New project at CPS: Success of Failure? Explaining Policy Outcomes by Comparing Actors and Processes in Making Domestic Violence Policies in East and Central Europe

A three month research project conducted jointly with CEU’s Department of Public Policy started in May.

After conspicuous absence from policy agendas during state-socialism, domestic violence emerged as a policy issue almost simultaneously in most CEE countries in the aftermath of the 1995 Beijing World Women’s Conference. In subsequent years, women’s movements across the region, in cooperation with transnational women’s and human rights networks advocated for legal and policy change. As the result of complex processes of movement mobilization, negotiation between state and intergovernmental actors, the effects of Europeanization and the globalization of human rights norms, as well as rapid political transformation in the region, policies, laws and strategies against domestic violence were adopted between 2003 and 2005 in most CEE countries.

The project aims to understand:

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what policy processes and mechanisms of involvement of different level actors explain the almost simultaneous policy outcomes and

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how these policy processes and mechanisms impact on the differences in the quality of policies in the field of domestic violence in five Central and Eastern European Countries: Hungary, Bulgaria, Croatia, Poland, and Romania.

The project is supported by the Central European University Research Support Scheme.

More (link to research and advocacy/social diversity and equal opp./domestic violence ; date: 20 June, 2009)