Antifeminist mobilisation is growing in the United Nations. It is led by a coalition of certain post-Soviet, Catholic, and Islamic states; the United States; the Vatican; conservative nongovernmental organisations, occasionally joined by the Organisation for Islamic Cooperation, the League of Arab States, the UN Africa Group, and the G77. Uniting them is the aim of restoring the ‘natural family’ and opposing ‘gender ideology’. The group has become increasingly strategic, and its impact can already be seen in a number of UN fora, including the Security Council. By surveying feminist notions of backlash and comparing them to Alter and Zürn’s definition of ‘backlash politics’, the article gauges whether the group’s activities can be characterised as such politics. The conclusion is that they can, suggesting that we are looking at a group with the potential to alter not only the global course of women’s rights but also how politics is done within the UN.

The article observes that women's rights politics in the United Nations are caught in full-scale polarization between feminist and conservative non-governmental organizations (NGOs), particularly visible in their fights over institutional spaces and language. It then sets out to elucidate the process by which this polarization came about. It first ties it to specific reasons for which conservative NGOs entered the UN; namely, their intent to halt and reverse the progress of women's rights. Next, the article observes that this intent has given birth to a specific style of conservative NGOs' advocacy: backlash advocacy. This advocacy differs from regular advocacy in that it does not target only UN decision-makers, but also a rival NGO group and its normative record. Polarization results from feminist NGOs' defensively reciprocating this attack. The article contributes to the literature on international organization (IO)–NGO relations by specifying why conservative NGOs, considered unlikely IO utilizers, end up actively using the UN and by showing that this diversification in NGOs' utilization of the UN can have detrimental rather than positive institutional effects. The article also invites feminist NGOs to be more aware of the political dynamic that now entraps them, and to tailor their future strategies accordingly.

This article examines the causes of criminalization of forced marriage in European countries. The first part of the article locates the debate on forced marriage within the wider discourse of immigration, national identity, and women’s rights. The second part uses qualitative comparative analysis to analyze 29 European nations, 20 of which criminalized forced marriage. Our findings indicate that criminalization of forced marriage emerges out of a complex set of conditions and the causal recipes differ for early (before 2013) and late adopters (after 2013) of the policy of criminalization. For nations in which criminalization policy was adopted before 2013, the intermingling of world cultural, feminist, and right-wing policies is the main causal mechanism. For the late adopters, a similar causal path fails to emerge indicating that criminalization became normative in European policy environment. In other words, late adopters simply mimic others.

The majority of countries in the world have laws setting the minimum age of marriage at 18 years old. This is a global legislative trend that intensified greatly in the 1990s. What explains this trend? To answer this question, I conduct quantitative analyses of factors influencing legislation setting the minimum age of marriage at 18. I analyse time-series data for 167 countries from 1965 to 2015 to examine which countries were early adopters of legislation. Drawing on world society theory, I theorise that global level institutionalisation of norms concerning women and children is the key to understand the passing of minimum age of marriage laws. Findings indicate that world cultural scripts and the presence of women legislators are the main impetus behind the fight against child marriage. Countries with a Muslim majority are less likely to pass laws setting the minimum age of marriage at 18.

Conservative NGOs contesting women’s rights in the United Nations are on the rise, and their activity is increasingly described as an antifeminist backlash. This article focuses a new theoretical lens on this development: socialization. It argues that conservative NGOs’ socialization into transnational practices and the United Nations has played a significant part in facilitating the antifeminist backlash. To support this claim, the article examines socialization comprehensively, applying several analytical angles: its definition, directionality, mechanism, degree and effects. It also treats conservative NGOs’ socialization as both a process and an outcome. As a process, it unfolds horizontally, by conservative NGOs competitively mimicking feminist NGOs in two domains in particular: their manner of transnational organizing and their skilful use of the UN human rights framework. The article finds that conservative NGOs have socialized into transnational NGO practices and the regulative institutional rules of the United Nations, but not into all its constitutive norms. The chief effect of this kind of socialization is polarization. The article singles out and empirically illustrates three of its manifestations: the struggle for institutional spaces; zero-sum politics based on a sense of existential threat; and the use of a strong moralizing discourse.