Infusing Illiberalism into World Culture: How the Illiberal Turn in the Global Gender Regime Is Being Conducted

Infusing Illiberalism into World Culture: How the Illiberal Turn in the Global Gender Regime Is Being Conducted

Amir Barjasteh

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Keywords: Illiberal normative ordering, World Culture, Global Gender Regime, Transitional Practices

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Illiberalism has gained vigorous momentum, significantly shaking the world polity. Despite different conceptualizations of the current state of global (dis)order,[1] there is little doubt that the post-Cold War international order is experiencing a loss of legitimacy amid multidirectional challenges. It is also evident that the nexus of power politics has shifted toward illiberal forces, which, as a result, are increasingly influencing global governance. But even as illiberal politics have become prevalent, their agents are making further calls for changes to rules and cultural principles within world society. To make such an overarching transformation possible, however, illiberal actors have sought not just to accumulate material and power capabilities but also to promote and institutionalize their expectations, cultural norms, and social purposes into international organizations and global governance infrastructures, and more broadly, into the global normative order. Taken together, such trends signal an ongoing project aimed at reordering global society illiberally.

This agenda underscores a significant cultural projection, whereby specific illiberal values and cultural principles are increasingly normalized and mainstreamed within global discourses. Consequently, these ideals are becoming codified into global scripts, a trajectory that can be characterized as the “illiberal turn” within the world cultural field. It is indeed critical because world culture—which refers to the shared meaning frameworks, principles, and standards that shape and legitimize global practices—is often promoted and diffused by international organizations and transnational institutions and adopted worldwide as presumably appropriate deeds in local contexts.[2] In this sense, rearticulating such an intersubjective framework of meaning, institutionalized in world culture, if completed, will enable illiberal forces to impose and stabilize a renewed social ontology that facilitates an overarching transformation.[3] Nonetheless, such transitional practices and re-culturalization mechanisms that make the illiberal turn possible remain unstudied.

This article adopts a cultural approach to illiberal world ordering and develops a (conceptual) framework for mapping the world-cultural agenda of illiberalism as a form of norm-transforming change. This framework examines the mechanisms and strategies through which illiberal actors seek to impose an alternative meaning system on global culture. Drawing on practice-oriented constructivist literature, the article first introduces the concept of “infusing illiberalism” to describe an ongoing process in world society in which illiberal values and cultural models are incorporated into global culture, gradually co-opting or replacing liberal elements of the normative order. In so doing, it complements the literature on the “diffusion” mechanism that emphasizes the spread of ideas aligned with an existing—often liberal—cultural framework and highlights how once-peripheral illiberal models can incrementally penetrate and convert core normative structures, thereby becoming mainstream.[4] In this regard, the conceptual framework of infusion elucidates the mechanisms through which even marginal cultural models are generalized or globalized, ultimately driving world cultural change. The article then bridges literature on macro-social liminality with the distinction, made by British IR scholarship, between primary and secondary institutions to map out phases and scopes of diverse strategic practices employed by illiberal actors to infuse their values—and more broadly, their ethos—into global modalities and formalities. To refine the framework and illustrate an illiberal regime of infusion practices, examples are provided from the illiberal global campaign against gender equality, which, because it is shared among all illiberal actors from diverse ideological camps, has been at the forefront of illiberalism’s infusion into world culture. The final section presents conclusions and implications, arguing that if this process reaches a critical threshold, the illiberal ethos may come to appear self-evident and appropriate within world society. This would then establish a durable background understanding for global governance and create institutional conditions for the top-down diffusion of illiberal models into diverse local contexts.

Changes in World Culture

Any transformation of the world order is shaped not only by power capabilities but also by changes in actors’ understanding, as well as their acceptance, of a particular intersubjective framework of meaning. As Constructivist IR literature notes, power and social purpose are joined to project political authority into the international system and shape an overarching “norm-transforming” change.[5] In other words, while realist scholars present the global redistribution of power via material resources as a key explanation for such transitions, it has been shown that “This is more than a power transition: It’s also about culture.”[6] In this respect, even though the ongoing illiberal movement accommodates a constellation of various anti-liberal ideologies,[7] cultural approaches to illiberalism highlight that these variations nonetheless share a common illiberal ethos, cultural frames, and prejudices.[8] As noted,[9] it is precisely in these values and ideals that differences between liberalism and illiberalism manifest.

Indeed, any change in culture takes considerable effort. Particularly when it comes to the current world culture, change is even more challenging, because world culture’s elaboration has been evidently tied to liberal models of sociopolitical organization since World War II,[10] with the liberal normative framework deeply “embedded” in the institutional settings of the world order.[11] However, as mentioned, global illiberalism is undeniably challenging the whole cultural apparatus, which is reflected in global institutional and normative contexts. As shown by scholars,[12] this trend has triggered doubts over the liberal order’s future and its associated normativity rooted in principles.

Given the longue durée of liberal hegemony in world culture, established constructivist theories on world cultural changes focus on differential rates of diffusionist change within the existing world culture, rather than the holistic transformation of the normatively liberal world culture. World Society theory, with the foundational argument that “World society is primarily a cultural field in which actors vary in their structural embeddedness” and hence generate variations of global models, pays much attention to decoupling and derivations of diffused models during localization processes.[13] In this view, illiberal actors are seen not as inherently exogenous forces (in relation to world culture) but rather culturally constructed as “others” and/or deviated in the mainly Western-led liberal world society.[14] Moreover, two lines of research, including norm dynamics and discursive institutionalism, shift the gaze toward contestations and changes in specific norms and ideational components of the whole, respectively.[15] Recent studies, also, have begun to trace a shift in the illiberal agenda from counter-trending in some areas to mainstreaming in several contexts—leading to a turn in world culture—as well as diverse aspects and consequences of such illiberal cultural models.[16]

A growing literature is problematizing this shift. For instance, Kubik, from a glocalization standpoint acknowledging the dialectic of particularization of the universe and universalization of the particular,[17] argues that challenges to liberalism should be seen as components of historically shaped illiberal forms of ethos in some particular areas that have been amplified by the systematic propagation of anti-liberal ideologies.[18] In this vein, the literature has documented the flows of illiberal models and norms across trusted networks.[19] In addition, it contends that the same mechanisms used for the institutionalization and diffusion of liberal norms also enable the rise of transnational networks composed of illiberal actors who gradually undermine and, ultimately, deinstitutionalize such liberal norms.[20] But these studies raise questions on the transitional processes through which once-embedded liberal institutional arrangements have been loosened, thereby enabling the spread of such illiberal models in the world polity. In other words, world cultural transitions themselves, and the practical ways through which such an illiberal shift is being organized and directed in particular, should be elaborated, which is the aim of the conceptualization here.

Infusing Illiberalism into World Culture

To address this gap, I draw on practice-oriented constructivist literature to provide a (conceptual) framework for investigating the process and its practices of the illiberal transition in world culture.[21] In doing so, the article first conceptualizes “illiberal infusion” as the gradual incorporation mechanism initiated by illiberal agents’ strategic actions within the global cultural field, which converts global models toward an illiberal ethos through three phases. Given the long-standing embeddedness of the liberal ethos in world culture, I posit that illiberal transformation in world culture can be best understood as a gradual, bottom-up process unfolding through strategic practices, rather than as an abrupt rupture or linear change.

