The perpetual marginalisation of women and LGBTQI+ people is an essential part of authoritarian and democratic backsliding regimes, and serves a range of different purposes: from legitimising restrictions on freedom of expression, freedom of the press, and civil society engagement, to building national and international alliances, and rationalising war and violent conflict.
For these reasons, we, financially supported by the German Federal Foreign Office, work to advance the international policy debate around the role of devaluation and disenfranchisement of women and LGBTQI* individuals in authoritarian and democratic backsliding regimes. The project further aims at developing policy recommendations on how governments committed to a Feminist Foreign Policy can better support feminist activists in authoritarian and democratic backsliding regimes in acute crises as well as countering the anti-feminism of the governments in the long run.