Download full text
(external source)
Citation Suggestion
Please use the following Persistent Identifier (PID) to cite this document:
https://doi.org/10.1017/S2045381721000186
Exports for your reference manager
Competitive mimicry: The socialization of antifeminist NGOs into the United Nations
[journal article]
Abstract 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 transnatio... view more
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.... view less
Keywords
UNO; non-governmental organization; conservatism; human rights; woman; polarization
Classification
Organizational Sociology
Women's Studies, Feminist Studies, Gender Studies
Free Keywords
NGOs; antifeminist backlash; moralizing discourse; socialization
Document language
English
Publication Year
2022
Page/Pages
p. 379-400
Journal
Global Constitutionalism: Human Rights, Democracy and the Rule of Law, 11 (2022) 3
ISSN
2045-3825
Status
Published Version; peer reviewed