Departing from World Society theory, I assume here that change begins when illiberal actors—once decoupled and marginalized within liberal world culture—become sufficiently large and authoritative enough to conduct strategic actions in global fields.[22] That is to say, agents and structures are “mutually constitutive” in a way that structures shape agents’ identities and interests, while “reflexive agents” can transform those structures through practices.[23] This understanding, after the acknowledgement that world culture constitutes actors, would imply that even such once-marginalized illiberal actors can perform their “actors’ agency” in bringing about change and conducting rites of passage from one culturally defined state or status to another.[24]

Central to this framework is the notion of practices as strategic actions, or what is called “competent performances.”[25] Even when actors advance illiberal or contesting positions, their strategic actions must remain intelligible and justifiable within existing long-lasting liberal normative frameworks and taken-for-granted rules to be recognized and accepted by others. In Bourdieu’s words, an actor (“pretender”) follows the patterns of a field just enough to gain a foothold and accumulate sufficient symbolic capital, before strategically tilting their actions to push the boundaries and eventually shift the structure from within.[26] Therefore, the infusion process entails both the erosion of current liberal norms and scripts, as well as the integration of illiberal values and principles within world culture. Ultimately, through such performances, actors can gradually render illiberal background understandings intersubjective and shift world culture. Seen through this lens, the illiberal transformation operates not merely as an ideological deviation or power imposition, but also as an organized process in which global meanings, norms, and authorities are displaced from liberal models and redefined through an illiberal ethos and ideals.

Phases of the Infusion Process

The infusion framework relies on the macro-social literature of liminality theory, which locates transformation in threshold states where boundaries are shaken, rules and roles are problematized, and new forms can be experimented with and even stabilized.[27] Developing this, infusion is explained through a patterned but open sequence, including (1) dislocation of existing order, (2) a liminal phase of suspension, experimentation, and innovation, and (3) attempts at reincorporation that may produce new orders, or trap societies in chronic “in-betweenness.”[28] In so doing, existing liberal norms and institutions are symbolically destabilized through discursive and institutional critiques that mark them as failing, illegitimate, or exhausted, initiating a phase of separation from established world-cultural norms and scripts. A liminal phase then emerges in which normative ambiguity prevails: Alternative epistemic frameworks, moral vocabularies, and political imaginaries circulate without yet solidifying into coherent orders, enabling experimentation, contestation, and the normalization of illiberal claims. Otherwise stated, this is the phase that triggers the possibility of “illiberal imagination.”[29] Hence, liminality functions as a critical site where taken-for-granted meanings and institutional roles are suspended, and social reality becomes reflexively negotiable and potentially transformable. From a historical perspective, one might argue that the neoliberal period has provided an opportunity structure for loosening the liberal culture and triggering post-liberal imaginations in global arenas.[30] Finally, through mechanisms of institutionalization, codification, and routinization, selected illiberal models and scripts are reaggregated into stabilized practices and global governance arrangements, producing a restructured normative order within world culture.

It is worth noting that when structures loosen during threshold phases, attention should shift to practices. As Swidler, in her seminal work, pointed out,[31] in periods of social transformation, when lives are unsettled, “practicing unfamiliar habits until they become familiar, then doctrine, symbol, and ritual directly shape action.” In this sense, transitional practices become vital because, as practice-based constructivist approaches emphasize, it is through such practices that order, power, institutions, identity, and change emerge and transform.[32] Therefore, liminal practices guide how illiberal alternatives are imagined, resocialized, and legitimized in global cultural fields.

Scope of the Infusion Process

It is important to study the different infusing practices by which actors seek to change others’ values and conduct and ultimately shift the agendas of global institutions in favor of illiberal culture. As mentioned earlier, world culture encompasses not only normative structure and ethos but also an institutional apparatus that promotes and ritualizes them. The illiberal infusion into world culture, therefore, entails clusters of (re-)ordering practices, struggling over both intersubjectivity of normative structures and redefinition of appropriate codes of conduct and principles, as well as organization of global institutions that embody and diffuse international norms, scripts, and cultural models constituted by such principles. To address these two aspects during transitional periods, I here rely on the analytical distinction between primary institutions and secondary institutions conceptualized by Barry Buzan (and developed by the English IR school).[33][34] As the rules of the international game, primary institutions—such as sovereignty, diplomacy, international law, human rights, and markets—altogether define what an order is, as well as membership and conduct. As mentioned, primary institutions reflect historically contingent and “intersubjectively shared meanings” attached to ordering practices[35]—in this case, illiberal ones—and provide a common ethical reference point that privileges some claims over others in terms of appropriate conduct. Secondary institutions include more specific regimes, international organizations, and formal arrangements that embody and help institutionalize and propagate the primary ones. This analytical categorization permits us to detect and map out diverse illiberal practices transforming world culture.

This illiberal infusion unfolds through patterned practices across both world cultural norms and the international organizations bearing those norms, which gradually integrate, normalize, and mainstream alternative conceptions of legitimacy, governance, and political community. Illiberal norm-transforming change often proceeds with incremental rearticulations of established principles—such as sovereignty, rights, democracy, and multilateralism—that “hollow out” their liberal content while injecting illiberal vocabulary.[36] In this sense, transformation occurs not only at the level of policy or power but at the deeper level of meaning-making, where new normative horizons are constructed and stabilized. Such transitional practices can go beyond the everyday framings of global models and scripts, rendering illiberal ideals into paradigmatic assumptions of world culture and reinforcing an illiberal moral background. An illiberal normative order thus emerges when world culture has been resocialized enough into the illiberal ethos and meaning system, and global institutions are adjusted—or possibly restructured—to authorize illiberal forms of authority, hierarchy, and political belonging.

Empirical Case: Infusing the Illiberal Gender Regime into World Culture

To demonstrate the framework’s analytical utility, this study draws on empirical illustrations from the illiberal gender regime of practice that has shaped the global campaign against gender equality. This campaign represents a particularly salient case, insofar as it constitutes a rare point of convergence among otherwise heterogeneous illiberal actors operating across diverse ideological and geopolitical contexts. It is at the forefront of illiberalism’s infusion into world culture.[37]

The above-described conceptualization of infusion is applied here. It treats practices as the primary unit of analysis, focusing on how social reality is produced and transformed through patterned, socially meaningful actions.[38] Within this perspective, change emerges through interconnected modules of practices. Among them, epistemic and meaning-making practices function to make things “known” and thereby challenge current primary institutions and generate ideational and normative change.[39] In this sense, epistemic practices consist of socially organized activities, conventions, and interactions through which knowledge is produced, shared, and justified. Then, discursive practices interplay such knowledge with power relations to shape how actors communicate, frame, and contest reality.[40] Whereas epistemic practices establish or challenge what counts as valid knowledge and truth, discursive practices influence and contextualize the reception of meaning through language. These dynamics are further promoted by broader networking practices enmeshing the cultural field and practices for institutional change, through which repeated actions and interactions reshape secondary institutions, including international organizations and governance structures, over time.

Practices in the Separation Phase

The separation phase involves practices aiming to negate the existing liberal normative framework of world culture. Here, delegitimization—done by strategic actions—is a key mechanism, as it problematizes the taken-for-granted aspects of the whole historically embedded liberal world culture and weakens the symbolic foundations that sustain its institutional order, as well as its institutional organizations. It is followed by illiberal conduct through which liberal cultural elements and models are contested and deinstitutionalized in practice.

