By the late 1990s, a third avenue for global feminist intervention became available when foreign ministries, after many years of feminist advocacy, grew concerned with the trafficking in persons, especially women and children. For many U. S. and European governments, the issue emerged as a practical problem as the num­ber of prostitutes/sex workers from Southeast […]

Whereas scarce financial resources can limit this kind of transnational feminist advocacy, the global feminist alliance with human rights organizations, state and non-state development agencies, and large charitable foundations created the op­portunity to expand and to distribute much greater amounts of money to lo­cal women’s organizations. Around the world, instead of being marginalized to receiving […]

The consensus among many feminists on the composite concept of violence against women signaled new opportunities, perhaps even an obligation, for femi­nists from the Global North and West to attend to women and women’s organiz­ing in other places. They believed that “all women face gender violence,” albeit different forms, and the solidarity created by the […]

In Russia and beyond, the consensus on global feminism legitimated three new types of interventions to foster the mobilization of activists into groups and social movements working against gender violence: transnational feminist networking, the funding of women’s rights advocacy through feminist alliances with donors, and states’ preemption of global feminism in initiatives against trafficking.

E ven as the new Russia was inhospitable to global feminism, liberaliza­tion and then the collapse of the Soviet regime opened Russia to a variety of global interventions designed to foster women’s mobilization, the first objective of global feminism. Some feminist foreigners and foreign women’s ad­vocacy groups came at the invitation of local groups hoping […]

In sum, despite the Soviet commitments to women’s emancipation, the new Rus­sia was not a hospitable environment for global feminist activism. While global feminists became united in their shared interest in combating violence against women, the Soviet haphazard and parafeminist response to gender violence gave way, in the 1990s, to the privatization of gender violence, […]

Underpinning this gendered process was a neotraditional gender ideology, a be­lief that physiology dictates that men are to be the strong providers and protec­tors and women the beautiful loving caretakers. A powerful force in the new Russia, this gender neotraditionalism has been part and parcel of the national­ism that came later to Russia than to […]

Gendered Transformation This privatization of gender violence in the 1990s was part of a larger gendered process across postcommunist societies in Central and Eastern Europe and Eur­asia (hereafter the “region”). Although moving the system toward a liberal de­mocracy where markets prevail was portrayed as a gender-neutral process—with the rhetoric of gender-neutral citizens and consumers—the consequences […]

Officially, the problems associated with trafficking in women—the exploitation of prostitution or coercive labor—did not exist until Gorbachev’s perestroika. Prostitution was neither legal nor criminalized, but penalized with a small fine.24 As coercion declined, prostitution was brought to the public consciousness by the 1986 publication of Yevgeny Dodolev’s Interdevochka (a book later made into a […]

By the 1990s, police were also ignoring cases of domestic violence (Human Rights Watch 1995; Human Rights Watch 1997; Johnson 2001). Entering the home and prosecuting domestic violence under the pretense of “hooliganism” became less justifiable, and more people lived in private (as in privately owned or non­communal) apartments. Despite the fact that there were […]