 Hello, everyone, and welcome to a new episode. Let's talk about politics and governance. Today, with our guest, Veronica Zewalska, from the Polish Academy of Sciences in Poland, we explore campaigns against gender ideology in Poland by the government, more specifically in the Polish defense sector. How have anti-gender backlash and gender backsliding affected women's representation in the armed forces? Has the Russian invasion of Ukraine influenced the situation somehow? I'm Roderick Silva. Let's talk about politics and governance. Veronica, it's a pleasure to have you here. Thank you. I'm very happy to be here. Tell us a bit about the relevance, the importance of this topic. So I think why this paper is pretty salient today is because it connects to separate fields of scholarly analysis, but also to separate and very current socio-institutional transformations that are ongoing in Poland and Central Eastern Europe more broadly. And it kind of puts them together and sees what we can learn from this juxtaposition. So the first field or process is what you already mentioned. The literature, that's a very prolific literature on gender backsliding, right-wing politics and gender, et cetera. And the second field is the literature on gender and defense. Now, these fields rarely talk to one another. And I think that there's quite a lot that we can learn from actually entering into dialogue. OK, so these two topics meet. So when you started this research, what were you hoping to find? Well, I'll say I wasn't really hoping to find much. And that is because my method of choice has always been. And especially for these types of topics has been exploratory sociology, something that you may associate with such names as American sociologist Arlie Russell Herschild, but also others. And this is this method that we as sociologists use when we are trying to understand something about phenomena of which very little is known and very little has been written. So in this sense, when you're entering this unrepresented world and you're trying to understand what's going on here, and there's been legitimately virtually no research on that would be gendering defense or that would be connecting right-wing populism studies with defense and gender in Central Europe. So mostly I just wanted to understand what's going on. However, I will say that I had certain expectations which came from my reading of mainstream literature. Now, the special issue that my paper is part of is a special issue on illiberalism, right-wing populism, and gender. And there's been prolific literature on right-wing politics and gender in the last 10 years, partially due to this interest in the global challenge posed by right-wing politics to women's rights. And all those papers, most of this mainstream feminist literature has one thing in common, and it is that it sort of conflates right-wing gender politics with anti-gender politics. And it suggests that when right-wing parties are in power, they generally are hijacking, eradicating, displacing, and rolling back women's rights. And here in this, so this is what I expected to find when I embark on this research journey in the Polish defense sector. And paradoxically, that's not necessarily what I found. Well, very good. So a minor expectation. And now let us know about the findings. So the whole paper stems from this observation that there's this puzzling paradox when you look at the gender politics of defense in Poland under the illiberal governance of the Law and Justice PIS Party, namely that the same party that has been known to be very vocally anti-gender and very dedicated to kind of rolling back certain elements of the liberal gender equality infrastructure, very vocal about gender as an enemy figure. The same party has actually safeguarded defense and security from these radical measures and has largely continued the prior politics and discourse and policy on women's rights and security and defense. And what's even more important and interesting and paradoxical, the same party has actually tolerated or even promoted women's rights in defense in certain realms. And I think so that's the main finding that basically, on the one hand, we have this gloomy story in mainstream gender studies and democratization research that when right wing governments are in power, women's rights will suffer all across the board. And this paper actually finds that it is not necessarily the case. The opposite may also be true. And it's way more complex. And secondly, there's also this other grim story stemming from gender and militarism research, which says whenever we see militarization, we will find remasculinization. And again, this paper says not necessarily the actual transformation of defense that may come from remilitarization may actually re-gender defense and make it a bit more equal than we assume. So I think these are the two main findings that can be interesting to people from different scholarly fields. Of course, some of those findings have already for sure some impact in society, in real life situations. So can you tell us more about that? How can your research or your findings impact real life situations? Well, again, in this particular case, I think I wasn't necessarily writing this paper to produce sound policy recommendations. But I do think that this paper may have some salience for at least one field. And that is for the field of gender mainstreaming scholarship and policy. So for all those who are interested in how to make gender mainstreaming work and when it doesn't really work and how to make it work better. Now, it is because what I show in this paper is how when Poland joined the NATO Alliance in the late 1990s, one of the consequences was, of course, that the state had to start mainstreaming women and gender into the defense sector. And this led to some deep institutional change. But this change has mostly resulted in breaking down certain institutional and legal and formal barriers for women's participation. So women were allowed to enter military colleges, where they were allowed to enter the armed forces. And discrimination based on sex was outlawed. But that's kind of about it. And let me just say that the actual effects we've seen from this gender mainstreaming in defense were very unsatisfactory in Poland. By the time the right-wing party came to power in 2015, I believe we had less than 5% of women in the armed forces. Women were never reached critical mass, never became critical actors, and generally in the society, defense remained this men's business. So what I'm trying to say is that the Polish case study shows that this conventional application of this universal gender mainstreaming principle brought stalemated and limited results for women. And now what happened is that paradoxically, again, it is the right-wing populist governance that actually led to greater inclusion of women. In just under six years, Poland has doubled the percentage of women in the armed forces. There were also other associated changes