Delegitimization

Delegitimizing practices are conducted to dismantle the authority of both existing norms and institutional organizations. They contribute to the ineffectiveness and inappropriateness of the liberal cultural apparatus. In the gender equality context—as elaborated by the United Nations in its Strategic Development Goals—diverse strategic actions have been applied to counter the legitimacy of such norms and institutions. For primary institutions, delegitimization often involves discursive and epistemic practices, shaping either demoralizing or devaluing strategies. Discursive practices are often used to position equal gender rights as an imposition on traditional social order or an ideological threat rather than a universal human right, weakening the legitimacy of gender equality agendas.[41] In addition, illiberal actors attack gender equality norms by framing them as detrimental to efficiency, arguing that such norms disrupt a well-functioning society. On the one hand, resistance to the implementation of liberal norms—through practices such as selective incorporation or window-dressing—has often led to the intended outcomes, contributing to the apparent devaluation of those norms.[42] On the other hand, illiberal governments employ anti-gender rhetoric to oppose liberal equality paradigms, portraying gender equality as bad for national security. Such contestations also recast liberal gender equality as a threat to social cohesion, national identity, and established family structures.[43] The “subversion of truth, characterized by false speak, double speak, and flooding,” is applied to epistemologically challenge the legitimacy of global norms and values.[44] At the international level, networking practices by illiberal coalitions seek to “spoil” women’s rights norms by framing them as part of a harmful “sexual revolution,” eroding their appropriateness in UN forums and beyond.[45]

To counter secondary institutions of liberal culture, epistemic violence—the systemic destruction or radical exclusion of certain knowledge systems—is used to delegitimize, silence, or misrepresent the perspectives of gender equality institutions, as well as related scripts. For instance, gender studies programs are disputed in illiberal academia,[46] and framing investments in women’s empowerment primarily around economic returns rather than structural justice is rationalized in transnational organizations.[47] Illiberal actors often frame international organizations (e.g., United Nations, World Trade Organization, human rights bodies) as illegitimate because they allegedly override traditional family values and national identity.[48] Soft repression mechanisms, including stigmatization, ridicule, and labeling, are discursively performed to disqualify institutional actors and discredit gender equality organizations. Stigma often works by portraying objects as morally dangerous, foreign, elitist, or politically empty.[49] In addition, discursive strategies on the Council of Europe Convention on preventing and combating violence against women and domestic violence, also known as “the Istanbul Convention,” during ratification in the European Parliament had the effect of delegitimizing institutional performances and procedures, as well as the norm that the convention embodies.[50]

Deinstitutionalization

The discharge of liberal primary institutions can be observed in the growing contestation of liberal gender equality principles and norms. Liberal understandings of gender equality—grounded in principles such as individual rights, nondiscrimination, and equal participation in political and social life—have long been embedded in the normative foundations of the liberal international order. However, these principles have increasingly been challenged by counter-framing practices, with political and social actors reinterpreting gender equality norms as culturally alien, ideologically imposed, or incompatible with traditional moral orders.[51] As these narratives circulate and gain acceptance, they destabilize the taken-for-granted status of liberal gender equality norms.

These processes also extend to the level of secondary institutions, which have historically promoted and institutionalized gender equality norms. Organizations such as international bodies, advocacy networks, and transnational policy forums have served as key sites for the diffusion and implementation of liberal gender equality principles. Yet these institutions increasingly face discursive and political challenges that seek to fragment or even undermine them. In addition to discursive deinstitutionalization, various social mechanisms contribute to this erosion. Actors may engage in resource sanctioning, for instance, by reducing financial contributions or withholding support from organizations that promote gender equality agendas. Furthermore, attempts to ban gender studies, marginalize feminist research in prestigious journals, and undo gender-sensitive policies in academia and higher education are framed as struggles for epistemic control.[52] Political obstruction within multilateral forums—such as blocking resolutions, delaying negotiations, or contesting policy mandates—can further undermine institutional capacity to advance these norms.[53] In more pronounced cases, states may withdraw from international organizations or agreements associated with liberal gender equality frameworks, as evidenced by Turkey’s exit from the Istanbul Convention. Altogether, these practices weaken the authority, resources, and operational effectiveness of secondary institutions, thereby contributing to the broader deinstitutionalization of liberal gender equality within the global normative order.

Practices in the Liminal Phase

The most critical phase, the liminal phase is conducted through diverse practices that affect and transform existing cultural principles, norms, and discourses. In the context of gender equality, this phase represents a transitional space in which the primary institutions—comprising the norms, values, and principles underpinning gender equality—are neither fully rejected nor fully preserved, but rather reinterpreted and gradually reshaped. During this phase, actors engage in liminal performances that allow them to navigate between adherence to internationally recognized gender equality commitments and the promotion of alternative normative frameworks. One important practice in this process is repurposing norms, whereby the language and symbolic vocabulary of gender equality are retained, but their underlying normative content is redirected to support different cultural or ideological objectives. Through this practice, references to equality, dignity, or protection may be selectively invoked while their meanings are subtly altered to emphasize traditional gender roles, family-centered moral orders, or culturally specific social hierarchies.[54] This process is reinforced through “conceptual flip-siding,”[55] in which foundational principles associated with gender equality are reframed to support alternative interpretations. Concepts such as rights, fairness, or empowerment may be redefined in ways that prioritize collective identity, social stability, or moral traditions rather than equal participation.[56] Such reinterpretations exploit the “discursive malleability” of norms and principles,[57] allowing actors to reshape the meanings attached to gender equality without explicitly rejecting the institution itself. By strategically deploying these discursive strategies in political rhetoric, policy debates, legal interpretations, and public narratives, actors can claim compliance with global gender equality standards. Over time, these liminal performances can gradually alter the constellation of norms, values, and principles that constitute gender equality as a primary institution, leading to a reconfiguration of its cultural and normative foundations within both domestic and transnational contexts.

Moreover, global organizations are incrementally reconfigured by actors to align with emerging changes at the threshold. Rather than directly dismantling these institutions, actors often pursue transitional practices to conduct gradual institutional change.[58] Institutional flip-siding, in this respect, refers to the process of subverting institutions from within through which actors strategically occupy institutional spaces, reinterpret mandates, and redirect organizational agendas in ways that shift the institution’s normative orientation.[59] In the context of gender equality, this may involve reframing institutional priorities toward themes such as family protection, demographic sustainability, or cultural sovereignty, thereby eroding the principles that previously guided these organizations.[60] As shown, instead of outright rejecting UN gender equality frameworks, the Center for Family and Human Rights is layering the United Nations Commission on the Status of Women with new conservative priorities and interpretations that dilute or roll back commitments.[61] Moreover, empirical attention in a study is given to the Geneva Consensus Declaration on Promoting Women’s Health and Strengthening the Family, championed by illiberal UN member states as a focal point of anti-abortion mobilization.[62] At the same time, actors may engage in parallelizing strategies either by establishing alternative transnational platforms, policy initiatives, or institutional arrangements that promote cultural-sovereignty-centered interpretations of gender relations,[63] leading to a new age of fragmentation, hybridity, and clash of norms.[64] These parallel structures operate alongside established international organizations and governance mechanisms, providing competing sources of expertise, coordination, and normative authority.[65] Together, these practices gradually reshape the institutional landscape, weakening the capacity of secondary institutions to sustain and reproduce liberal gender equality norms within global governance.

