Book Roundtable: When Authoritarians Speak the Language of Emancipation

What happens when authoritarian regimes appropriate the language of emancipation? In Russia and Serbia, authoritarian rulers have spent more than a decade portraying gender equality as a form of Western neo-colonialism and themselves as defenders of national sovereignty and “traditional values.” In doing so, they have turned arguments about Western domination, knowledge production and resistance against those they were originally meant to empower.

Under Authoritarian Eyes asks what this does to feminist politics – and how it should change the way we think about transnational feminist solidarity. Drawing on more than 70 interviews with feminists across different generations in Russia and Serbia, alongside feminist publications, memoirs and archival material, the book shows how feminists radically shift their priorities and strategies when emancipatory ideas become tools of authoritarian legitimation.

Rather than understanding transnational feminism primarily through the divide between a hegemonic West and its “Others", the feminists at the centre of the book emphasise solidarity, reciprocity and agency. Their lived experiences invite us not to abandon critical approaches to power, but to rethink where the relevant power dimension lies as authoritarianism rises – including between Russia and the countries of its former empire.

Tracing these developments in the decade preceding Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine, Under Authoritarian Eyes ultimately asks: how can feminist critique remain emancipatory when authoritarian actors co-opt its central concepts?

Leandra Bias is a Swiss National Science Foundation Ambizione Fellow at the University of Fribourg, Switzerland, where she leads a project on how elites in Russia and Ukraine instrumentalise gender for legitimacy. Generally, her research studies how gender, (de-)democratization, and political violence interact with each other with a focus on former communist Europe. She is the recipient of the European Consortium for Political Research 2023 Joni Lovenduski PhD Prize.