The workshop asked how the feminist gains of the 2010s are being simultaneously eroded and contested — through both backlash and resistance — across international institutions, conflict zones, and transnational movements, and what this reveals about the gendered foundations of the current international order.

Three papers were presented, each approaching the question from a strikingly different vantage point.

Christa Florence Lucie Martinot (Yonsei University) opened with a comparative study of wartime gender-based violence in East Asia, examining the Rape of Nanjing, the Comfort Women system, and the Lai Dai Han across China-Japan, Korea-Japan, and Vietnam-Korea relations. The paper argued that wartime sexual violence does not end with conflict resolution but perpetuates across scales from individual trauma, to societal memory politics, to interstate diplomac. It conceptualizes and traces empirically how the legacies of violence shape the limits of reconciliation between states decades after the violence itself occurred.

Isha Lakhanpuria (Panjab University, Chandigarh) presented ethnographic fieldwork from Kashmir, arguing for a broader understanding of women's agency in conflict settings beyond visible activism and protest. Drawing on doctoral fieldwork conducted amid ongoing surveillance and political uncertainty, the paper showed how women continue to exercise meaningful choice through education, employment, and community participation, even as fear reshapes, rather than eliminates, their presence in public life.

Dandara de Souza Araujo (State University of Rio de Janeiro) closed the session with an analysis of the far right's instrumentalization of anti-feminist rhetoric as a coordinated political strategy against the liberal international order. Tracing examples from Argentina, Brazil, and the United States to recent contestation over gender language at COP30 and the UN Commission on the Status of Women, the paper argued that attacks on feminism function as a means for far-right actors to position themselves as anti-establishment alternatives.

Together, the three papers offered strikingly different entry points — historical memory diplomacy, everyday agency under surveillance, and organized political backlash — that converged on a shared insight: the durability of feminist gains depends as much on what happens quietly, within institutions and everyday life, as on what is visible in headlines and formal declarations.

Special thanks to Veronica Slaviero for joining the workshop as the discussant and providing insightful comments and questions to all the participants.

RC19 is grateful to IPSA for its support in making this workshop possible, and looks forward to continuing these conversations with all three presenters at the IPSA World Congress in Rome next summer!