Practices in the Reincorporation Phase

After liberal norms and values are challenged and illiberal ones normalized to the public, this phase is conducted to mainstream illiberal principles and convert the world culture into an illiberal ethos. It encompasses a variety of strategic actions to integrate an illiberal cultural content and agenda with global forms of action, which, if legitimized, will lead to the embeddedness of an overarching illiberal world culture.

Integration of the Illiberal into World Culture

The institutionalization of illiberal primary rules emerges through processes that promote alternative normative foundations to those associated with liberal principles, including gender equality. Central to this process is the production of alternative knowledge claims that amass the epistemic authority for illiberal values and norms and present them as legitimate and culturally grounded alternatives. Actors may also draw on the moral authority of local traditions, religious doctrines, and culturally embedded knowledge systems to reinterpret social order and gender relations in ways that prioritize hierarchy, tradition, and communal values over liberal notions of individual equality.[66] In this phase, anti‑gender politics appears to operate as a struggle over knowledge itself. For instance, illiberal communities use “evidence‑based misogyny,” mimicking a scientific basis (e.g., with statistics, studies, charts) to construct an “alternative” gender knowledge that appears authoritative.[67] Through discursive performances, these ideas are framed as authentic expressions of local identity and moral order. The aim is to counter liberal narratives that portray gender equality as universal. In this context, actors engage in forms of illiberal norm entrepreneurship by actively advocating and legitimizing these alternative principles in public discourse, policy debates, and ideological narratives.[68] As shown, “reactionary international norm building” seeks to change the normative consensus by replacing established rights and altering the grounding and sources of rights, as well as their content; evoking an imagined traditional past; retracting basic rights protections; and even encouraging violence.[69] As these discursive practices gain traction, illiberal norms can gradually become socialized within the constellation of primary institutions that structure social and political life.

At the level of secondary institutions, the institutionalization of illiberal norms may be supported through the creation of parallel organizational infrastructures and “weaving” transnational anti-gender networks that reinforce and disseminate such alternative normative frameworks.[70] Actors may establish or strengthen transnational organizations, alliances, and policy platforms that promote illiberal culture. Even though they do not embrace all its constituent norms, illiberal NGOs have been incorporated into transnational NGO activities and the United Nations’ regulatory institutional framework thanks to a strong moralizing discourse.[71] In addition, institutional conversion is carried out. As evidenced, institutional coalitions leading to anti-feminist mobilizations are formed in international organizations with the aim of converting their agenda.[72] Furthermore, studies show that the European Parliament offers three types of opportunities to anti-gender organizations: policy influence, mobilization, and organizational legitimation.[73] Through conferences, policy exchanges, research initiatives, and coordinated messaging, such organizations and networks help institutionalize illiberal ideas and practices, thereby building a parallel architecture of secondary institutions that supports the diffusion and stabilization of illiberal primary institutions within the evolving global normative order.

Legitimization

Legitimization plays a key role here; functional integration occurs not at the level of institutionalization but when the integrated element becomes legitimate. It follows that the expanding institutional order develops a corresponding canopy of legitimations, a protective cover of both normative and cognitive interpretation.[74] In this sense, it is not just a matter of values but also implies knowledge. In the case of gender equality, as shown, an “illiberal values alternative” is being built as a globalist illiberal project by the European far-right that, while accepting markets and global institutions, insists they must protect Christian, heteronormative, anti-multicultural “civilization” against liberal UN norms on gender, sexuality, and migration.[75] Furthermore, epistemic networks composed of religious authorities, conservative intellectuals, policy experts, and advocacy groups can facilitate the circulation of alternative knowledge and policy models across national boundaries. These networks contribute to the consolidation of illiberal norm entrepreneurship by providing intellectual legitimacy, strategic coordination, and platforms for transnational advocacy. Opposition to gender equality is increasingly organized through dense “knowledge networks” that seek both political power and epistemic authority, aiming to reshape the very conditions of knowledge production.[76] They often employ proactive strategies that cultivate illiberal science perspectives and alternative knowledge production.[77] Also, through transnational alliances, digital counterpublics, and state‑aligned epistemic institutions, illiberals are creating “alternative regimes of truth” that paint gender equality norms as ideological, unscientific, and dangerous,[78] while imposing their viewpoint on gender as truth.[79] Overall, the projection of “gender ideology” has become a unifying “redemptive hegemony” and ritualistic cry in the illiberal international,[80] functioning as a social control mechanism.

Conclusion

The article takes a cultural perspective on illiberal world ordering, highlighting the transitional process and its practices upon which the global illiberalism movement seeks to transform world culture. Due to the long embeddedness of liberal principles and codes of conduct in world culture, the illiberal agenda for norm-transforming change is performed not through an abrupt rupture but as a gradual transition toward an illiberal turn in world culture. I relied on practice-oriented constructivist literature to provide a framework for investigating this. In this way, I first conceptualize “illiberal infusion” as the gradual yet overarching process of incorporation, conducted by illiberal agents in the global cultural field, that replaces existing liberal global models with once-marginal illiberal ones and converts them into an illiberal ethos.

The article then integrates insights from macro-social literature of liminality theory with the International Relations tradition of the British School, particularly its distinction between primary and secondary institutions, to develop an analytical framework for tracing steps and scopes of transitional practices within illiberal infusion. In doing so, it maps out how actions carried out during transitional phases affect and shift global institutions. Although not strictly sequential, these practices are strategically pursued across three interrelated phases: the negation of deeply embedded liberal values and models; suspension and/or reinterpretation of existing models and articulation of illiberal alternatives; and reconfiguration of global models through these alternatives. Both norms and principles associated with primary institutions, as well as formal organizations and their codified scripts known as secondary institutions, serve as key sites of diverse practices in infusing illiberalism.

The article operationalizes the framework through the case of gender rights (summarized in Table 1). As a global agenda shared across diverse ideological strands of illiberalism, gender has been at the core of infusing illiberal norms into world culture broadly. While epistemic and meaning-making practices comprise socially organized activities and interactions through which knowledge is produced and justified, discursive practices bring such knowledge into interaction with power relations to shape how actors communicate, frame, and contest liberal articulations of primary institutions, and more broadly, reality. These dynamics are further facilitated by networking and institutional change, practices through which repeated interactions, actions, and reinterpretations gradually shift secondary institutions, like international organizations and governance structures.

Table 1: Infusion of the Illiberal Gender Regime into World Culture

Practices in the negation phase sought to delegitimize and deinstitutionalize existing liberal models, forms, and scripts. The practices here not just target and problematize the effectiveness and appropriateness of the liberal gender rights apparatus but also gradually detach the liberal gender norms from global scripts. The liminal phase functions as a critical site where taken-for-granted meanings and institutional roles are suspended, and social reality becomes reflexively negotiable and potentially transformable. In the context of gender equality rights, this phase constitutes a transitional space in which primary institutions—comprising the norms, values, and principles underpinning gender equality—are neither fully rejected nor fully preserved, but instead reinterpreted and repurposed. Meanwhile, global organizations are reconfigured by actors to align with these emerging shifts at the threshold. The integration phase is conducted by transitional practices to internalize illiberal content and norms into world cultural models and global scripts, entailing both institutionalization and legitimation logics. Normative gender equality frameworks are being reshaped to embody an illiberal ethos and are then presented as legitimate to global public opinion. In this sense, the illiberal turn in world culture operates as an organized infusion in which not just global meanings, norms, and values but also global institutions and their codified scripts are sought to shift from liberal tenets to illiberal ones.

