In recent years, efforts to change school curricula, university research, and media content have become a key element of anti-gender politics. Analysis of seven EU countries in the CCINDLE project (D2.5 Report on anti-gender mobilisations’ knowledge production) show that many of these efforts are repressive: they try to cut funding or accreditation for gender studies, block sex education in schools, or target scholars working on gender or critical race studies. At the same time, anti-gender politics also involves what can be called productive inventions, which focus on producing new “knowledge” and promoting new experts on gender, reproduction, family, and broader social inequalities and power relations. This new “knowledge” often takes the form of pseudo-science or troll-science: ideas that are presented as scientific but ignore basic scientific standards such as sound methods, solid evidence, peer review, and transparency about how research is done. Here, pseudo-science refers to claims that look scientific on the surface but do not follow scientific method, for example because they rely on cherry-picked data or reject well-established research without good reasons. Troll-science is used to describe a more openly provocative style of such false “science”, where arguments are designed to shock, confuse, or inflame public debate rather than to understand reality, while still trying to borrow the authority of real science
This new “knowledge” – or, rather conservative redefinitions of gender, identity, and rights – is often produced by institutions such as private colleges, training academies, and think-tanks. These institutions are set up by political actors to advance conservative and illiberal agendas by reshaping who produces knowledge, what counts as legitimate expertise, and how the public is educated about gender, family and the state. Three illustrative examples are Hungary’s Mathias Corvinus Collegium (MCC), Poland’s Collegium Intermarium, and France’s Institut des Sciences Sociales, Économiques et Politiques (ISSEP).
These three institutions offer a model for intervening in knowledge-production systems through productive means. These productive interventions include building parallel educational pipelines for future elites; publishing research, creating new curricula and organizing public events that reframe gender and related social issues within an ultraconservative worldview. Political ties secure these institutions through funding and support from parties and/or the state. Each of the three has close ties to right-wing political parties. MCC cooperates closely with Orbán’s government in terms of funding and academic output, and ISSEP operates as a deliberate training arm of a far-right party National Rally (former National Front). Collegium Intermarium has received generous financial support from the Polish state under the Law and Justice coalition; after the 2023 change of government, its links to politics now run more through conservative civil society and legal actors.
MCC is the oldest and most established of the three. Founded in the mid-1990s, MCC presents itself as a broad talent-development institution, offering programs from primary-school enrichment to postgraduate and PhD training, as well as leadership academies designed to educate future Hungarian elites. ISSEP is a private school founded in 2018 and associated with Marion Maréchal, the granddaughter of Jean-Marie Le Pen. It is explicitly framed as an alternative institution of political and civic formation for a future political leader, rejecting what its founders present as “leftist” dominance in the academy. Finally, CI, founded in 2021 in Warsaw, is promoted as a new Central European university focused on law, classical philosophy, family, and demography studies, offering a distinctive “faith and science” perspective, but it has remained the least successful of the three, losing much of its funding after 2023 and struggling to attract students.
All three institutions combine formal teaching with research centers, public events, and fellowship schemes that move beyond classical scholarship into shaping political culture, especially debates about family, gender, and national identity. They create an alternative pipeline for producing “expertise” that normalizes skeptical or hostile perspectives on gender equality, LGBT rights, and related fields. These institutions also act as hubs for conservative, anti-gender networking by inviting activists and organisations critical of “gender ideology,” hosting events on the “dangers of gender”, and producing academic outputs (reports, policy proposals, trained graduates) that can be circulated as “expert” alternatives to mainstream gender studies. ISSEP is perhaps the most explicit in directly challenging gender scholarship, for instance by organising conferences on the alleged harms of “transgender ideology”. Yet all three institutions promote ultraconservative views, target minority rights, and simultaneously seek public recognition as defenders of freedom of speech and academic liberty.
Taken together, these three cases show how anti-gender actors have shifted from street-level protest to structural interventions inside knowledge infrastructures. The report argues that these interventions have serious consequences for knowledge production as well as for democracy more broadly, including normalising ultraconservative positions on gender as plausible policy options and creating confusion about the meaning of key concepts such as minority rights. A closer look at these academic institutions established by political actors highlights further problems, such as the politicization of education and research. When knowledge institutions are closely connected to parties or party networks, education becomes a tool of party strategy, and curricula risk turning into pipelines for partisan elites rather than training grounds for pluralistic inquiry.
Author: Elżbieta Korolczuk, Södertörn University. 16th December 2025