sense in agreement with the ideology of the respective non-democratic regime.
[12] Finally, many civil society organizations, in particular those that are active in service provision, might be prone not only to tolerate but also to at least indirectly support non-democratic settings. For some of these organizations, serving the community through the provision of, e.g., health care or other welfare-related activities, comes first. However, civil society organizations whose prime objective is the provision of services for the community or specific constituencies are the main arena of civic engagement of women. Indeed, some of these organizations are founded, exclusively staffed, and governed by women. Furthermore, many of these organizations perceive themselves as non-political, as mingling with politics and politicians is sometimes seen as a “dirty business.” Therefore, the organizations and their women leaders tend to abstain from lobbying and advocacy. This is not to say that women’s organizations are generally distancing themselves from politics. The women’s movement and many initiatives and organizations around the world are a testament to the fact that since the nineteenth century women have increasingly taken the opportunity to become active and lobby on behalf of women’s rights and gender justice as important components of a strong democracy. But, the success story of the women’s movement should not distract our attention from the very fact that gender equality has not yet been achieved in any society around the world. Furthermore, it might also be the case that civil society organizations, in particular those with a female labor force and leadership, might not be working on behalf of a further advancement of gender justice and democracy but are, due to numerous reasons, indirectly or directly supporting authoritarianism and non-democratic rule.
With a special eye on women’s organizations and initiatives, this volume aims at investigating the nexus between civil society and democracy in non-democratic settings. By doing this, the chapters follow a research design and specific approach developed by Gabriele Wilde, which serves as the theoretical framework and normative underpinning of the majority of the contributions present in this volume.
3. [13] Gender relations and the authoritarian
Although the nexus between authoritarian politics and gender relations as an essential component and core of civil society is increasingly becoming the focus of political science analyses, it is still hardly understood theoretically or systematically. Just as gender relations were a focal point of research on democratic transformation – especially in institution-centered approaches, which focused on political participation and quotas (Norris and Inglehart 2001; Saxonberg 2000; Tripp 2001) – so too were gender relations in authoritarian regimes important for the empirical studies and country examples of authoritarianism research.
Such approaches typically conceptualize gender relations more in terms of the political order and less in terms of the social order. This is apparent, for instance, in the studies of Southeast Asia, which look at the reproduction of social elites in dynasties, scrutinize the political participation of certain women, or investigate the postcolonial legacy and significance of social diversity in gender (Robinson 1999). Other analyses have considered – against the background of the low level of political representation of women – the role of women in the construction of democratic oppositions (Fleschenberg and Hellmann-Rajanayagam 2009). Research on democratic transformation in Eastern Europe centered on how gender relations were changing on political and social levels; it examined the decreased institutional representation of women during the transition and the development of the political representation of women in democratization processes, which varied significantly across regions. In addition, gender research on Eastern Europe took up the problem of the trafficking of humans, especially women (Deutsche Gesellschaft für Osteuropakunde 2003; Hinterhuber, Fuchs, and Karbstein 2006; Hasibovic, Nickel, and Sticker 2007). Gender relations in autocracies have become the object of numerous political science analyses (for an overview, see Kreile 2009) in studies on the Middle East; scholars problematize specific and unequal forms of political participation; the degree of limited plurality (Linz 1964: 255); how political representation and parliaments function as mechanisms of authoritarian rule (Matz 1987); and the nexus between modernization, political emancipation move [14] ments, and democratization (Al-Rebholz 2014; Yesilyurt Gündüz 2002) with regard to the political and social position of women.
Beyond such studies – which focus above all on political rule and investigate how “electoral authoritarianism” (Schedler 2006) in voting procedures and parliament (Köllner 2008: 358ff.) impacts the gender order – current analyses of developments in Latin America and of the Arabic Spring have demonstrated that liberalization and formal democratization do not automatically lead to more equality or gender justice (Al-Ali 2012; Roy 2012; Antonakis 2017).
But explaining the sluggish democratization of social gender relations as the result of the stubborn persistence of patriarchal traditions and cultural religious foundations would be too easy.
Recent developments all over the world obviously show that the increasing authoritarian organizations and political power are shaking up not only societies striving for democracy. Civil society, a space for ideas of gender justice, plural gender identities, and equal life chances, is also diminishing, and its activities, responsibilities, and solidarities are limited by systemic mechanisms of discrimination, hierarchization, exclusion, and arrangements. According to this understanding, the institutions, parties, groups, and social organizations have a fundamental effect on civil society and the gender relations inscribed there. This is clearly what is happening by means of ideological, populist, discursive, and materialistic strategies, which offer traditional forms of gender identification and secure power and provide legitimation in authoritarian settings (Graf, Schneider, and Wilde 2017; Wilde and Meyer 2018).
Even in established European democracies the call has become louder for conservative family values, women’s maternal role is being emphasized, and women are being precluded from political representation; the significance and function of hierarchical-patriarchal gender orders, traditional power structures, and non-governmental actors have now become more than evident: they serve the reproduction of domination structures and the stability of authoritarian regimes, as well as the democratization of gender relations (Sauer 1996: 123f.).
But research on autocracy and right-wing populism has kept quiet about this topic – the nexus between autocracies and the inscription and constituting of gender relations as social power relations falls neither into theoretical nor empirical focus in political science research, which is preoccupied with the [15] structures and institutions of authoritarian systems, their core properties, functional logic, and maintenance mechanisms.
With the exception of post-structural and governmental approaches (Foucault 2000, 2001; Laclau and Mouffe 1991; Mouffe 2007), attention is only seldom turned to society, and even more seldom to gender, gender roles, and gender identities, a fact which has been criticized for a long time now by feminist autocracy research (Schneider and Wilde 2012). In light of political upheavals and changes aiming to turn civil society into a homogenous, enclosed entity and to inscribe gender relations as an essential and constitutive part of the questionable ideals of closed, non-pluralistic, and homophobic societies, mainstream research approaches and instruments for theoretical analyses are becoming increasingly outdated. The developing authoritarian inscriptions and mechanisms of control are far too complex to be explained by the distinction between unity parties or privileged parties and their fusions with different social organizations. And fundamental systematizations – such as Juan Jose Linz’s (1964, 2000) triad of totalitarian systems, authoritarian regimes, and democracies, which is still being used in comparative empirical research, for instance, on the regimes in the Middle East (Bank 2009) – are overwhelmed and hardly perceptive given the intersection of formal democratic institutions and principles of the rule of law with authoritarian practices, as well as in view of self-contained power and domination relations. Non-institutional mechanisms for securing domination and the social foundations of authoritarian rule have not been adequately considered conceptually or methodically (Köllner 2008: 362); though feminists have criticized autocracy research exactly for this reason,