The conceptual contribution of “infusion” to illiberalism studies is that it elucidates the illiberal playbook for transforming global culture. While the existing literature on illiberal culture has mainly investigated specific cases (like Hungary, Poland, or the United States under Trump), the infusion framework addresses the mechanism of incorporating such illiberal agendas into the global arena. It shows that the illiberal agendas are being executed incrementally, through a variety of actions and practices that, even though they use eligible mechanisms in world society, push boundaries and infuse global modalities and formalities with illiberal contents. Illiberal agents’ “creative capacity” to alter existing models and obligations and to create new ones is significant in normative ordering.[81] This article makes an empirical contribution to the literature by addressing the illiberal transition of the global gender rights regime. The proposed framework will be developed by its application to other empirical cases such as illiberal peace-making,[82] which has recently become prevalent in global politics.

In a broader sense, the concept of “infusion” can enrich sociological neo-institutionalist scholarship by complementing its central mechanism of global change—diffusion, or the spread of ideas, policies, and models across borders. As emphasized in the seminal studies, diffusion of any model is institutionally conditioned by its alignment with broader cultural systems that confer legitimacy and appropriateness,[83] and it is further facilitated by culturally perceived similarities and relational linkages among actors involved in the diffusion process.[84] Yet the question of how alternative models can spread, gain legitimacy, and even become mainstream has remained.[85] Although the concept of “infusion” requires further theoretical and empirical elaboration, it opens a promising avenue for understanding broader transformations in world culture.

Through illiberal infusion, illiberal visions and viewpoints may be rendered into widely shared meaning systems and, consequently, cemented as background knowledge, which lends people a “culturally distinct rationality,”[86] toward an “illiberal common sense,” as there are currently some invocations in the making.[87] Yet while they are indeed becoming the “new normal,”[88] there are still opportunities for merging, challenging, and resisting them. In this regard, world culture, with its institutional organizations, is a battlefield with “structural opportunities for action.”[89] The battle is a critical one because it will determine which among competing cultural apparatuses survive in the long run, appearing appropriate and emanating outward globally.

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[1] Scholars from different International Relations (IR) schools have sought to theorize the current unstable state of global order. For instance, please see: Trine Flockhart, “The Coming Multi-Order World,” Contemporary Security Policy 37, no. 1 (2016): 3–30, https://doi.org/10.1080/13523260.2016.1150053; Riccardo Alcaro, ed., The Liberal Order and Its Contestations: Great Powers and Regions Transiting in a Multipolar Era (Routledge, 2018), https://doi.org/10.4324/9780429461521; John J. Mearsheimer, “Bound to Fail: The Rise and Fall of the Liberal International Order,” International Security 43, no. 4 (2019): 7–50, https://doi.org/10.1162/isec_a_00342; Stacie E. Goddard et al., “Contestation in a World of Liberal Orders,” Global Studies Quarterly 4, no. 2 (2024): ksae026, https://doi.org/10.1093/isagsq/ksae026; G. John Ikenberry, “The End of Liberal International Order?,” International Affairs 94, no. 1 (2018): 7–23, https://doi.org/10.1093/ia/iix241; Amitav Acharya et al., “Multipolar or Multiplex? Interaction Capacity, Global Cooperation and World Order,” International Affairs 99, no. 6 (2023): 2339–65, https://doi.org/10.1093/ia/iiad242.

[2] Frank J. Lechner and John Boli, World Culture: Origins and Consequences (Blackwell Pub, 2005); John W. Meyer et al., “World Society and the Nation‐State,” American Journal of Sociology 103, no. 1 (1997): 144–81, https://doi.org/10.1086/231174.

[3] This point has been largely discussed in seminal constructivist IR works, including: John Gerard Ruggie, “What Makes the World Hang Together? Neo-Utilitarianism and the Social Constructivist Challenge,” International Organization 52, no. 4 (1998): 855–85, https://doi.org/10.1162/002081898550770; Martha Finnemore and Kathryn Sikkink, “International Norm Dynamics and Political Change,” International Organization 52, no. 4 (1998): 887–917, https://doi.org/10.1162/002081898550789; Emanuel Adler, World Ordering: A Social Theory of Cognitive Evolution (Cambridge University Press, 2019).

[4] Frank Dobbin et al., “The Global Diffusion of Public Policies: Social Construction, Coercion, Competition, or Learning?,” Annual Review of Sociology 33, no. 1 (2007): 449–72, https://doi.org/10.1146/annurev.soc.33.090106.142507.

[5] John Gerard Ruggie, “International Regimes, Transactions, and Change: Embedded Liberalism in the Postwar Economic Order,” International Organization 36, no. 2 (1982): 379–415, https://doi.org/10.1017/S0020818300018993.

[6] Christian Reus-Smit, “Cultural Diversity and International Order,” International Organization 71, no. 4 (2017): 851, https://doi.org/10.1017/S0020818317000261.

[7] Zsolt Enyedi, “Illiberal Conservatism, Civilisationalist Ethnocentrism, and Paternalist Populism in Orbán’s Hungary,” Contemporary Politics 0, no. 0 (2024): 1–18, https://doi.org/10.1080/13569775.2023.2296742; Marlene Laruelle, “Illiberalism: A Conceptual Introduction,” East European Politics 38, no. 2 (2022): 303–27, https://doi.org/10.1080/21599165.2022.2037079.

[8] Jan Kubik, “Illiberalism as a Culture,” in The Oxford Handbook of Illiberalism (Oxford University Press, 2023), https://doi.org/10.1093/oxfordhb/9780197639108.013.4.

[9] Ikenberry, “The End of Liberal International Order?”

[10] Meyer et al., “World Society and the Nation‐State”; John W. Meyer and Ronald L. Jepperson, “The ‘Actors’ of Modern Society: The Cultural Construction of Social Agency,” Sociological Theory 18, no. 1 (2000): 100–120, https://doi.org/10.1111/0735-2751.00090.

[11] Ruggie, “International Regimes, Transactions, and Change”; Emanuel Adler and Kathryn Sikkink, “What Made John Ruggie’s World Transformation Theory and Practice Hang Together,” International Organization 77, no. 4 (2023): 871–80, https://doi.org/10.1017/S0020818322000042.

[12] For instance, Ikenberry, “The End of Liberal International Order?”; David A. Lake et al., “Challenges to the Liberal Order: Reflections on International Organization,” International Organization 75, no. 2 (2021): 225–57, https://doi.org/10.1017/S0020818320000636.

[13] Sociological neoinstitutionalist literature has identified various mechanisms of localization that make changes in global cultural models and ideals. For a review, please see: Pertti Alasuutari, “The Discursive Side of New Institutionalism,” Cultural Sociology 9, no. 2 (2015): 162–84, https://doi.org/10.1177/1749975514561805.

