics unfolded in a specific context of the 2019 ICPD25 Summit in Nairobi, Kenya. We end with conclusions.

Data and Methodology

This article is based on textual analysis of various materials produced by the anti-gender movement between 2012 and 2023. This dataset included over 100 articles and statements published on the webpages and social media of anti-gender groups and organizations, both international ones such as the World Congress of Families, Agenda Europe and CitizenGo, and national such as Poland’s Ordo Iuris Institute, Italy’s ProVita or the Population Research Institute in the United States. Our material also included media coverage of anti-gender initiatives and interventions, specifically media reporting on the 2019 ICPD25 Summit in Nairobi, Kenya and reports concerning the summit, which were published by progressive organizations operating on the national and/or international level, as well as by international institutions such as the United Nations (UN). We also participated in various events in Poland, including two 2015 anti-gender rallies and the inauguration of the Collegium Intermarium in 2021, as well as in the 2019 World Congress of Families in Verona, Italy, and we examined materials distributed during these events (e.g. booklets or leaflets) and notes from participant observation.

This dataset was supplemented by 20 semi-structured interviews conducted between 2019 and 2022 with representatives of civil society organizations focusing on gender issues, operating at the EU level as well as in Poland and Italy. The two countries represent European contexts where anti-gender campaigns have been relatively robust and politically influential, with both feminist and conservative organizations engaged in transnational organizing. Interviewees either worked in national organizations but engaged in transnational activism (e.g. attended international meetings, cooperated with international organizations and institutions), or were employed in international organizations focusing on the European Union and beyond. Socially progressive national organizations included, for instance, the Federation for Women and Family Planning and Polish Women’s Strike in Poland, and Casa Internationale delle Donne and Non Una di Meno in Italy. Transnational organizations included ILGA Europe, the International Planned Parenthood Federation European Network, She Decides, and the European Parliamentary Forum for Sexual and Reproductive Rights. We also interviewed several representatives of socially conservative organizations, including two key national organizations that are active also on the international level (Ordo Iuris Institute in Poland and ProVita in Italy), and the One of Us Federation, which is a European Citizens’ Initiative with headquarters in Brussels. Interviews were conducted either in person or online (in English or in Polish) and transcribed. We looked for keywords such as global, globalization, globalism (a term often used by anti-gender actors), colonialism, neocolonialism, sovereignty, international, and nation(al). We conducted content analysis of materials which included these keywords, examining the ways in which issues of gender equality, sexual and minority rights are discussed in these texts in relation to globalization. In part 4, which identifies the discursive dimension of chameleon tactics, we refer to materials from public speeches, publications and websites, whereas in part 5, which focuses on the summit in Nairobi in 2019, we mostly examine interviews with participants. Due to the volatility of the conflict and the resulting concerns about personal safety, some of our interviewees wished to remain anonymous. Hence, we included only general information about the organizations whose employees were interviewed, along with places and dates of the interviews, but avoided providing details that would allow for identification.

The methodologies employed in this paper are a combination of sociological approaches, scrutinizing strategies and discourses of social movements, and a cultural-studies lens, through which gender struggles appear as a historical process involving complex clashes of various discourses and value systems. This interdisciplinary perspective is reflected in the structure of the paper.

Gender and Critiques of Globalization: A Historical Overview

Gender has been implicated in debates on globalization since the 1970s, when second wave feminists strove to globalize women’s rights through universal human-rights legislation and the claim that ‘sisterhood is global’ (Bunch, 1990; Morgan, 1996; Walby, 2002). In this period, international human-rights institutions and instruments, which had emerged in the aftermath of the Second World War, began to push for progressive values globally, internationalizing, among other things, gender equality, and LGBTQ rights (Keck and Sikkink, 1998; Roggeband, 2023). Today, gender equality is among UN targets to be achieved by 2030 as part of the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (UN, 2021). The norms and legal standards created by international institutions and codified in treaties such as CEDAW adopted by United Nations general Assembly in 1979 often serve local actors as an instrument with which to exert pressure on their governments. Scholars have conceptualized the relationship between local groups (e.g. feminist and LGBTQ movements) and international institutions such as the UN or EU in terms of the ‘boomerang effect’ (Keck and Sikkink, 1998). According to this theory, transnational advocacy networks can effectively promote human rights locally by securing support from international institutions, which then put pressure on national governments. However, activists do not necessarily rely on the boomerang effect; some jump scales between national and transnational levels in order to achieve their goals, such as pushing for new policies at the grassroots level and changing international norms and practices (Ayoub, 2013; Kalm and Meeuwisse, 2023).

