Beyond the Shadow of the Iron Curtain: How Women's Rights Movements View Repression As a Political Opportunity in Semi-Authoritarian States. the Case of Hungary.

Scholars have characterised right-wing populist and (semi-)authoritarian regimes as gendered, describing their deep patriarchal nature. Although commonly accepted, this gendered aspect of populism has not been scholarly investigated in terms of gendered consequences. These regimes and their combination have also been characterised as repressive, especially due to their gendered nature, because this nature means that one gender is favoured at the expense of the other(s). In this paper, these gendered repressive tactics are explored along with the resistance mechanisms that women’s rights movements employ to resist. To do so, the case of Hungary has been selected based on the fact that it is well documented, but also because the country is in the centre of Europe, which means that influences and is influenced by numerous states that vouch for human rights and democratic principles. The research aims to answer the question of how women’s rights movements view repression as a political opportunity in order to mobilise. To answer, six repressive state tactics are identified, and four movement mobilisation mechanisms are selected and researched in a way that unveils the causal pathway from repression to resistance. The repressive tactics are gender inequality, restrictive reproductive policies, fostering of gender-based violence, antifeminist rhetoric, restrictive policies on education and on social movement mobilisation, and the mobilising mechanisms are network building, framing and communication of narratives, backlash, and outrage tactics, and international impact. The paper verified the causal relation between repression and mobilisation and uncovered that based on the type of repression different mechanisms are utilised, in numerous ways and intensities. The Hungarian women’s rights movement is proven to prefer employing mild mechanisms instead of more intense ones, without that diminishing the fact that it does use repression as an incentive for mobilisation.