[14] John W. Meyer, “World Society, Institutional Theories, and the Actor,” Annual Review of Sociology 36, no. 1 (2010): 1–20, https://doi.org/10.1146/annurev.soc.012809.102506.

[15] Finnemore and Sikkink, “International Norm Dynamics and Political Change”; Antje Wiener, Contestation and Constitution of Norms in Global International Relations (Cambridge University Press, 2018). Vivien A. Schmidt, “Taking Ideas and Discourse Seriously: Explaining Change through Discursive Institutionalism as the Fourth ‘New Institutionalism,’” European Political Science Review 2, no. 1 (2010): 1–25, https://doi.org/10.1017/S175577390999021X; Alasuutari, “The Discursive Side of New Institutionalism.”

[16] For instance: Wade M. Cole et al., “Global Liberalism, Emerging Illiberalism, and Human Rights, 1980 to 2018,” Social Science Research 120 (May 2024): 103001, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ssresearch.2024.103001; Evan Schofer et al., “Illiberal Reactions to Higher Education,” Minerva 60, no. 4 (2022): 509–34, https://doi.org/10.1007/s11024-022-09472-x.

[17] Roland Robertson, “Glocalization: Time-Space and Homogeneity-Heterogeneity,” in Global Modernities, ed. Mike Featherstone et al. (SAGE Publications Ltd, 1995), https://doi.org/10.4135/9781446250563.n2.

[18] Kubik, “Illiberalism as a Culture.”

[19] For instance, please see: Marlies Glasius et al., “Illiberal Norm Diffusion: How Do Governments Learn to Restrict Nongovernmental Organizations?,” International Studies Quarterly 64, no. 2 (2020): 453–68, https://doi.org/10.1093/isq/sqaa019; Alexander Cooley et al., “Transnational Uncivil Society Networks: Kleptocracy’s Global Fightback against Liberal Activism,” European Journal of International Relations 30, no. 2 (2024): 382–407, https://doi.org/10.1177/13540661231186502.

[20] Kristopher Velasco, “Transnational Backlash and the Deinstitutionalization of Liberal Norms: LGBT+ Rights in a Contested World,” American Journal of Sociology 128, no. 5 (2023): 1381–429, https://doi.org/10.1086/724724.

[21] Here, I mainly refer to the Wendt’s argument on process, practices and structural change: Alexander Wendt, Social Theory of International Politics (Cambridge University Press, 1999).

[22] In metaphorical words: “the situation begins to change when there is a leper colony sufficiently large and durable to serve as a plausibility structure for counter-definitions of reality – and of the fate of being a leper.” Berger and Luckmann, The Social Construction of Reality, 186.

[23] Here, “reflexive” denotes an agent possesses three intrinsic capacities: “1) to have a theoretical understanding (however inaccurate) of its activities, in the sense that it could supply reasons for its behavior; 2) to reflexively monitor and potentially adapt its behavior; and 3) to make decisions.” Alexander E. Wendt, “The Agent-Structure Problem in International Relations Theory,” International Organization 41, no. 3 (1987): 359, https://www.jstor.org/stable/2706749.

[24] Pertti Alasuutari and Ali Qadir, Epistemic Governance: Social Change in the Modern World (Palgrave Macmillan, 2019), 30, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-19150-4.

[25] Emanuel Adler and Vincent Pouliot, “International Practices,” International Theory 3, no. 1 (2011): 1–36, https://doi.org/10.1017/S175297191000031X.

[26] Pierre Bourdieu, The Rules of Art: Genesis and Structure of the Literary Field (Stanford University Press, 1996).

[27] For detailed review, please see: Arpad Szakolczai, “Liminality and Experience: Structuring Transitory Situations and Transformative Events,” International Political Anthropology 2, no. 1 (2009): 141–72, https://www.academia.edu/download/34746291/ipa_journal_1_2009_szakolczai.pdf; Victor Witter Turner, The Anthropology of Performance, with Richard Schechner (PAJ Publications, 1986); Agnes Horvath et al., eds., Breaking Boundaries: Varieties of Liminality (Berghahn Books, Incorporated, 2015), http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/tampere/detail.action?docID=1767519.

[28] For instance, please see: Jennifer Howard-Grenville et al., “Liminality as Cultural Process for Cultural Change,” Organization Science 22, no. 2 (2011): 522–39, https://doi.org/10.1287/orsc.1100.0554; Maria Mälksoo, “The Challenge of Liminality for International Relations Theory,” Review of International Studies 38, no. 2 (2012): 481–94, https://doi.org/10.1017/S0260210511000829; Bjørn Thomassen, “Revisiting Liminality: The Danger of Empty Spaces,” in Liminal Landscapes (Routledge, 2012); Harald Wydra, “Liminality and Democracy,” in Breaking Boundaries: Varieties of Liminality, ed. Agnes Horvath et al. (Berghahn Books, 2015), https://www.degruyterbrill.com/document/doi/10.1515/9781782387671-012/html?lang=en&srsltid=AfmBOoqB5EpQHAl8a-wd75mNh1Q4g8aEwHzAFcmRg9gT8Jg1sbnaGdg4.

[29] Michał Krzyżanowski and Natalia Krzyżanowska, “Conceptual Flipsiding in/and Illiberal Imagination : Towards a Discourse-Conceptual Analysis,” Journal of Illiberalism Studies 4, no. 2 (2024): 33–46, https://urn.kb.se/resolve?urn=urn:nbn:se:uu:diva-535698.

[30] R. Jepperson and J. Meyer, “Concluding Reflections: Evolving Cultural Models in Global and National Society,” in Institutional Theory: The Cultural Construction of Organizations, States, and Identities, ed. John W. Meyer and Ronald L. Jepperson (Cambridge University Press, 2021), https://doi.org/10.1017/9781139939744.013.

[31] Ann Swidler, “Culture in Action: Symbols and Strategies,” American Sociological Review 51, no. 2 (1986): 278, https://doi.org/10.2307/2095521.

[32] While constructivist approaches in general agree with this point, the practice-oriented line of this scholarship, in particular, highlights such practices in structuring and ordering. For more clarification, please see: Adler and Pouliot, “International Practices”; Wendt, Social Theory of International Politics.

[33] The author, while acknowledging debates among different constructivist schools on functions and interactions of such primary and secondary institutions, uses them here just as an analytical distinction.

[34] Barry Buzan, From International to World Society?: English School Theory and the Social Structure of Globalisation (Cambridge University Press, 2004), https://www.google.com/books?hl=en&lr=&id=244_sIuLohQC&oi=fnd&pg=PR11&dq=From+International+to+World+Society%3F+buzan&ots=9J5z_sLT4j&sig=9wcneOZRvdsfKMPktS1oICFt6lM.

[35] Buzan, From International to World Society?, 165.

[36] Rebecca Adler-Nissen and Ayşe Zarakol, “Struggles for Recognition: The Liberal International Order and the Merger of Its Discontents,” International Organization 75, no. 2 (2021): 611–34, https://doi.org/10.1017/S0020818320000454.

