Introduction

This book is the product of an international and interdisciplinary conference that was held at the University of Sussex, UK, in 2018. The primary aim of the conference was to have a closer look at the reasons and impacts of numerous problematic legislation and policies that have been adopted across the world over the last decade and which had a destabilising effect on gender equality and justice. There have been some notable examples in this regard: Poland has reintroduced restriction on women’s right to abortion in 2020 (Calkin & Kaminska, 2020); the debate over the so-called foetal “heartbeat” bills in Taiwan (Liu, 2020) and the ephemeral unconstitutional anti-abortion state laws have been heated in the US and internationally since 2019 (Bakst, 2019; Evans & Narasimhan, 2020); Russia has partially decriminalised domestic violence in 2016, despite the outcry from activists and victims (Semukhina, 2020). As a pandemic swept Europe (Kuhar & Paternotte, 2017), the mobilisation of “anti-gender”, anti-feminist and misogynist discourse in the political and policy domains has its global resonance in, for instance, Brazil (Hunter & Power, 2019), India (Rothermel, 2020) and South Korea (Kim, 2021). In this light, it would not be an exaggeration to contend that the last decade marks a global crisis of gender equality.