These dynamics between transnational and local levels have a built-in problem. As early as the mid 1980s, it became clear to many feminists that the human rights-based strategy had its pitfalls. Activists from the Global South warned that what was being globalized was in fact Western white women’s rights—a culturally specific conception of gender justice, which was implicated in the history of colonialism and had a silencing effect on women from non-Western contexts (e.g. Mohanty, 1984; Narayan, 1997; Spivak, 1988). Viewed from this perspective, transnational governance and neoliberal globalization were threats to equality rather than allies of feminism. As shown by Conny Roggeband (2023: 254–255), norm diffusion—especially in the culturally sensitive realm of gender—is inevitably a contentious process, one that requires deep regime change, with profound transformations of the political division between private and public spheres. Hence, it is likely to be met with resistance from actors seeking to preserve the norms that are being challenged. In the case of women’s rights, this is compounded by the fact that the international treaties have weak enforcement mechanisms, while the norms tend to be vague (opening space for re-framing), and even contradictory. As Roggeband points out, tensions also exist between various international norms (e.g. those concerning trade liberalization and those mainstreaming gender). In other words, while the effectiveness of conventions such as CEDAW or the Istanbul convention against violence has been documented, opposition against such measures has also been powerful. Ironically, it is precisely the universalist status of such transnational measures that becomes the object of critique both from some feminist and anti-gender movements.

By the mid 1990s, the diffusion of liberal norms in the realm of gender was being challenged more or less simultaneously from both left and right: by feminists from the global South, and by the then rapidly consolidating transnational religious right, which later evolved into the anti-gender movement (Bob, 2012; Buss and Herman, 2003). The Vatican played a key role in the early stages of the movement’s growth, providing much of its ideology, networks and resources. In the mid 1990s, the Holy See began to frame its socially conservative agenda in terms of resistance to the concept of gender in international treaties on population and women’s rights. The strategy was employed at two UN conferences: the 1994 Cairo Conference on Population and Development and the 1995 Beijing Conference on Women (Bracke and Paternotte, 2016; Case, 2016, 2019; Corredor, 2019). Since then, the vilification of the concept of gender has remained central to Catholic teaching on the family, marriage, and sexuality. The anti-gender movement takes up this framing as a tool of political influence, as well as a source of ideological coherence in the movement’s alliances with right-wing parties (Graff and Korolczuk, 2022). While the Vatican remains a key player, the global religious right gained momentum by building alliances between different denominations or even religions, around issues such as opposition to gay rights, sexual education and women’s reproductive rights, as well as defense of religious freedom (Bob, 2012; Chappell, 2006). The composition of inter-faith alliances changed over time. Bob (2012) proposed the term the ‘Baptist-burqa network’ for a broad coalition of religious fundamentalists which included Muslim groups, but today this alliance is solely Christian with cooperation between Catholics and Evangelicals, plus a strong presence of the Russian Orthodox Church.

An important strand of the right-wing critiques of liberal gender norms being promoted internationally emerged in the United States, and later spread around Europe and beyond (Mascolo, 2024; Stoeckl and Uzlaner, 2022). In their seminal book Globalizing Family Values: The Christian Right in International Politics Doris Buss and Didi Herman (2003) show how the ‘family values’ agenda and vilification of feminism developed during the US culture wars of the 1980s went global in the 1990s. The core aims included restricting access to abortion, opposing sex education and vilifying the gay community as a source of moral corruption (see also Dowland, 2015). Today the ideological package known as ‘family values’, invented by the American Christian Right, constitutes the ideological core of gender-conservatism in different countries, including Russia (Stoeckl and Uzlaner, 2022). Anti-abortion strategies developed in the United States have been successfully exported to Poland (Włodarczyk, 2010), Ireland (Mason, 2019), and African countries such as Uganda, Ghana, and Kenya (Kaoma, 2012; Martinez et al., 2021; McEwen, 2021; Wepukhulu, 2023). Gender has also been used instrumentally as a discursive strategy justifying specific states’ claims to dominance and even acts of aggression. In 2022, Putin repeatedly invoked the need to defend traditional family values against the decadent West in his attack on Ukraine (Edenborg, 2023; Kratochvíl and O’Sullivan, 2023).

The Anti-Gender Movement as a Global Phenomenon: The Key Actors

Today, opposition to globalization understood as a diffusion of gender-equality norms is voiced by a variety of actors, including religious fundamentalists, right-wing politicians, and representatives of non-governmental organizations (NGOs) or informal networks. The concept of the anti-gender movement helps us to see how these actors are interconnected, both on the ideological and organizational level (Datta, 2020, 2021; Kováts and Põim, 2015). Scholars have shown that in Europe the movement consists of numerous national organizations and networks, notably, the Spanish group HazteOir, the French Manif pour Tous, and the Polish foundation Ordo Iuris Institute. It is, however, best understood as a global phenomenon (Cabezas, 2022; Graff and Korolczuk, 2022; Paternotte and Kuhar, 2018). Key organizations on the global level are World Congress of Families, CitizenGo, and the Political Network for Values, which are interconnected ideologically, organizationally, and financially. Strong links have been traced between the World Congress of Families and influential political actors including Steve Bannon, Donald Trump’s personal lawyer, and far-right politicians in Italy, Hungary, Poland, and Spain (Provost and Ramsey, 2019). In March 2019, Open Democracy published a report on money flowing from US Christian Right fundamentalist groups such as the Alliance Defending Freedom (ADF) into Europe (Provost and Ramsey, 2019; see also Datta, 2021). Other sources of funding and know-how include various churches; wealthy individuals in Brazil, Mexico, or Russia; national governments; and the European Union itself (Datta, 2020, 2021; Sarkadi Nagy, 2021). Both the organizational and financial links testify to the paradoxical position of anti-gender actors as critics of globalization who function thanks to global connections and capital flows.

