‘Feminism is framed as nothing less than a military strategy’

You originally assumed that female activists in Russia and Serbia feel co-opted by Western feminism. Why did they disagree so vehemently?

Primarily because this assumption was already totally obsolete at the time. They pushed back and, indeed, some of them were extremely annoyed. It is exactly this idea of Othering by the West that is constantly propagated by the individual regimes – particularly in relation to equality. They frame equality, feminism and queer rights not as something that also exists and is a campaigning issue in Russia and Serbia, but as something that the West imposes. In other words, there are two separate discourses and spheres of action: the regime’s general political discourse about the West, and the specific discourse within feminist theory that deals with Othering by the West. There is resonance between the two, however: ‘This is what the West wants; it oppresses us and silences our voices.’ And this is exactly why feminists push back so vigorously – because this resonance can be exploited by the regimes to dismiss criticism of their policies by claiming that it is foreign-imposed. At a time when authoritarianism was becoming more radicalised, resisting the regime’s discourse and not giving it more impetus was the key concern for feminists.

Authoritarian regimes often frame equality as a ‘foreign ideology’ in order to mobilise against the West. Why is the issue of gender roles so effective as a tool for consolidating power and creating enemy stereotypes?

In the cases of Russia and Serbia, I would call it a kind of ‘gateway drug’ because it seems so harmless at first. It is aimed at something that most people still react to instinctively: ‘This is about the family, and who is against the family?’ The regime’s narrative then continues: ‘The “West” wants to undermine our society here by driving up divorce rates and driving down births.’ Feminism is framed as nothing less than a military strategy – it goes that far in Russia. At the same time, the narrative operates through a reverse mechanism as well: many people still instinctively think that it won’t affect them. Initially, there’s an assumption that it will only impact the ‘extremists’ who are campaigning for queer rights; people assume that their own rights won’t be affected. That’s until a point is reached that we’re now seeing in Russia: the right to abortion, which was largely uncontested for decades, is coming under attack and a great many women are being impacted by this. But at first, only one message gets through: ‘This is about the family and protecting the family, and no one can argue with that. So it must be a good thing.’

Serbia wants to join the EU, while Russia rejects it – yet both of them employ similar methods against feminism. What connects the struggle for women’s rights in these two countries despite these diametrically opposed political goals?

This was the exciting aspect of this research: the seemingly significant differences are much smaller in reality. The key difference is simply that authoritarianism is more advanced in Russia than in Serbia. Due to the experiences of war in the 1990s, feminists in Serbia reacted much earlier to authoritarianism and anti-genderism than their Russian counterparts. The connection is that Serbia apparently still wants to join the EU, but this is deceptive – and feminists have noticed. The government exploits gender equality as a tool: they promote the message that they still believe in it, after a fashion, while actively obstructing it at the same time. What connects the two cases is that feminists very quickly identified this as a political strategy. That’s why they immediately made it a priority to resist the regime in discursive terms, instead of losing their way in ‘mock battles’ between Western and Eastern feminism over power positions. Under these circumstances, that was no longer a priority.

Public protest is largely suppressed in Russia but is at least partly tolerated in Serbia. Which forms of activism are feminists able to pursue in the two countries despite repression and intimidation?

I must start with a caveat because my fieldwork ended in 2017, so my comments on Russia, and indeed on Serbia, are no longer up-to-date. However, my data show why the discursive dimension turned out to be so important: it was one of the few remaining spaces. Even during the first interviews in 2014, repression was Russian feminists’ biggest concern. And even then, they were fearful of so-called offline activism. During the course of my research, all three gender studies centres that still existed in Russia were shut down. Their work shifted to service-based activities with victims of sexual and domestic violence, for example, and to art and literature. Very few women were still protesting in the streets.

This was more of a possibility in Serbia, but this was also where I experienced one of the most defining moments in my fieldwork. At a protest against rape as a weapon of war, around 20 silently protesting activists – the Women in Black – had twice that number of police escorting them and were completely screened off from the public. And yet despite the police presence, far-right activists took close-up photos of us and laid a wreath at our feet. For me, this shows that the police escort was intended to signal to the EU that Serbia has freedom of speech, while failing to provide effective protection. Granted, there is still far more scope in Serbia, but I know of several feminists who have left the movement due to this kind of attempted intimidation.

You describe the full-scale invasion of Ukraine as the ‘tragic culmination’ that has been years in the making in Russian politics. How is this war connected to women’s and LGBTQ+ rights?

By ‘tragic culmination’, I don’t mean that the war was inevitable. I want to trace the regime’s logic: equality is framed initially as a Western construct and then as a military tool to undermine the nation; as the final step, combating equality is identified as a foreign and security policy goal. The regime wants to push back and fend off this Western-imposed gender justice, this ‘gender ideology’, as it calls it. This logic is then built into security and foreign policy strategies. It has been taken to such extremes that the full-scale invasion was launched in part to repel this ‘gender ideology’. Putin himself has said that this is about guarding against these pseudo values, which, he claims, were already on the doorstep in Ukraine and now needed to be combated preventively – because if they penetrated into Russia, this would spell the end for the nation. The conflict is thus stylised as an existential war.

The interviewee was Angelika Markowska, trainee at ZOiS.

Dr Leandra Bias is a senior researcher and SNSF Ambizione fellow at the Department of European and Slavic Studies, University of Fribourg, Switzerland. Her research lies at the intersection of political science and gender studies and explores topics such as authoritarianism, anti-gender politics, foreign policy and feminist resistance.

Bias, Leandra. Under Authoritarian Eyes: Feminist Solidarity and Resistance in Russia and Serbia. Oxford University Press, 2026 (Open Access).