From Gendered Escalations to War: Gender governance as wartime crisis management in Russia and Ukraine

• In Event: Demographic Anxieties

Abstract

Gender politics has become an active and contentious terrain shaping relations between Russia and Ukraine in the post-Soviet period. While past research contends that gender politics in the two countries have been organized around an “escalatory cycle” (Popova and Shevel 2024) that contributed to Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022 (Bluth forthcoming), this paper analyzes the development and implications of state policies and rhetoric around gender and sexuality during wartime. Findings reveal gender politics as a site of wartime crisis management: as Ukraine adopts liberal reforms to facilitate European integration and secure autonomy from Russia, Russia has doubled down on “traditional family values” to justify military aggression as defense of the nation’s future. At the same time, this dynamic produces profound internal contradictions within Ukraine: the same war that has reignited Ukraine’s push toward liberal Europe has simultaneously stalled the implementation of liberal gender norms and generated new gendered inequalities amid a severe demographic crisis driven by mass displacement and casualties. This study enhances our understanding of how discourse and policies about gender and sexuality shape and are shaped by war and its existential threats to national continuity and population survival.

Author

• Natasha Bluth, University of California-Los Angeles