The global character of the anti-gender movement is best exemplified by the following two organizations: the World Congress of Families (WCF), with headquarters in the United States, and CitizenGO, which was established in Spain. As has been shown by Kristina Stoeckl (2020: 224–226), the World Congress of Families exemplifies the ways in which the American Christian Right went global in the 1990s and how Central and Eastern Europe, including Russia, became a new frontier of the culture war, this time wedged on an international scale. The WCF was established in 1995 by Allan Carson, an American professor and head of the Howard Center for Family, Religion and Society in Illinois, and Anatoly Antonov, a Russian sociologist specializing in demographics. Over the decades, the WCF became a prominent fixture in the world of global anti-gender activism: its congresses have brought together elite actors from all over the world, including conservative activists, politicians, the European aristocracy, as well as clergy of several denominations. So far, international congresses have taken place in countries such as Mexico, Hungary, Poland, and Italy, with right-wing politicians—notably, the autocratic Hungarian leader Victor Orban and the-then Prime Minister of Italy Matteo Salvini—as guests of honor and celebrated speakers. Under the umbrella of the WCF, religious fundamentalists and political actors confront progressive NGOs and international institutions advocating for what they call family values.

CitizenGo epitomizes the power and global ambitions of European anti-gender actors, who promote their values on other continents, especially Africa, echoing colonial patterns. Its mother organization is the Spanish group named HazteOir, a close collaborator of the nationalist far-right party Vox (Cabezas, 2022). Founded in 2001 by fundamentalist Catholic lawyer Ignacio Arsuaga, HazteOir is dedicated to combating abortion, sex education, euthanasia, and same-sex marriage. Its full name (HazteOir—Victimas de la ideología de género) translates as ‘Make yourself heard, victims of the gender ideology’. In 2013, Arsuaga founded CitizenGo, a membership petition platform, which claimed to have over 16 million users as of March 2024. Petitions can be signed in 50 countries, in 12 languages. Examples of campaigns include opposition to the Estrela Report (an EU resolution on sexual and reproductive health and rights), support for Russia’s anti-gay laws, and an appeal to Netflix users to discontinue their subscriptions in protest of the platform’s stand on abortion. The WCF and CitizenGO are linked to each other; in fact, WCF President Brian S. Brown is a member of CitizenGo Foundation Board of Trustees, while CitizenGo’s director Ignacio Arsuaga sits on the board of Brown’s International Organization for the Family. Both organizations are keen to establish their presence in the Global South, often promoting legal initiatives that would never be accepted in their home countries. CitizenGo’s regional Africa office, located in Nairobi, has been active in opposing comprehensive sex education in schools, women’s reproductive rights, and the rights of LGBTQ community in the region: it has vigorously opposed the decriminalization of homosexuality in Kenya and pushed for the ‘Kill the Gays’ law in Uganda (Martinez et al., 2021; McEwen, 2021; Norris, 2022; VICE News, 2023; Wepukhulu, 2023). In the following sections, we examine the campaigns initiated by these two organizations and their allies, showing how the critiques of globalizations are articulated through opposition to gender.

Chameleon Tactics: Articulating Right-Wing Opposition to Globalization

The trend of framing right-wing critiques of globalization as defenses of local and authentic ways of life is much broader than the anti-gender movement. It is a pattern characteristic of many right-wing parties, religious fundamentalists, as well as some anti-capitalist movements. For example, the authors of the study The International Alt-Right (Hermansson et al., 2020) argue persuasively that the alt-right is a reactionary and racist global anti-globalist movement committed to defending white populations against the alleged onslaught of multiculturalism and transnationalism. The paradox of a nationalist internationale is at least partly solved once we realize that the Internet serves these groups as a virtual homeland: ‘the alternative Right, especially the white nationalist element of the movement, has nurtured white supremacist ethnoscape online, by framing white Westerners of European descent across the world as a diaspora’ (Hermansson et al., 2020: 30). Jack Donovan, an alt-right celebrity and advocate of tribalism, went on record stating: ‘Hate Globally, Like Locally’ (Hermansson et al., 2020: 31), expressing a sentiment shared also by the anti-gender movement, which fetishizes the local, but organizes globally. Viewed in this broader perspective, the anti-gender movement stands out as particularly effective at portraying itself as authentic and local, in part due to the fact that defense of the family rhetoric is far more palatable to the broader public than ethnonationalism and open racism.

