The gender politics of Liberal International Order contestation. A research agenda

Since the end of the Cold War, the Liberal International Order (LIO), understood as a Weberian ideal type of world order, has organized international security, economic, and human rights governance, though never without contestation. Adopting a constructivist and neo-institutionalist framework, this research treats the LIO as an institution constituted by specific norms and values, among which a distinct normative project on gender politics is identified, grounded in liberal assumptions. While politics related to gender has not traditionally been a core field of IR, the role that it has assumed in the Liberal International Order has made it a key element of contestation of the Order itself. This research conceptualizes and develops a research agenda for the gender politics of LIO contestation, proposing an analytical framework based on a typology along two axes: the goal of contestation toward the LIO itself and the orientation of the gender politics promoted relative to the LIO's own normative baseline, and identifying key dimensions and actors of the contestation to analyze. Drawing on discourse analysis of primary documents, the research empirically identifies the LIO's fundamental gender-politics norms and their pervasiveness. The research also proposes the illustrative case study of the European anti-gender movement, analyzed mainly through secondary sources as an instance of conservative-revisionist, discursively and institutionally internal contestation of the LIO.