Recent research by Dr Nitasha Kaul, Associate Professor (Reader) in Politics and International Relations at the Centre for the Study of Democracy (CSD), was quoted in an article in the influential magazine Foreign Affairs.
The article 'Revenge of the patriarchs: Why autocrats fear women' by Erica Chenoweth and Zoe Marks, makes a strong case for why democratic backsliding and gender need to be understood together and it lists specific policy proposals for the Biden administration to do this. It prominently highlights Dr Nitasha Kaul's research on the use of misogyny as a political strategy to undermine democracy.
Foreign Affairs (since 1922) is an American magazine of international relations and U.S. foreign policy published by the Council on Foreign Relations, and is considered one of the United States' most influential foreign policy magazines.
Dr Kaul has theorised how electorally legitimated leaders in multiple democracies across the global north and south, in the west and non-west, and with different majority religions, all use specific versions of misogyny to increase support for their regressive agendas. In the article, Dr Kaul describes how these leaders - Trump, Modi, Bolsonaro, Duterte, and Erdogan - have “push[ed] anxious and insecure nationalisms” which “punish and dehumanize feminists.”
Her argument is also cited on the counterpart to the violent sexist rhetoric, the ‘paternalistic misogyny’. She said: “While Trump, Bolsonaro and Duterte have most explicitly sexualised and objectified women, projecting themselves as profusely virile and predatory, [Indian Prime Minister Narendra] Modi and Erdogan have promoted themselves as protective, and occasionally even renunciatory, father figures…to keep women and minorities in their place…[They] are at times deeply and overtly misogynist, and yet at other times use progressive gender talk to promote regressive gender agendas.”
Dr Kaul has long worked on questions of gender and power as they intersect with political legitimacy, human rights and democracy.
Read Dr Nitasha Kaul’s original article on the International Studies Review website and the Foreign Affairs article.
