In recent years, conservative governments and their civil society allies have undermined international women’s rights treaties and SOGI rights initiatives and challenged domestic rights protections. The articles in this special issue grapple with these trends by analysing the ideologies, discourses, and strategies of contemporary anti-feminism in global and comparative contexts. Several prominent patterns emerge: the core significance of social hierarchy and biological essentialism to anti-feminist conservative thought; the polarizing demonization of feminists by religious conservatives and populist nationalists; the appropriation of rights discourses and advocacy tactics by anti-feminist campaigns; and the strategic importance of law and legal language as a terrain of rights contestation. Taken together, this research suggests that anti-feminism is not incidental to reactionary anti-democratic politics, but instead a constitutive element of political movements that seek to naturalize inequality and legally enforce conformity with conservative social norms.

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.

The rise of patriarchal populist leaders over the past decade has fortified a long-standing campaign by conservative governments and advocacy groups to undermine women’s international human rights. Their efforts have increasingly focused on revising language as a means to challenge and weaken the international norms and organizations essential to women’s and girls’ equality and health. Through our textual analysis of UN records, governmental and nongovernmental publications, media coverage of disputes over language, and background interviews with activists, we identify and delineate the significance of this ‘norm spoiling’ strategy and trace its expansion during the Trump administration. We find that women’s rights challengers have pursued three distinct spoiling tactics based in language: controlling what women’s rights advocates can say through policies such as the United States’ ‘global gag rule’; altering the meaning of women’s rights by reframing them as an attack on other rights, such as religious freedom; and deleting foundational words, such as ‘gender’ and ‘sexual and reproductive health and rights’, from international agreements. The role of language in today’s patriarchal populism goes beyond populist leaders’ speeches, rallies and tweets. Their governments and allies systematically control, alter or delete words central to women’s rights.

This article addresses the conservative opposition to Iceland’s recently liberalised abortion laws. It argues that the opposition belongs to a long and rich history of conservatives willing to employ diverse measures to oppose progress. It further claims that the rhetoric employed has strong roots in the conservative tradition. This is demonstrated by the fact that the discourse in Iceland fits within Hirschman’s analytical framework, through which he analyses the main arguments of conservatives in the past. Icelandic conservatives argued that the proposed legislation would lead to the perverse effect that healthy foetuses would be aborted, that the legislation was futile, as the system was already well-functioning, and that it would jeopardise women by giving them the sole responsibility of deciding whether to terminate a pregnancy. The article sheds light on the underlying resistance to women’s bodily autonomy and right to self-determination. It also illustrates the importance of hierarchy and conservatism’s opposition to equality that is perceived to be taken too far. In light of global trends, where conservatives have tried to implement policies that are hostile towards women and women’s interests, it is important to explore national contexts where legislative success has been achieved despite global backlash.

This article argues that the tokenistic appropriation of categories such as gender and race have deprived them of their radical and transformative political and practical roots while facilitating their commodification as a luxury product that is consumed by the depoliticized and privileged. Such (ab)use of gender, as an analytical tool, similar to race and class, has been on the rise within progressive circles. However, with the rise of alt-right populism claiming to know and fight ‘feminism’, as well as the commodification of feminism by progressives, now more than ever a decolonial social reproductive theory is needed to help understand and delineate how women are oppressed in a plethora of intersectional ways based on race, class and ability among other traits, while engaging the specific material historical-constitutive structures, judicial-political and socio-economic dimensions of the world order, as well as the emergence of right-wing populism as white heteronormative backlash. This article argues for a feminist decolonial social reproductive theory that sees gender and racial hierarchy as part of capital’s dynamism (a product), which transforms the natural, social and material world, restructuring and evolving for the ordered extraction of surplus. Although this process may differ temporally and geographically, it nonetheless results in a constellation of class exploitation, governance and struggle that facilitates right-wing backlash and undermines the left’s response, thus obviating the need for decolonial social reproductive theory.

Global regulatory competition is a recent phenomenon that confronts us in various different fields, ranging from food and chemical safety to climate change, and animal welfare to environmental law. The digital economy is not immune to this trend, and it seems highly unlikely that this will soon come to an end when we consider the radical differences between the European Union and the United States with respect to the importance they assign to the right to privacy and the right to freedom of speech. Nevertheless, despite their differences in content, it can be contended that they both tend to disregard the interest of others even though they have enough resources at their disposal to take them seriously. This becomes visible when the recent case law of the CJEU and the recent regulations such as the GDPR and the US CLOUD Act are taken into account. Their similar attitude to regulating for the globe raises the question of whether we are confronted with a new type of Eurocentrism, which is more contracted and introverted than the previous expansionist version. The article argues that unilateralism should be a selfless one and that it should necessarily consider outsiders if it is to acquire legitimacy.

This article offers a critical discussion of two influential positions in contemporary legal and political theory, which will be referred to as ‘political constitutionalism’ and ‘strong popular sovereignty’. Despite their important differences, both share a sceptical approach to the dominant constitutional practice in liberal democracies, hence they are brought together here under the term ‘weak constitutionalism’. They both highlight the political dimension of the constitution, arguing that democratic legitimacy requires institutional arrangements that give the people and/or their representatives the last word in settling fundamental issues of political morality. By contrast, this article underlines the legal dimension of the constitution as the repository of the moral principles that make possible a practice of public justification in constitutional states. It is from this second constitutional dimension that the critical arguments are developed, both against the desire to take the constitution away from the courts and the aspiration to recognize the constituent power as pre-legal constitution-making faculty.

The notion of legal space is increasingly being used to address the challenges of multiple and overlapping spheres of legality that the notion of legal order cannot capture. This article shows how legal space can serve as an alternative (or at least complementary) concept to legal order in view of the limitations of the latter. It sketches out a notion of legal space that is inspired by topology, an approach that analyses the qualitative nature of spaces. It is concerned with understanding the ways in which legalities interact, rather than with ‘measuring’ their spatial dimensions. A topology-inspired approach to legal space can contribute to conceptualizing, in a novel manner, the inner structure of legal spaces, the boundaries of these spaces and their interrelations with other spaces. It offers an analytical toolkit for better understanding multiple legalities, providing categories to characterize sets of legal elements as well as phenomena such as overlaps and hybridity. It is conceptually less constrained than the concept of legal order, and thus allows us to address various bodies of law ranging from classical domestic law, EU law and international law to global administrative law, corporate social responsibility law, platform law and lex sportiva.

This article adds nuance to current understandings of the relationship between the populist leader and the public by using the concept of trust. Merging the literature on populism with the growing scholarship on trust from philosophy, psychology and other social sciences, it argues that following on from the populist leader’s appeals to similarity, the populist–public relationship involves an intertwining of two forms of public trust: the public’s trust in the populist and the public’s trust in itself (what we term ‘public self-trust’). Contrary to what political and constitutional theorists have recognized as a tension between public self-trust and the public’s trust in its political representatives, we contend based on the scholarship on trust that in the populist–public relationship these two forms of trust can be mutually reinforcing. This mutual reinforcement, we suggest, has the potential to create a positive feedback loop of public trust that, given the value of public trust to political leaders, empowers the populist.