Gender and Sexual Politics in a Changing International Order

Moving beyond explanations that frame these conflicts as domestic moral disputes or isolated backlash, it argues that struggles over gender and sexuality have become geopolitical, with anti‑gender actors engaging in worldmaking that challenges the liberal international order. Drawing on feminist and critical IR scholarship, the project analyses how gender equality, reproductive rights, and SOGI rights are constructed as issues of sovereignty, civilisation, democracy, security, and development in multilateral arenas. It traces how anti‑gender frames circulate across diplomatic, legal, and policy forums; theorises anti‑gender worldmaking as an emergent ordering project; and builds an AI‑assisted research infrastructure for mapping changes in gender, sexuality, and reproductive‑rights regimes.

Using interviews, document analysis, ethnographic observation, and theory‑driven AI methods, the project examines politically salient international sites. It offers the first systematic study of anti‑gender mobilisation as a geopolitical project, advances a new framework linking body politics and geopolitics, and introduces methodological tools for layered, intersectional analysis of rights transformations.