The ultraconservative actors discussed in this paper employ the concept of globalism rather than globalization, to signal that these processes are not inevitable and organic, but rather reflect the political agenda of global liberal elites. ‘Globalism’ is portrayed as a threat to the traditional family and the wellbeing of children, the central claim being that ‘gender ideology’ is being imposed on local populations by global powers. It remains an unquestioned assumption of this discourse that authentic local culture is always gender-conservative. What is actually at stake is hegemony at the transnational level, but the strategy of legitimization is to obfuscate this political reality and make opposition to gender appear as locally rooted. Anti-gender rhetoric—its semantics, the metaphors employed, the underlying larger narrative—is constructed to serve this goal. Innumerable documents produced by the movement present its enemies—that is, feminism, LGBTQ+ movements, as well as international bodies such as the EU and UN—as powerful colonizers, while insisting that gender-conservatism is local, fragile and embattled. As we demonstrate below, ultraconservatism consistently claims victim status for itself: the struggle over gender is portrayed as one between a pro-life/family-loving David and a pro-abortion/pro-gay Goliath.

The discursive strategies discussed in this section are meant to achieve two complementary goals: (1) to de-legitimize gender equality by making it appear antithetical to what is local and authentic, and (2) to vilify transnational bodies (and by proxy also their local allies) by linking them to foreign ‘gender ideology’. The discourse promulgated by the World Congress of Families is a case in point. Despite its American origins and global ambitions, the group consistently projects an image of an organization that protects vulnerable local populations against aggressive liberal forces. The latter are framed as not only rootless, cosmopolitan, and godless, but also tyrannical, devious, criminal, and enormously wealthy. Thus, leaders of the anti-gender movement put themselves in the position of advisors to sovereign nations, who need to brace themselves against liberal aggression. Father Josiah Trenholm, a leader of the Orthodox Church in the United States, speaking at the World Congress of Families conference in Tbilisi, Georgia in 2016, urged local participants to

[t]ell the LGBT tolerance tyrants, this lavender mafia, these homofascists, these rainbow radicals, that they are not welcome to promote their anti-religious and anti-civilizational propaganda in your nations. (Hatewatch Staff, 2016)

This quote is interesting not only in its word choice— ‘tyrants’, ‘mafia’, ‘fascists’, ‘radicals’—but also in the spatial arrangement it implies. Trenholm speaks to those who are inside the ‘nations’, while LGBT movements are a sinister global force waiting on the outside, eager to come inside, but should be told they are not welcome. This metaphor rules out the possibility that the LGBTQ community might exist within national spaces, and that men such as himself might be perceived as forces of globalization.

To show how anti-gender actors position themselves as heroic defenders of local communities it is useful to examine anti-gender activity in countries such as Kenya, Ghana, or Uganda (Beeson, 2023; McEwen, 2021). Both organizations discussed in the previous section—the World Congress of Families and CitizenGo—have a strong presence in the region and they often cooperate with each other, as in the case of the 2019 regional conference on the family in Accra, Ghana, which aimed to mobilize conservative forces on the African continent. In the following quote Brian Brown, the leader of the WCF and its American mother organization IOF (International Organization for Family), addresses potential funders in a newsletter written on this occasion:

I am on my way to Ghana to be with some of our staunchest allies from throughout Africa, to help them strategize how to combat the Soros agenda being pushed so vigorously in their native countries’ despite it being so much at odds with their values. But the money he is pouring into Africa alone swamps the resources IOF can muster for our worldwide operations—and that is why we need your help! (Brown, 2019—punctuation as in original)

This text constructs a radical opposition between ‘native countries’ and the international ‘Soros agenda’. As in much conspiratorial far-right discourse, Jewish-Hungarian wealthy philanthropist George Soros appears as a code word here. His name epitomizes the claim that Jews are the force behind foreign values being ‘pushed’ on local populations against their will (e.g. Langer, 2021). The choice of wording is not coincidental: Soros’ money is dirty money, and so associated with a swamp, while Brown himself is presented as a champion of local values, on his way to help the local populations defend themselves. While Soros is attacking ‘vigorously’, Brown is appealing to potential funders to help him and his ‘staunch’ allies to save Africa from Western interventions. The overarching metaphor is that of combat—a struggle between good and evil. In reality, conservative organizations such as the WCF are just as ‘global’ as their opponents; however, chameleon tactics demand persistent disavowal of the global nature of ultraconservative actors.

