Resistance, Resilience and Resignation: Women’s Rights Advocates and Their Allies

This chapter examines how women’s movements and actor constellations involved in combatting violence against women in Bulgaria, Croatia, Hungary and Poland were impacted by the opposition to the Istanbul Convention. On the one hand, emerging anti-gender and anti-Istanbul Convention mobilization altered the relations between women’s movements and states and redefined the context in which women’s rights advocacy could be done. On the other hand, the openly hostile and highly gendered attacks impacted women’s movement capacities and strategies. They imposed threats on women’s rights activists, curtailing their capacity and space to act, but also resulted in new strategies and frames, and catalyzed new, often more powerful coalitions of resistance, depending on tradition, strength and capacity of preceding women’s rights organizing.