related to the diminishing of gender gaps in defense and security skills in the society. Generally, all of that is leading to this kind of greater re-entering of defense. And why that was possible is because this right-wing party went a bit further than conventional gender mainstreaming. In other words, it created new institutions and revived a new type of ethos of military service. And both these new institutions and this new ethos to put it very shortly, were not only more open to women because they enabled women to combine soldiering, volunteer part-time soldiering with family and professional life, but they also revived a certain ethos that was more in line with Polish traditions of territorial defense and that, again, was more appealing to women than the ethos of expeditionary professional military forces that was there before. So all that to put it very shortly, all that tells gender mainstreaming experts and scholars is that sometimes it is not enough to do conventional gender mainstreaming, but full inclusion of women may demand the creation of new institutions that are more in line with women's position in the society, women's orientations in the first place. Of course, very interesting. And can you indicate the researchers out there what comes next in this topic? Was something left behind? Because your paper is about Poland, so perhaps new geographical contexts? Yes, that's actually a very good point. This geographical limitation is certainly a very big limitation of this paper. Now, I do believe that there is this broader, wider message in this paper, which is this message that the paradigm that in which we talked about the gender politics of the right is not necessarily giving us the full story. But it is time to expand and to maybe look for new concepts, new ways of framing it. And this big message of we need to find more sensitizing analytical approaches to really understand how right-wing gender politics works, and we need to move beyond those gloomy, overly deterministic stories of backlash, backsliding and war against women. That all of that is something that is applicable to other contexts where we have illiberal transformations, right-wing populism rising, this approach. However, it will certainly bring different results in different national contexts. Not all countries, not even in my region, Central Eastern Europe, will have a similar gender politics of defense. But I do believe that this idea that we have to have a more analytical, sensitizing approach to studying the gender politics of the right and that the gender politics of the right is way more messy, ambiguous, contradictory than we have assumed. That's something that can be applied and tested in other contexts for sure. Of course. And you also mentioned that your research makes gender with defense policy, with right-wing politics. Can you provide some additional resources about the topics that were discussed today? So materials that somehow mix all these elements? Not really. That's kind of the problem. As I said, this type of research that I've been doing has been in many ways an unrepresented world of international academia. I mean, I'm not aware of other researchers trying to look at these three building blocks together. So gender, defense, and security, and right-wing populism. However, of course, there are great resources and great papers and books written in each of those three elements. So I think that maybe my hope is that maybe we can see more scholars taking up these topics together. Because clearly, the topic of defense restructuring in Central and Eastern Europe itself is a very salient topic. It's a very big political, institutional, societal transformation that we're having. That in response to the Russian war of aggression in Ukraine, all countries in the Central Eastern European region are rethinking their defense, they're rebuilding their defense capabilities. And so it would be great to have more research on why there's societal and gendered implications of these processes. Because as much as we know everything about how much countries are spending on defense, what kind of military procurements are happening, we don't know what type of societal transformations this brings about. And I think as scholars in sociology, political science, anthropology, this is what we should be doing as engaged social scientists. We should be monitoring and understanding what type of societal transformations are happening in order to also intervene in them in a critical way. Of course, so your research and this conversation is then the tip of the iceberg, still a lot to find. If there is anything that you want your audience to remember about this talk, so what it would be? So what's the punchline of today's talk? I guess I would say there are three things, each of them is kind of important in its own way. First, I would like our listeners to remember that as this paper showcases, but also other great studies out there, liberal gender politics or writing gender politics does not automatically imply a backlash or anti-gender politics. In fact, writing gender politics is way more complicated and it is structured differently in different realms of policy and politics. And it is also structured and communicated differently to different audiences and trying to fit it under this one master narrative of gloomy backlash is just not true. So that's one thing. The second thing is that I would like our listeners to think about is that militarization does not necessarily imply remasculinization. So similarly, we can have processes of defense, preparations, defense restructuring that actually bring some re-gendering with them rather than a strengthening of this masculine culture of the military. So that's another interesting thing to look at. And finally, the final lesson, which is more methodological, so to say is that I do believe this paper shows and I hope that others will agree too, that we are in this moment of, you know, as some say, interregnum, this period where the oldest dying, the new struggles to be born in terms of our societies and political economic changes. And therefore our concepts, I do believe should be open to also capture and work with this change and ambiguity and the dynamic of sociopolitical processes. So they shouldn't be concepts that are definitive, that are telling us what to see, that are normative. They should be concepts that are open, analytical and sensitizing so that they can help us disentangle what is really going on, all those different transformations. And through that, they can help us actually better understand and craft better responses. And my fear is that without that, we will be kind of stuck in retelling certain master narratives, but we won't necessarily understand what's going on. Some important lessons from today's talk. This episode is available on, let's talk about Politics and Governance website on Koji Tatu's YouTube channel, as well as in podcast directories. Veronica, it was a pleasure. Thank you very much. Thank you.