Gender equality policymaking in non-democracies

On Thursday 12 March at 10-12 in Porthania (P545, 5th floor), INEQ together with Associate Professor Marianna Murayeva at the Faculty of Law and Aleksanteri Institute will host a talk by Professor Janet Elise Johnson (CUNY) on gender equality, policymaking and domestic violence in non-democratic environments, including Russia.

Please find Professor Johnson’s profile here:  https://www.frias.uni-freiburg.de/en/people/fellows/current-fellows/johnson

 

The politics of domestic violence in Russia

by Janet Elise Johnson

Over the last decade, non-democratic regimes have been passing legislation that at least superficially addresses gender inequality, especially targeting violence against women. The cross-national studies of gender equality policymaking, especially on issues such as violence against women which require significant change in policy and practice, show that strong, autonomous feminist movements are the decisive factor, while in non-democratic regimes, informal links between women’s movements and key actors also crucial. This presentation will explore these gender-related policy dynamics through the tracing of three policymaking processes on domestic violence over the last decade: a 2013-16 attempt to pass comprehensive domestic violence reform, the criminalization of domestic violence in 2016, and the partial de-criminalization in 2017. These insights will be used to consider the current attempt to pass yet another domestic violence law that began last fall.

Janet Elise Johnson is Professor of Political Science at Brooklyn College, City University of New York, USA, and FRIAS Senior Fellow/Marie Curie Fellow of the European Union at the Freiburg Institute for Advanced Studies, University of Freiburg, Germany. Her books include The Gender of Informal Politics (2018), Gender Violence in Russia (2009), and Living Gender after Communism (2007), with The Routledge International Handbook to Gender in Central-Eastern Europe and Eurasia (edited with Katalin Fábián and Mara Lazda) forthcoming in 2021.