Similar rhetoric was used by critics of the 2019 UN summit in Nairobi, which we discuss in detail in the next section. Religious fundamentalists and conservative organizations, both Kenyan and international, claimed that a small corrupt elite was using this forum to promote abortion and sex education. In the words of Jonathan Abbamonte, who visited Nairobi as a representative of the US-based Population Research Institute and who currently works at the Heritage Foundation:

International agreements long ago carefully negotiated by nation states are being hijacked by activists to promote radical pro-abortion and anti-family ideologies. Backed by a handful of wealthy European and Western nations, philanthropists and corporations, a small cabal of well-funded activists operating through the United Nations system is pushing for a narrow set of progressive views that are anathema to the cultural and religious values held by most of the developing world. (Abbamonte, 2019)

The above quote shows how right-wing actors link critique of globalization together with anti-gender rhetoric. It also contains a subtext that can easily be decoded as antisemitic: use of words such as ‘cabal’, and persistent stress placed on money as the source of power and moral corruption (see Graff, 2022). References to Soros and his alleged ‘agenda’ are also a thin veil for antisemitism. This densely coded language allows anti-gender leaders to present one group of international actors as sinister globalists while casting themselves as a benevolent ally of local populations.

At the heart of the chameleon tactics used by the anti-gender actors is victim–perpetrator reversal, which involves associating opponents with cruel practices of domination. A remarkable theme of anti-gender discourse, employed especially in African contexts, is the claim that the West is promoting homosexuality and abortion in an effort to control population growth on the continent. In such contexts, ultraconservatives are in essence accusing liberal elites of genocidal racism, while positioning themselves as champions of anti-racist politics. Notably, such claims are usually made in the public sphere by citizens of the African countries themselves. For example, in 2016, Ann Kioko, an anti-abortion activist, published an opinion piece in which she equated homosexuality and abortion with Western plans of depopulation:

We are under immense pressure to create liberal laws that allow same-sex unions and abortion. The agenda is to control the population because a big one is a threat to the West in many respects. Homosexuality can be a great tool to control population growth as it is the only sure way to have a ‘baby-less’ union. (Kioko, 2016)

Kioko is a Kenyan speaking on behalf of all Africans here, but she is also an employee of CitizenGO (specifically their Campaigns Director for Africa and the United Nations) and thus a representative of a global organization with headquarters in Madrid. In this case, as in many others, the boundaries between local and global are deliberately blurred. One might say that there is no difference between this scenario and one in which local LGBTQ activists speak at UN conferences on behalf of gays and lesbians in their country. However, the whole point of Kioko’s activism is not to represent, but to reject representation by denying the very existence of homosexuality in the Kenyan context. She concludes her article with the following claim: ‘We know Africans are never homosexuals; the west is trying too hard’.

Kioko strategically uses her identity as a Kenyan to push the agenda of an international Christian network, and to legitimize the claims to victimhood. She has been featured in an article published by an American pro-life organization C-FAM entitled ‘African Pro-Lifer Threatened by Abortion Groups, Fears for Her Safety’ (Gennarini, 2019). The text describes her as a local activist who is subject to harassment and threats at the hands of the local pro-abortion group, backed by the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO), the International Planned Parenthood Federation, and Clinton Health Access Initiative. While we do not deny the existence of local activists challenging reproductive rights or the fact that they may encounter opposition, our analysis shows that anti-gender actors often push for changes on the transnational level while disguising themselves as representatives of the grassroots. Global conservative organizations also demonize local women’s rights activists as either inauthentic or duped by global elites. Such a tactic helps to legitimize their critique of global trends and to undermine the legitimacy of international institutions and norms.

The case in point is a variant of chameleon tactics: a local voice is used to camouflage what is in fact global influence. The irony here is that a de facto colonial project engineered by the Christian right is taking place under the guise of decolonization. This pattern has been under increasing scrutiny of scholars interested in opposition to gender equality and minority rights (Kaoma, 2012; McEwen and Narayanaswamy, 2023; Sanders and Jenkins, 2022). As shown by the authors of a recent report prepared by the United Nations Research Institute for Social Development:

The anti-gender argument suggests that pro-LGBTIQ+ rights are themselves colonial, Western impositions antithetical to the ‘natural’ order in diverse developing-country contexts, ultimately working against the achievement of the SDGs [UN Sustainable Development Goals]. Furthermore, anti-gender actors are using the language of decolonisation in ways that ultimately reinforce colonial-era ideologies in which notions of racial hierarchy were entangled with cis-heteronormative constructions of the gender binary, hierarchy, and the nuclear family model. (McEwen and Narayanaswamy, 2023: 1)

While the anti-colonial frame is often used in the Global South, it has also been present in anti-gender discourses circulating in Central and Eastern Europe. In this context, the colonizer is identified as the European Union and gender is portrayed as unwanted influence from the decadent West, for example, ‘Ebola from Brussels’ (Korolczuk and Graff, 2018). In both cases, the local is fetishized as authentic, truthful, and wholesome, and presented as embattled—under threat from global liberal forces.