[37] For more discussion on the importance of gendered politics in illiberalism, please see: Weronika Grzebalska and Andrea Pető, “The Gendered Modus Operandi of the Illiberal Transformation in Hungary and Poland,” Women’s Studies International Forum 68 (2018): 164–72, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.wsif.2017.12.001; Eva Fodor and Erika Kispeter, “The Gendered Politics of Illiberalism,” Annual Review of Sociology, ahead of print, March 12, 2026, https://doi.org/10.1146/annurev-soc-090225-013257.

[38] Adler and Pouliot, “International Practices.”

[39] Christian Bueger, “Making Things Known: Epistemic Practices, the United Nations, and the Translation of Piracy,” International Political Sociology 9, no. 1 (2015): 1–18, https://doi.org/10.1111/ips.12073.

[40] Schmidt, “Taking Ideas and Discourse Seriously: Explaining Change through Discursive Institutionalism as the Fourth ‘New Institutionalism’”; Michel Foucault, Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings, 1972-1977, 1st American ed, ed. Colin Gordon (Pantheon Books, 1980).

[41] For instance, please see Johanna Kantola and Emanuela Lombardo, “Strategies of Right Populists in Opposing Gender Equality in a Polarized European Parliament,” International Political Science Review 42, no. 5 (2021): 565–79, https://doi.org/10.1177/0192512120963953; Phil Erick Otieno and Alfred Makonjio Makabira, “Gender Equality vs ‘Morality’: The Erosion of Gender Agendas in Kenya,” IDS Bulletin 55, no. 1 (2024), https://doi.org/10.19088/1968-2024.110.

[42] Victoria Diaz Garcia, “The Effectiveness of National Women’s Mechanisms in Latin America: A Window of Opportunity to Advance Women’s Equality or Merely Window-Dressing?” (doctoral, Dublin City University, 2019), https://doras.dcu.ie/23612/.

[43] Didem Unal, “Political Homophobia as a Tool of Creating Crisis Narratives and Ontological Insecurities in Illiberal Populist Contexts: Lessons from the 2023 Elections in Turkey,” New Perspectives on Turkey, 2024, 1–22, https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/new-perspectives-on-turkey/article/political-homophobia-as-a-tool-of-creating-crisis-narratives-and-ontological-insecurities-in-illiberal-populist-contexts-lessons-from-the-2023-elections-in-turkey/35773BDFED5312268D74E539C866E5AB.

[44] Emanuel Adler and Alena Drieschova, “The Epistemological Challenge of Truth Subversion to the Liberal International Order,” International Organization 75, no. 2 (2021): 359–86, https://doi.org/10.1017/S0020818320000533.

[45] Rebecca Sanders, “Norm Spoiling: Undermining the International Women’s Rights Agenda,” International Affairs 94, no. 2 (2018): 271–91, https://doi.org/10.1093/ia/iiy023.

[46] Yasmine Ergas et al., “Disputing ‘Gender’ in Academia: Illiberalism and the Politics of Knowledge,” Politics and Governance 10, no. 4 (2022): 121–31, https://hal.science/hal-04215315/.

[47] Kelly Gerard, “Rationalizing ‘Gender-Wash’: Empowerment, Efficiency and Knowledge Construction,” Review of International Political Economy 26, no. 5 (2019): 1022–42, https://doi.org/10.1080/09692290.2019.1625423.

[48] Kilian Spandler and Fredrik Söderbaum, “Populist (de)Legitimation of International Organizations,” International Affairs 99, no. 3 (2023): 1023–41, https://doi.org/10.1093/ia/iiad048; Liesbet Hooghe et al., “Contested World Order: The Delegitimation of International Governance,” The Review of International Organizations 14, no. 4 (2019): 731–43, https://doi.org/10.1007/s11558-018-9334-3.

[49] Myra Marx Ferree, “Soft Repression: Ridicule, Stigma, and Silencing in Gender-Based Movements,” in Authority in Contention, vol. 25, ed. Daniel J. Myers and Daniel M. Cress, Research in Social Movements, Conflicts and Change (Emerald Group Publishing Limited, 2004), https://doi.org/10.1016/S0163-786X(04)25004-2.

[50] Valentine Berthet, “Norm under Fire: Support for and Opposition to the European Union’s Ratification of the Istanbul Convention in the European Parliament,” International Feminist Journal of Politics 24, no. 5 (2022): 675–98, https://doi.org/10.1080/14616742.2022.2034510.

[51] e.g., Amir Barjasteh, “Justifying Authoritarian Practices: Epistemic Governance in Two Opposite Interventionist Policies on Women’s Attire in Iran’s Pre- and Post-Revolution 1979,” International Journal of Cultural Policy, 2024, 1–16, https://doi.org/10.1080/10286632.2024.2428381; Susanna Mancini and Nausica Palazzo, “The Body of the Nation : Illiberalism and Gender,” in Routledge Handbook of Illiberalism (Routledge, 2021), https://doi.org/10.4324/9780367260569-31.

[52] Fernanda Rojas-Müller et al., “The Ice Again: Epistemic Exclusion of Feminisms in Academic Spaces,” WSQ: Women’s Studies Quarterly 53, no. 1 (2025): 135–53, https://muse.jhu.edu/pub/90/article/956513.

[53] Anne Marie Goetz, “The New Competition in Multilateral Norm-Setting: Transnational Feminists & the Illiberal Backlash,” Daedalus 149, no. 1 (2020): 160–79, https://doi.org/10.1162/daed_a_01780.

[54] For instance, please see: Fodor and Kispeter, “The Gendered Politics of Illiberalism”; Mancini and Palazzo, “The Body of the Nation : Illiberalism and Gender.”

[55] Krzyżanowski and Krzyżanowska, “Conceptual Flipsiding in/and Illiberal Imagination.”

[56] Agnieszka Golec de Zavala and Oliver Keenan, “Gender and National Collective Narcissism: Gender Asymmetries and Obstacles to Gender Equality,” Sex Roles 90, no. 4 (2024): 565–86, https://doi.org/10.1007/s11199-024-01443-8; Amir Barjasteh, “Policing Repertoire of Knowledge Practices in Neo-Authoritarian Governance: Authority of Sovereignty Cluster of Global Norms, and the Constitution of Legitimizing Narrative for Suppression in Iran’s ‘Woman, Life, Freedom’ Uprising,” Democratization, March 26, 2025, world, https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/13510347.2025.2482626.

[57] Lauri Heimo, “Discursive Malleability of a Global Policy Model: How Conditional Cash Transfers Transcend Political Boundaries in Chile,” Global Social Policy 24, no. 1 (2024): 96–116, https://doi.org/10.1177/14680181231197218.

[58] James Mahoney and Kathleen Thelen, “A Theory of Gradual Institutional Change,” in Explaining Institutional Change: Ambiguity, Agency, and Power, ed. James Mahoney and Kathleen Thelen (Cambridge University Press, 2009), https://www.cambridge.org/core/books/explaining-institutional-change/A5B2439A1AA6BF1A327C5FB4300EB150.

[59] Ireneusz Paweł Karolewski, “Institutional and Conceptual Flipsiding: Illiberal Subversion of ‘Democracy,’” Social Semiotics 36, no. 1 (2026): 20–34, https://doi.org/10.1080/10350330.2025.2601616.

[60] Karin Johansson, “Protection Norms in the WPS Agenda: Backlash from Within?,” in Backlash Against the Women, Peace and Security Agenda: Contesting Gender Norms, ed. Annika Björkdahl et al. (Springer Nature Switzerland, 2026), https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-032-10853-1_3.

