Edited by Andrea Krizsán

Domestic violence, one of the most prevalent forms of gender-based violence, is a policy ield where spectacular progress took place worldwide in the last decades. Importantly the issue was put on the policy agenda across diferent regions and countries almost invariably by women’s movements (Htun and Weldon 2012). Awareness of domestic violence as a policy issue which needs state intervention has also showed spectacular progress in the last decade or so in most countries of Central and Eastern Europe. Yet, considerable variety emerges in the achieved policy outputs and the extent to which these outputs are gender equality sensitive and serve the interests of women victims/survivors (Krizsan and Popa 2014). his volume asks how this variation can be connected to women’s movements in the region. Is women’s rights advocacy and autonomous women’s organizing an equally important component of progress in countries of this region?

The literature on women’s movements in the region has widely discussed their weakness and dependency on foreign donors, in the context of transition to democracy. Weak capacity to mobilize as well as to generate policy change, vulnerability to the inluence of foreign donor agendas, as well as the wide refusal of the feminist label because of its association with the communist project, were among the reasons for skepticism. he very existence and potential of women’s movements was sometimes questioned (McBride and Mazur 2010, Stetson and Mazur 1995, Jaquette and Wolchik 1998, Rueschemeyer 1993, Einhorn 1993). Even though major progress in policies advancing women’s rights took place in the irst two decades after the transition, two main caveats were attached to this progress. On the one hand, the newly adopted policies were attributed to international influence coming from global and regional human rights instruments as well as conditionality linked to European Union accession, rather than women’s rights activism and women’s movements’ mobilization (Avdeyeva 2007, Miroiu 2004). On the other hand, research has shown that many policies were adopted for window-dressing purposes, their implementation failed, was limited or oppositional to the initial gender equality intents, thus, ultimately minimizing their potential for gender transformation. Indeed, gender policies remained largely disconnected from domestic realities and domestic women’s rights advocacy.

While these trends may apply in general terms to post-communist countries, recent research has challenged the idea of regional homogeneity and is increasingly pointing to diversity in terms of gender equality policy processes and their outputs across the diferent countries of the region (Krizsan et al. 2010). In some countries of the region there is a staggering lack of gender equality progress, while other countries are deinitely faring better, adopting better policies, having more participatory policy processes and as a result are better at implementing gender policies. Furthermore, some gender policy issues are discussed more than others, and some bring more gender equality progress than others. Some gendered issues are discussed in more gendered ways, others in either non-gendered or outright hostile ways. he signiicant variation between countries points to the crucial inluence of domestic factors on gender policy change: most importantly for this volume the signiicance of domestic women’s movements and their interactions with domestic structures.

This volume aims to contribute to the debate on gender policy change in Central and Eastern Europe by placing the emphasis on the importance and relevance of domestic policy dynamics, and primarily domestic women’s rights advocacy vis-a-vis the state for understanding gender equality policy change in various countries of the region. It aims to challenge the general understanding about the weakness and lack of capacity of women’s groups for successfully advocating for policy change, and to highlight various domestic dynamics in diferent countries that have led to gender equality sensitive change and success. Our starting point in the volume is that diverse women’s movements exist in the region, and that they are the main protagonists of policy change in this ield in multiple and diferently eicient ways.

Central European University in 2012-2013.