Where There is Power, There Is Resistance: Re-interpreting Bulgaria’s Response to the Istanbul Convention on Preventing Gender-based Violence

• In Event: International and State Power in Gender and Sexual Violence Prevention in the Postsocialist "East"

Abstract

The Council of Europe Convention on Preventing and Combating Violence Against Women and Domestic Violence, better known as the Istanbul Convention, is a human rights treaty of the Council of Europe opposing violence against women and domestic violence. The convention ratification debates in 2018 and 2019, illuminated major differences between Europe’s West and East, as former socialist countries such as Bulgaria, Czech Republic, Slovakia, and Hungary rejected the document and became examples par excellence of “backward” societies and sites to observe the mobilization of conservative and violent forces leading to the rejection of the convention. Focusing on the Bulgarian case, this presentation offers an alternative explanation for these countries’ dissident. Drawing from social psychology, archival media and legal documents, and published opinions of ordinary Bulgarians, the study suggests that the Istanbul Convention imposed Anglophonic and West-centric language and notions of gender/sexuality that extended historical hegemonic Western power and causing major rupture of individual and group identifications in countries such as Bulgaria. Bulgarian political, legal, and social resistance was also a claim to self- agency, autonomy, and cultural self-preservation against external power and amid the extraordinary cultural and political changes continuously rupturing that society experiencing post-Ottomanism, Western European colonial attitudes and politics, monarchism, Soviet domination, state socialism, post-socialist capitalism, globalization, and neoliberalism within the span of a century.

Author

• Miglena S Todorova, U of Toronto (Canada)