Chameleon tactics, which include positioning themselves as grassroots actors fighting against all-powerful global elites, are consistently employed by national organizations such as the Ordo Iuris Institute in Poland. Ordo Iuris was established in 2003 with the help of TFP (Tradition, Family, and Property), a global network originating in Brazil, and remains well embedded in transnational networks in Europe (Datta, 2020; Korolczuk, 2023). Nonetheless, the Institute projects an image of a local institution worried that globalization might destroy authentic local cultures. Here is a selection of headlines (translated from Polish) from the Ordo Iuris Institute website that exemplify this pattern:

• World Health Organization (WHO) recommends the use of abortion drugs and persuades governments to lift restrictions that make abortion difficult. (Published: 29 July 2020)

• WHO is preparing an escalation of attacks on life-saving law. (Published: 27 August 2021)

• European Convention on Human Rights again at center of fight for freedom to kill. (Published: 21 December 2022)

• Against surrogacy and imposing recognition of homoadoption—Ordo Iuris at European Parliament conference. (Published: 04 July 2023)

• Surrogacy: Will the Hague Convention force the legalization of surrogacy in member states? (Published: 24 July 2023)

The language employed here suggests that the EU and WHO are manipulative anti-democratic institutions engaged in top-down interventions: they are imposing their values, forcing national governments to implement policies at odds with local norms. All efforts on the part of international bodies and transnational organizations to coordinate gender-equality policies and responses to various challenges are framed as illegitimate violations of nation states’ prerogatives. It is implied that the ultimate goal of these institutions is to gain even more power and eventually establish a sort of world government, which makes the anti-gender argument a variant of a broader conspiratorial discourse concerning so-called ‘Cultural Marxism’ (Busbridge et al., 2020).

Anti-gender groups view themselves as enemies of the UN and EU in their current form, but their aim is to replace existing elites rather than destroy the institutions as such, as shown in the following excerpt from an interview with an Ordo Iuris representative:

. . . when it comes to the global scale, to international institutions, . . . the other side definitely has more influence now, and this is due to the march through the institutions that this side has been carrying out for many decades. Starting with the United Nations, where people are very often employed as experts because of their views and political connections, and ending, of course, with the European Union and the European Commission. (Interview 1, Warsaw, 8 June 2021)

Representatives of the anti-gender movement fashion themselves as modern Cassandras, warning the local population about the growing powers of ‘radicals’ within international institutions. At times, they present themselves as anti-globalist forces, coming to the rescue of ‘sovereign nations’ before it is too late. On other occasions, however, it becomes clear that they harbor universalist ambitions, aiming to replace (rather than undermine) the global players such as the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP), UNESCO, or WHO, or at least to effectively infiltrate them.

Who is the Globalist? The Case of the ICPD25 Nairobi Summit

In November 2019, the United Nations Population Fund organized the International Conference on Population and Development (ICPD25) in Nairobi, Kenya. The aim was to mobilize decision-makers to commit politically and financially to finally and fully implement the gender-equality policies adopted in 1994 at the International Conference on Population and Development (ICPD) Program of Action. The summit was attended by more than 9500 people from 170 countries and according to the organizers it was a significant success (Nairobi Summit ICPD, 2019). Conservative organizations (including the WCF and the CitizenGo Africa) saw this event as an opportunity to voice their dissent and capture media attention. They organized a counter-summit with the aim of galvanizing opposition to LGBTQ+ rights, sex education, and access to safe abortion. This section examines the clash between progressive and ultraconservative forces which occurred in Nairobi. We focus on anti-gender strategies toward international institutions and civil society actors and the types of alliances they form locally and globally, showing how chameleon tactics were employed in their activities and discourses, and how they were perceived by feminist participants of the Summit.

The counter-summit was convened by local religious actors, including the Kenya Conference of Catholic Bishops and the National Council of Churches of Kenya, but according to our interviewees from progressive organizations, it was sponsored mainly by Western civil society organizations, including CitizenGo, the Heritage Foundation, the Population Research Institute (an American-based anti-choice organization), and the US Administration. Ironically, Americans took on the role of defending local culture and norms in Nairobi. A participant from a feminist organization whom we interviewed offered the following description:

. . . At each of the lectures I attended [during the counter-summit], there was an important representative of a big American NGO operating internationally, with a lot of money. In addition, there were people from US government institutions, whose presence signaled that they [the anti-gender movements] would have funding from the United States. (Interview 2, Warsaw, 22 May 2020)

While the initiative opposing the agenda of ICPD25 sought to be perceived as local resistance to global cultural colonizers, in fact it was organized under the leadership of the Trump Administration, while the feeble grassroot support was mobilized by the Catholic Church and other international religious networks (Archer et al., 2019; Sanders and Jenkins, 2022: 412–413).

