Periodic Reporting for period 2 - FIERCE (Feminist Movements Revitalizing Democracy in Europe)
Période du rapport: 2023-12-01 au 2025-08-31
Recently rising social and economic inequalities, political disaffection, the political influence of radical and populist right & anti-gender actors and their positions are shaping debates and threatening democratic values of equality and inclusion. The FIERCE project investigated feminist movements and anti-gender/anti-feminist actors and mobilisations through 3 different research streams, and with an innovative co-creational approach conducted together with feminist organisations and groups. The research referred to 3 methodological insights: Interviews, Critical Frame Analysis and Discourse Network Analysis. Data collection included: parliamentary debates and campaigns, semi-structured interviews and newspaper articles. Through the 3 strands of research, FIERCE captured feminist and anti-gender/anti-feminist discourses, practices and actions during the period between 2010-2023 in the fields of labour market, health and reproductive rights, LGBTQ+ rights, migration and gender-based violence in the 8 case studies, representing a wide variety of country contexts. The project’s action-research component was realised through co-creation laboratories, FIERCE actions, the transnational FIERCE network and FIERCE’s winter school, bringing together a diverse range of feminist actors and allies. These activities enabled the creation and strengthening of alliances between feminist and LGBTIQ+ organisations and researchers and facilitated the collection of examples of innovative democratic actions implemented by feminist movements. Knowledge created inside these co-creation processes translated into the Feminist online course, a free-access programme bridging research and activism. It also fed into the development of a policy toolkit to help policymakers and European institutions support gender equality, feminist movements, and innovative democratic practices with the aim of countering far-right & anti-gender movements.
A mapping of actors, with timelines of most salient gender issues and debates in each country, over the period 2010-23, was realised. To identify how gender issues and debates are framed, communicated, and disseminated by feminists on the one side and anti-gender/anti-feminists on the other, policy documents, social movement texts, and interviews were collected. Relevant campaigns were identified and selected for analysis. 41 interviews have been conducted with anti-gender/anti-feminist actors and policy makers and 239 interviews conducted with feminist activists and policy makers/actors, 161 social media campaigns were analysed for anti-gender/anti-feminist actors and feminist actors alongside 170 parliamentary debates. Apart from the open access reports, FIERCE released in 2025 the edited volume Anti-Gender Mobilizations in Europe and the Feminist Response: The action oriented activities of the project involved: 1) the realisation of three cycles of national and transnational Lab sessions, which in total involved approximately 400 participants 2) The implementation of 18 FIERCE Actions 3)The development of an online feminist self-paced course 4) The creation of a feminist network bringing together more than 50 participants from eight European countries and 5) the preparation of a policy toolkit including 2 factsheets and a policy brief. The results were presented in public during FIERCE’s final conference held in Brussels, engaging more than 160 participants online and onsite.
The FIERCE project focuses on expanding knowledge about the strategies and positions of the anti-feminist and anti-gender movements and more broadly understood, the far right. At the same time, the project looks into feminist movements' responses to the challenges posed by the gender equality+ backlash. Previous research has mostly studied anti-gender and anti-feminism movements separately from feminist responses and reactions. This is a knowledge gap that FIERCE strived to bridge. The project’s reports under WP1 and WP2 already highlighted the complex and new network of actors on both sides. They also disclosed the lack of more structured knowledge about the specific action repertoires, strategies, organisation, policy demands and achievements that took place over time, giving this field a genuine transnational character. FIERCE addressed the issues above concurrently exploring actors and dynamics within the project framework and in diverse settings, using tasks based on critical framing analysis of debates and campaigns, interviews, discourse network analysis. In addition, the multidimensional, multi-level comparative analysis across eight country cases and addressing five thematic areas as well as the cross-cutting dimension of intersectionality provided a novel level of complexity to the analysis of policy framing, strategies, agenda-setting and influence. At the same the combination of grounded theory and research and co-participatory research operationalised through national and transnational Labs proved both useful and effective in understanding and discussing the interplay of actions and reactions between anti-gender, anti-feminist actors, and feminist movements across the various contexts represented in the project. It also allowed to reveal some of the main controversies at stake not only between, but also amongst the actors under scientific scrutiny. To sum up, FIERCE project strived to provide new insights into the capacity, practices, and strategies of the feminist movements for revitalising democratic processes and democratic innovation. The knowledge produced addresses both structural constraints as well as internal tensions, highlighting the importance and challenges of intersectional inclusiveness, solidarities, and hybrid activism (moving beyond dichotomies), thus shedding new light on the democratic dynamics of the movements.