[61] Sanders, “Norm Spoiling.”

[62] Leia Onsmark and Annika Björkdahl, “Norm Spoiling and Backlash: Women’s Rights at Risk at the UN,” in Backlash Against the Women, Peace and Security Agenda: Contesting Gender Norms, ed. Annika Björkdahl et al. (Springer Nature Switzerland, 2026), https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-032-10853-1_4.

[63] Katja Kahlina, “ANTI-GENDER CIVILIZATIONISM AND THE WEST-EAST DIVIDE: THE CASE OF THE WORLD CONGRESS OF FAMILIES*,” Mobilization: An International Quarterly, Mobilization: An International Quarterly 29, no. 4 (2024): 547–60, https://doi.org/10.17813/1086-671X-29-4-547.

[64] Ziya Öniş and Mustafa Kutlay, “The New Age of Hybridity and Clash of Norms: China, BRICS, and Challenges of Global Governance in a Postliberal International Order,” Alternatives 45, no. 3 (2020): 123–42; Jason Beckfield, “The Dual World Polity: Fragmentation and Integration in the Network of Intergovernmental Organizations,” Social Problems 55, no. 3 (2008): 419–42, https://doi.org/10.1525/sp.2008.55.3.419.

[65] Kristopher Velasco and Jeffrey Swindle, “ASSEMBLING GOD’S ‘LAST BEST HOPE’: THE EXPANDING REACH OF THE WORLD CONGRESS OF FAMILIES*,” Mobilization: An International Quarterly, Mobilization: An International Quarterly 29, no. 4 (2024): 441–68, https://doi.org/10.17813/1086-671X-29-4-441.

[66] Goetz, “The New Competition in Multilateral Norm-Setting.”

[67] Ann-Kathrin Rothermel, “The Role of Evidence-Based Misogyny in Antifeminist Online Communities of the ‘Manosphere,’” Big Data & Society 10, no. 1 (2023): 20539517221145671, https://doi.org/10.1177/20539517221145671.

[68] Daniëlle Flonk, “Emerging Illiberal Norms: Russia and China as Promoters of Internet Content Control,” International Affairs 97, no. 6 (2021): 1925–44, https://doi.org/10.1093/ia/iiab146.

[69] Rebecca Sanders and Laura Dudley Jenkins, “From Norm Breaking to Norm Making: Anti-Feminist Reactionary Norm Building in International Politics,” International Feminist Journal of Politics 27, no. 3 (2025): 608–34, https://doi.org/10.1080/14616742.2025.2512013.

[70] Manuela Caiani and Ivan Tranfić, “WEAVING THE TRANSNATIONAL ANTI-GENDER NETWORKS*,” Mobilization: An International Quarterly, Mobilization: An International Quarterly 29, no. 4 (2024): 423–39, https://doi.org/10.17813/1086-671X-29-4-423.

[71] Jelena Cupać and Irem Ebetürk, “Competitive Mimicry: The Socialization of Antifeminist NGOs into the United Nations,” Global Constitutionalism 11, no. 3 (2022): 379–400, https://doi.org/10.1017/S2045381721000186.

[72] Jelena Cupać and Irem Ebetürk, “The Personal Is Global Political: The Antifeminist Backlash in the United Nations,” The British Journal of Politics and International Relations 22, no. 4 (2020): 702–14, https://doi.org/10.1177/1369148120948733.

[73] Martijn Mos and Lucrecia Rubio Grundell, “Opportunity Beckons: The Anti-Gender Movement at the European Parliament,” International Feminist Journal of Politics 27, no. 3 (2025): 560–83, https://doi.org/10.1080/14616742.2025.2505125.

[74] Berger and Luckmann, The Social Construction of Reality, 79.

[75] Dorit Geva and Felipe G. Santos, “Europe’s Far-Right Educational Projects and Their Vision for the International Order,” International Affairs 97, no. 5 (2021): 1395–414, https://doi.org/10.1093/ia/iiab112.

[76] Nina Perger and Roman Kuhar, “Wielding the Power of Knowledge: Anti-Gender Mobilizations and the Strategic (Mis)Use of Epistemic Authority,” Journal of Gender Studies 0, no. 0 (2026): 1–22, https://doi.org/10.1080/09589236.2026.2637522.

[77] Didem Unal, “Populists’ Struggle for Epistemic Hegemony and Anti-Gender Attacks on Higher Education in Authoritarian Contexts: The Case of Turkey,” British Journal of Middle Eastern Studies, 2024, 1–20, https://doi.org/10.1080/13530194.2024.2331701.

[78] Elżbieta Korolczuk and Agnieszka Graff, “Gender as ‘Ebola from Brussels’: The Anticolonial Frame and the Rise of Illiberal Populism,” Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 43, no. 4 (2018): 797–821, https://doi.org/10.1086/696691.

[79] Asuman Ozgur Keysan and Ege Elif Tektas, “Alternative Regimes of Truth: Anti-Gender Politics, Digital Platforms and Epistemic Struggles in Turkey,” Journal of Gender Studies 0, no. 0 (2026): 1–33, https://doi.org/10.1080/09589236.2026.2632905.

[80] Robert Benson, “Illiberal International: The Transatlantic Right’s Challenge to Democracy,” in Populism and the Future of Transatlantic Relations: Challenges and Policy Options (European Center for Populism Studies (ECPS), 2026), https://doi.org/https://doi.org/10.55271/rp00137; P. Ayoub and K. Stoeckl, “The Global Resistance to LGBTIQ Rights,” Journal of Democracy 35, no. 1 (2024): 59–73, http://dx.doi.org/10.1353/jod.2024.a915349.

[81] Dennis R. Schmidt and John Williams, “The Normativity of Global Ordering Practices,” International Studies Quarterly 67, no. 2 (2023): sqad021, https://doi.org/10.1093/isq/sqad021.

[82] David Lewis et al., “Illiberal Peace? Authoritarian Modes of Conflict Management,” Cooperation and Conflict 53, no. 4 (2018): 486–506, https://doi.org/10.1177/0010836718765902.

[83] Dobbin et al., “The Global Diffusion of Public Policies.”

[84] David Strang and John W. Meyer, “Institutional Conditions for Diffusion,” Theory and Society 22, no. 4 (1993): 487–511.

[85] As highlighted in the critique: “a stronger case for institutional theory requires more direct investigation of .. the processes by which the range of ‘thinkable’ alternatives expands and contracts over time and across settings” Marc Schneiberg and Elisabeth S. Clemens, “The Typical Tools for the Job: Research Strategies in Institutional Analysis*,” Sociological Theory 24, no. 3 (2006): 196, https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-9558.2006.00288.x.

[86] Adler, World Ordering, 212.

[87] For more discussion on the relations between culture and common sense, please see: Kubik, “Illiberalism as a Culture.”

[88] Michał Krzyżanowski et al., “Discourses and Practices of the ‘New Normal’: Towards an Interdisciplinary Research Agenda on Crisis and the Normalization of Anti- and Post‑democratic Action,” Journal of Language and Politics 22, no. 4 (2023): 415–37, https://doi.org/10.1075/jlp.23024.krz.

[89] Swidler, “Culture in Action.”