According to media reports, and also in the view of our interviewees (women’s rights activists who attended both events), this mission was a dismal failure. The anti-choice groups were ineffective in mobilizing mass participation and attracting media interest in their counter-summit. The event was attended by only about a 100 people, while the organizers had expected thousands to show up (Archer et al., 2019). Photos of the event and the accompanying street pickets show a handful of local protesters, all wearing t-shirts with CitizenGo logo, which was also printed on the banners with pro-family slogans such as ‘Africa does not welcome abortion’ and ‘ICPD25 does not represent me’ (Smith, 2019). It was a spectacle in incompetent astroturfing; while the protests were intended to be seen as spontaneous local mobilization, insistent branding made it clear that this was not the case.

Representatives of anti-gender groups were far more successful in disrupting the proceedings of the official UN summit. One of the tactics employed was to deliberately obstruct the sessions. As one participant from a Polish NGO told us:

Ordo Iuris was very visible . . . its representatives were in the audience and spoke up in many discussion panels . . . they would interrupt [speakers], keep asking irrelevant questions, and undermine . . . findings. . . . [The leader of OI] Kwaśniewski was also very active on Twitter, tweeting all the time during the Nairobi summit, belittling it, [so] if you Google search ‘Nairobi Polska’ it will mainly be information from Ordo Iuris. (Interview 2, Warsaw, 22 May 2020)

The disruptive tactics can be understood as an effort to change the content of the official summit, undermining the hegemony of the human-rights discourse on women’s rights. The strategy also serves the goal of claiming victim status for opponents of sexual and reproductive rights. In their official communications, representatives of anti-gender organizations often suggested that they had been excluded from the event, thus forced to adopt contentious tactics characteristic of grassroots social movements.

Organizing street protests and convening alternative meetings in the same cities during the events organized by global institutions are among the repertoire employed by various social movements. In this case, the goal was to create the impression that a conservative alternative to the UN exists, no less legitimate and firmly rooted in the local context. The events in Nairobi show that the anti-gender campaigners often lack mass grassroots support, and the efforts to disrupt or influence the official summit’s proceedings by a small but well-organized group of activists can be far more successful. According to our interviewees from progressive organizations, conservative civil society worked hand in hand with right-wing politicians from countries such as Kenia, Poland, and the United States in attempting to undermine commitments to reproductive rights during the official summit. One of our interviewees from a Brussels-based progressive organization stated that because of the intervention of the anti-choice actors, the interparliamentary meeting planned during the Nairobi summit had to be relocated from the premises of the Kenyan parliament and instead took place at another, less prestigious venue:

They [anti-gender actors] did much more damage during the official summit, than they did by organizing the counter summit. . . . One example is that we were planning to hold a parliamentary summit, along with the UN one, and ours was supposed to be taking place in the Kenyan parliament. . . . At the last moment, 2–3 days before the summit, because of the lobbying of anti-gender groups the conservative MPs from the Kenyan parliament refused and we had to move our event. (Interview 3, 26 May 2020)

The case of Nairobi shows that the interventions of anti-gender organizations rely on strong connections with politicians, a pattern we have described as the movement’s opportunistic synergy with right-wing populist actors (Graff and Korolczuk, 2022). Such collaboration involves a spill-over of anti-gender rhetoric into the discourse of right-wing populist actors and politicians’ more or less open support for demands of anti-gender groups. These organizations, in turn, provide civil society backing for populist regimes and cadres for the new elites (Korolczuk, 2023).

The greatest achievement of the anti-gender actors at Nairobi consisted in derailing the consensus around the summit’s goals. Representatives of several countries, including Brazil, Hungary, Libya, Poland, Senegal, Uganda, and the United States, withdrew from signing the final Nairobi Declaration, which aimed to strengthen women’s reproductive rights globally. Instead, these countries issued a statement declaring their intention of undermining the consensus regarding sexual and reproductive rights as expressed in the ICPD Programme of Action. In an interview, an employee of the Polish organization Ordo Iuris Institute was quite willing to claim credit for this success:

We took part in the Nairobi Summit, which was certainly an important point in our history . . . It was thanks to our efforts that attention was brought to this problem . . . We contributed to the fact that Poland contested the summit and in fact openly opposed its resolutions. (Interview 1, Warsaw 8 June 2021)

While anti-gender actors claim to be victims-outsiders within the transnational human-rights circuit, in reality they are insiders with advisor status and substantial influence. The Ordo Iuris employee proudly admitted that the organization was affiliated with the ECOSOC (Economic and Social Council) at the UN, they were included in the European Union’s Transparency Register, and that they planned to apply for the status of an international NGO at the Council of Europe:

We also act strongly before the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg, where we send at least one or two amicus curiae briefs every month, where we speak on matters that concern our agenda. (Interview 1, Warsaw, 8 June 2021)

The representatives of other conservative organizations we interviewed also discussed their international involvement and close cooperation with international institutions and bodies. As explained by the interviewee representing One of Us Federation, the very goal of establishing this network was to better coordinate international cooperation and put pressure on national governments:

