Lobbying for intersectionality: Civil society organisations and the EU’s anti-discrimination policy

Room: P30 (Préfecture building, 119 rue du marais – Bruxelles)

– In collaboration with EUGENDERING –

Speaker: Oriane Calligaro (UCLille)

Discussants: Marta Bucholc (University of Warsaw) and Raphaële Xenidis (Sciences Po)

Oriane Calligaro is an associate professor in political science at ESPOL (Université catholique de Lille) and visiting professor at the College of Europe. She is associate researcher at the Université libre de Bruxelles (CEVIPOL) and co-director of the journal Politique européenne. She has extensively published on the EU’s actions in the cultural and academic fields and on the role of values in EU governance. Her current research deals with the role of civil society organizations in the EU anti-discrimination policy. She published the monograph Negotiating Europe. The EU promotion of Europeanness since the 1950s, Palgrave Macmillan, 2013 and co-edited with François Foret the book “European values”. Challenges and opportunities for EU governance, Routledge, 2018.

Abstract: Numerous civil society organizations (CSOs) have been involved in the design of European anti-discrimination norms and policy tools. This seminar focusses on the advocacy coalitions and knowledge networks created in the last decades at the initiative of the Open Society Foundations (OSF), together with several European NGOs and think tanks. The goal is to analyze the advocacy strategies of this coalition to put controversial policy issues on the EU’s agenda, like ethnic data collection, ethnic profiling, or islamophobia, but also to promote a specific approach to these issues: intersectionality.

We show how OSF allows CSOs to exist and professionalize, and subsequently to build their expert knowledge and make it visible in the EU policy-making process. OSF actively promotes “advocacy triangles” between academic, activist, and institutional actors, through which contentious causes gain in credibility and acceptability in the EU arena. We attempt to trace the creation of such triangles and the circulation of knowledge and norms from academic/activist realms to EU policy documents and actions, in particular through the case study of intersectionality.