Feminist governance in the field of violence against women: the case of the Istanbul Convention

This chapter discusses the governance of violence against women in three parts. First, it looks at the specificity of the issue in terms of governance and the governance responses to address it developed by feminists in local and national contexts. Second, it looks at violence against women as a specific transnational governance issue. Finally, it shows how and why the feminist governance of VAW has become a major terrain for recent ‘anti-gender’ mobilisations in Europe, through the case of the Istanbul Convention debates. Overall, while feminist advocacy has been extremely successful in introducing new norms and institutional frameworks to combat VAW, the chapter shows that maintaining feminist principles and gender equality transformation at the core of these new modes of governance remains an ongoing struggle.