I work at the European level . . . but sometimes also at the national level, for example now Italy is with the campaign concerning the protection of maternity and then they ask for . . . support, and of course we also support national actions in Spain or in any country . . . . (Interview 4, Brussels, 20 June 2020)

A growing segment of the scholarly literature on anti-gender movements corroborates this view, showing an increased influence of socially conservative right-wing forces inside transnational bodies (Cupać and Ebetürk, 2020; Kantola and Lombardo, 2021; McEwen, 2023; Zacharenko, 2020). The UN has long been an arena of struggle, with the Vatican striving to mobilize a coalition against women’s rights, but in recent decades we can see a strengthening of this tendency: EU institutions are also under intense pressure to roll back reproductive rights. Meanwhile, anti-gender organizations continue to project a public image of outsiders, while portraying opponents as a global elite.

Throughout the Nairobi intervention, significant efforts were made to portray feminism and LGBTQ+ activism as a foreign import, an imposition, echoing Pope Francis’ often repeated claim that gender is a form of colonization (e.g. Allen, 2024). In hindsight, it is clear that the counter-summit was an unsuccessful effort to legitimize opposition to UN gender-equality policy as a local initiative rooted in what conservatives like to call ‘African culture’. Kenya was strategically chosen as a convenient site for the struggle around ‘family values’, based on the assumption that societies on the African continent are culturally homogeneous and committed to upholding patriarchal gender regimes. Yet, as demonstrated by Haley McEwen, a sociologist based in Johannesburg:

One need not look far within African feminist and queer scholarship to find that the nuclear family unit as envisioned by the pro-family movement has not been customary within most African societies. As numerous scholars have shown, no such nuclear family structure has been practiced on the continent as a norm, historically or currently. (McEwen, 2021: 41)

Viewed from this perspective, the ‘family values’ agenda is, in fact, a colonial project of conquest and imperialism, in which sexuality and kinship norms characteristic of conservatism in the Global North are imposed on societies of the Global South (McEwen, 2023: 45–46; Oyěwùmí, 2002). The irony of this dynamic does not escape local women’s rights activists. Kenyan feminist Jade Maina observed that the Nairobi counter-summit was ‘mostly attended by white men trying to make decisions for Black African and especially Kenyan women’ (Archer et al., 2019).

Swedish scholars, Kalm and Meeuwisse (2023) observe that socially conservative ‘actors delegitimize not only the institutions but also the norms underlying the post-World War II liberal international order, including a commitment to liberal democracy and a universal conception of human rights’ (pp. 559–560). What is at stake in these conflicts are not just specific pieces of legislation, but also the legitimacy of local versus global actors, as well as the liberal value system governing the international global order.

Conclusion

Globalization has opened up new arenas where ultraconservatives struggle for power, albeit under the guise of opposing the alleged colonization of locals by global liberal elites. The United Nations with its various agencies and international conferences remains a key space for interventions, and the anti-gender groups monitor the work of international bodies with an eye to seizing opportunities for contestation. Their discourse is structured by a series of oppositions: family values versus feminism, religious freedom versus LGBT rights, community versus individualism, tradition versus modernity. As demonstrated earlier, the Manichean struggle between these poles is consistently framed as one between the local/national and the global/international. Anti-gender rhetoric has a clear target: the alleged global hegemony of Western elites, which supposedly aim to dominate the rest of the world.

This paper has demonstrated how the critique of globalization has been captured by ultraconservative actors to undermine both gender equality as a norm and the legitimacy of international institutions themselves. They employ a two-pronged strategy: on one hand, globalization is demonized as a top-down process consisting in the imposition of liberal values (such as abortion or LGBTQ+ rights) on local populations. On the other hand, feminism and LGBTQ rights are consistently de-legitimized as a global project, orchestrated by the elites in order to more effectively control the populations. The two frames reinforce each other, so that in anti-gender discourse ‘genderism’ and ‘globalism’ are almost synonymous. In other words, while gender issues have always been part of the global arena, in recent decades, attacks on ‘gender ideology’ have become a key component of right-wing critiques of globalization as such.

A very real tension exists between the globalization of universal human rights in the realm of gender and the need to acknowledge legacies of colonialism and respect context-specific perspectives. This tension appears to be unresolvable and plays out on the ground in complex dynamics, linking local movements, national governments, and global human-rights institutions. Feminists have long been divided over the question of universalism and many of them have critiqued the Western hegemony inscribed in the human-rights framework. As this paper has demonstrated, today this tension is being strategically exploited by global right-wing players, who employ chameleon tactics both on organizational and discursive levels. While anti-gender organizations are well embedded in transnational networks, they readily pose as grassroots actors or employ local activists, whose voices are meant to legitimize the accusation that gender is a form of colonialism. The moralistic anti-globalist frame promoted by the anti-gender movement allows these groups and networks to organize globally to oppose ‘globalism’ while maintaining a public image as defenders of the local.