2026 - 2028: Feminist Foreign Policy Analysis in Central and Eastern Europe at Wartime (GAČR)

A clash over gender norms has been central to many current crises in international politics, ranging from democratic backsliding and regression of women’s rights to the rise of authoritarianism. However, never before have gender norms been as politicised and instrumentalised in foreign policy as in the case of the war on Ukraine that Russia claims to wage to protect the ‘Russian world’ from ‘LGBT and gender ideologies’ originating from the ‘decadent West’. As the European continent has become one of the major battlefields of the ontestation over gender norms, the need to understand their role in both domestic politics and foreign policies in the shifting power configurations on the global level has thus become more salient than ever. Drawing on the emerging subfield of feminist foreign policy analysis (FFPA) (Aggestam and True eds. 2024), the project interrogates how four countries with different gender regimes, namely Germany, the Czechia, Ukraine and Russia, incorporate these regimes in their foreign policies following Russia’s 2022 full-fledged invasion of Ukraine.