Conflicts over religious symbols in the public sphere, gay marriage, abortion or gender equality have shown their disruptive potential across many societies in the world. They have also become the subject of political and legal debates in international institutions. These conflicts emerge out of different worldviews and normative conceptions of the good, and they are frequently framed in terms of competing interpretations of human rights. One newcomer voice in conflicts over rights and values in the international sphere is the Russian Orthodox Church (ROC), which in recent years has become an active promoter of ‘traditional values’ both inside Russia and internationally. This article studies the ideational prerequisites and dynamics of Russian Orthodox ‘norm protagonism’ in the international arena.

This article offers a case study of the Russian-American pro-family organisation the World Congress of Families, explaining its emergence, strategies, and religious and political agenda from 1995 until 2019. The article adds to a growing body of research that sheds light on transnational networks of conservative and right-wing political and civil society actors. It zooms in on Russian pro-family activists as connected to such networks and thereby takes an innovative perspective on the Russian conservative turn as part of a global phenomenon. The article also makes the argument that a specific Russian Christian Right movement, comparable to and linked with the American Christian Right and conservative Christian groups in Europe, is taking shape in Russia.

This book examines the key 2008 publication of the Russian Orthodox Church on human dignity, freedom, and rights. It considers how the document was formed, charting the development over time of the Russian Orthodox Church's views on human rights. It analyzes the detail of the document, and assesses the practical and political impact inside the Church, at the national level and in the international arena. Overall, it shows how the attitude of the Russian Orthodox Church has shifted from outright hostility towards individual human rights to the advocacy of "traditional values."

The rights of people who are marginalised by their sexual orientation and gender identity (LGBTI) have improved in many countries. Largely, these achievements can be traced back to the ‘spiral model’ of factors including transnational mobilisation by the LGBTI rights movement, the actions of a few pioneering governments, and advances in the human rights frameworks of some international organisations (IOs). Yet a rising and increasingly globally connected resistance works against LGBTI rights. It rests predominantly in the hands of a transnational advocacy network (TAN) that attempts to lay claim to international human rights law by reinterpreting it. Drawing on a decade of fieldwork and 240 interviews with LGBTI, anti-LGBTI, and state and IO actors, this article explores how the conservative TAN functions, in terms of who comprises it and how its agenda is constructed. We argue that this TAN has employed many of the same transnational tools that garnered LGBTIQ people their widespread recognition. It also conforms to the spiral model of rights diffusion, but in a process we call a double helix. As the double-helix metaphor suggests, rival TANs have a reciprocal relationship, having to navigate each other’s presence in an interactive space and thus using related strategies and instruments for mutually exclusive ends.

This article is dedicated to analysis of the traditionalist agenda, promoted by Russia, in recent debates in the United Nations Human Rights Council (‘Traditional values’ from 2009 to 2013, ‘Protection of the family’ from 2014 to 2017). The traditionalist agenda could be interpreted as yet another chapter of contextualist opposition to the universalist application human of rights and as a successor to the cultural relativism in human rights promoted in the past by the Organization of Islamic States or countries from the Global South. This article seeks to challenge such an interpretation and instead makes the argument that the traditionalist agenda employs novel aspects of illiberal norm protagonism in the human rights sphere. The article undertakes an in-depth analysis of the discourse coalitions of both supporters and opponents of the traditionalist agenda, using the tools of discourse analysis in international relations and drawing on a constructivist approach to norm diffusion in international organisations.

In the last two decades, Russian state actors and the Russian Orthodox Church have come to play an increasingly important role in the undermining of established understandings of international human rights law by reinterpreting its aims and repurposing its institutions, in particular the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the United Nations Human Rights Council, and the European Court of Human Rights. Russian state and church leaders have appropriated and coopted the language of human rights in order to advance an illiberal and nationalist agenda that undercuts democratic values and targets particular groups and their rights and freedoms—most notably liberal civil society, political opposition, and the LGBTIQ+ community. Written from the angle of a constructivist sociology of human rights, this article brings together three case studies of Russian rights appropriation around the topics of traditional values, family, and homeschooling and draws six lessons on the (mis)appropriation of human rights for illiberal purposes. The analysis of Russia’s rights appropriation sheds light on the background and build-up for current events in Russia’s war against Ukraine.