Culture Wars in the Post-Soviet Space | 21 Sept 2021 |

In the last decade the term culture war has become hard to avoid. If it is not yet the buzzword of the first part of the twenty-first century, it soon will be. Culture wars seem to be around us everywhere. Each passing week brings some new mention of an outbreak in a public institution, civic space or political arena in some part of the globe. Culture wars are the phenomenon we cannot seem to shake. Battle lines are drawn, rhetorical tools are sharpened and social media awash with vitriol and moralising, and seemingly unbridgeable social gaps. If the immediate post-Cold War period did usher in an era of universal global liberalism, decades on it is now far in the distance, only visible in the rear-view mirror. Instead, around us lie social and political fault lines featuring competing visions of what should be the appropriate normative basis upon which societies should be constituted. They are debates that focus on belonging, on citizenship, on rights and identities.

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The polarising debates regarding morality and identity have long since ceased to be a solely US phenomenon and have gone 'global', illustrating their complex 'transnational' nature. The liberal surge of globalisation in the 1990s led not to universalism, but rather engendered contention, often between foreign and local agents, with one group proselytising the other in terms of the perceived acceptable moral and normative boundaries for religious, social and political conduct. Both US conservative faith-based and liberal human rights advocacy NGOs sought to export and promote their convictions abroad, often facing off `against each other politically across the globe'.

For example, US evangelists are argued to have played a key role in seeking to restrict the rights of the LGBTQI community in Africa, and especially in the case of the 2009 Anti-Homosexuality Bill in Uganda which generated a strong response from global and local LGBT human-rights advocates. While the 'exporting' of the US culture wars has been ongoing since the 1990s, local actors in many different countries also became locked into value-laden tensions pitting those holding on to some notion of 'tradition' against those seeking 'progress'.