Gender Politics, Authoritarian Regime Resilience, and the Role of Civil Society in Algeria and Mozambique

Abstract

The question of whether and how authoritarian regimes may use gender politics to preserve their rule has attracted insufficient academic attention so far. Research on state feminism shows that non-democratic regimes often enact women-friendly policies for the purpose of maintaining power. However, this finding has not been linked to the broader research on authoritarian resilience. To address this research gap, we connect recent debates on authoritarian resilience to the research on state feminism. Subsequently, we engage in a cross-regional comparison of the use of gender politics by the authoritarian regimes of Algeria and Mozambique in order to enrich both sets of theory on the basis of empirical findings. Specifically, we ask what strategies the two authoritarian regimes employ in the areas of women’s rights and gender and how these might contribute to regime resilience, focusing on the interactions between these regimes and civil society organisations (CSOs).