The New Europe
Transnational Policy
Networks: The Case of Domestic
Violence Reform
Based on Brunell and Johnson
(forthcoming) ÒThe New WAVE: How
Transnational Feminist Networks Promote Domestic Violence Reform in Post-Communist
Europe.Ó
ÒDomestic ViolenceÓ in
post-Communist Europe
pre-1989
didnÕt
exist
no vocabulary for it
commonly accepted phenomenon
no legal structures, policy intervention,
criminal statutes
Evolution of the 1990s
Gradual emergence of terms
Òfamily violenceÓ Òviolence in the familyÓ
sometimes, Òdomestic violenceÓ
Also Institutional Change 
NGOs – service providers,
consciousness raisers, policy entrepreneurs
New criminal statutes
New prevention/public awareness campaigns
New training for social workers, police, prosecutors,
judges
**Not in all cases, not all reforms, not all
implemented/thoroughly practiced
But some real, tangible
changes
ÒHow
is such change occurring? What are the mechanisms for allowing such notions to
be articulated and transmitted to world-be activists, policy makers, law
enforcement officers, and citizens in postcommunist Europe? And, perhaps most importantly, what are
the effects of this new conceptualization of violence against women? Has domestic violence moved from the stages
of naming and consciousness-raising to actually eliciting new state responses
to it?Ó
Methods
First, our questions
Grow out of long experience in the region;
contact with activists, policy makers in the region over 10-15 year period
Interpretive, ethnographic – listening
and observing change
Second,
Theory
driven inquiry
Hypothesis generation
How is this happening here, in our cases?
What are the mechanisms of norm/policy
diffusion?
Led us to literature on transnational
organizing
Merry, Weldon
Why are these changes happening now?
Globalization is creating opportunities,
incentives for transnational governance, discourse, info exchange, collective
action
Esp. important: opportunities for activists to deliberate over standards to
which states should be held (Merry 2006:
226-7)
Mechanisms in our case:
EU: PHARE,
esp. the PHARE Social Dialog Programme;
DAPHNE
programmes
Transnational NGOs: WAVE
Third,
Hypothesis testing
Operationalizing hypothesis
Testing competing hypotheses
Our sample/countries we chose
and why
Òmost similar systems,Ó i.e.,
all going through postcommunist transition
Selected for variation on the
dependent variable
i.e., policy change
picked some we knew were more
progressive, others where we doubted reform was likely at all
Albania
Armenia
Bulgaria
Czech Republic
Hungary
Moldova
Poland
Romania
Slovak Republic
Ukraine
Hypothesis Testing
Bi-variate Regression
Tested other hypotheses too
Other independent variables
Foreign funding
Political and
economic reform
Culture
Geographic
diffusion
Findings
New from WAVE: SAVE
UNIFEM StopVAW site