Decentring Gender-Based Violence: Central and Eastern European Perspectives in International Relations
Abstract
This introductory article advances a feminist rethinking of gender-based violence (GBV) from the perspective of Central and Eastern Europe (CEE). Refusing to treat the region as a site of delayed development or exceptional violence, we position CEE as a source of theoretical insights for International Relations and feminist scholarship. Drawing on debates on the continuum of violence, intersectionality, feminist political economy, and the politics of knowledge production, we conceptualise GBV as a constitutive feature of contemporary political orders. We argue that violence operates across interconnected legal, institutional, economic, discursive, and military domains and must be understood in relation to broader processes of war, democratic backsliding, geopolitical contestation, and the global polycrisis. The article further reflects on the ethical and political challenges of feminist knowledge production in times of ongoing conflict and proposes solidarity, care, and pluriversality as key analytical and political horizons for future research on gendered violence.
Keywords
anti-gender politics, gender, gender-based violence, knowledge production, epistemic politics, Central and Eastern Europe, polycrisis, patriarchy, decentering Europe
Author Biography
Maryna Shevtsova
Dr. Maryna Shevtsova is a Senior Postdoctoral Fellow of the Research Foundation – Flanders (FWO) at KU Leuven. She holds a PhD in Political Science from Humboldt University of Berlin and has previously been affiliated with the University of Ljubljana, Lund University, and the University of Florida as an EUTOPIA, Swedish Institute, and Fulbright fellow. Her research focuses on gender and sexuality politics, feminist security studies, anti-gender movements, migration, and post-conflict reconstruction, with a particular focus on Central and Eastern Europe and the post-Soviet region. She has published extensively on LGBTQ rights, feminist foreign policy, queer migration, and Russian influence in the region.
Julia Sachseder
Dr. Julia Sachseder is Principal Investigator of the ClimPeace project (the Austrian Academy of Sciences) at the Department of Political Science at the University of Vienna, and holds a Visiting Professorship in the Department of Gender Studies at CEU. She has a PhD in Political Science from the University of Vienna, with various affiliations with, e.g., the Universidad de los Andes and the Austrian Institute for International Affairs. Her research explores the intersections of the global political economy and coloniality in (re)producing or transforming political, environmental, and border violence. She further examines the roles of state, private and corporate actors in contexts of peace and conflict. Julia has published extensively on peace and conflict, the political economy of sexual violence, border politics, Latin America and Europe.