Over the past few years, CCINDLE has had the privilege of co-organising four Gender Cafés with the Society of Gender Professionals (SGP), a global non-profit network of gender practitioners, academics, and activists spanning 127 countries. The partnership with SGP provided a great way to take CCINDLE’s comparative research on gender backlash and democratic backsliding in Europe and put it into direct, global conversation with practitioners on the frontlines — a genuine exchange of knowledge and experience with a community nearly 80,000 strong.
Across the series, close to 800 people registered to take part — from human rights lawyers in Buenos Aires to DEI consultants in Nairobi, from academics in South Africa and Budapest to community organisers in Manila. In this post, we want to look back on that journey and then zoom in on the final Gender Café, held this past June, which brought the whole series to a fitting close. You can see all the recorded Gender Cafés on our YouTube channel here.
Four Conversations, One Throughline
Each Gender Café paired CCINDLE’s research with SGP’s practitioner network to ground academic findings in lived, professional experience, and together they trace an arc across some of the defining fault lines of the past few years. The series opened in February 2024 with a look at how anti-gender movements operate on the ground in Bangladesh, Poland, Sweden, and Lebanon, drawing over 80 participants from 22 countries into a conversation about the strategies anti-gender actors use and how feminist and LGBTQ+ movements are pushing back, with breakout discussions surfacing counter-strategies from a further 15 countries and regions. That November, the series examined how technology and artificial intelligence are amplifying gender-based violence, and the particular risks facing journalists and non-English-speaking communities in the Global South. The December 2025 Café focused on backlash against LGBTQI+ rights across Africa and South America, with panellists from Ghana, Puerto Rico, India, and Argentina centring Global South voices to unpack how political opportunism, religious conservatism, and colonial legacies converge to fuel backlash, and what strategic litigation, documentation, and transnational solidarity can do about it.
The series closed this past June with its most wide-ranging session yet: a Gender Café asking whether DEI itself can survive the era of backlash. Taken together, the four sessions make clear that anti-gender and anti-DEI backlash is not a series of disconnected national controversies, but a coordinated, transnational phenomenon and that resisting it requires the kind of cross-border, cross-sector solidarity that SGP’s network embodies every day. It’s this final session we want to look at in more depth.
Organisational diversity efforts are under considerable strain. Photo by James A. Molnar on Unsplash
The Final Café: Can DEI Survive the Era of Backlash?
On 30 June 2026, nearly 60 participants from over 20 countries joined the last Gender Café in the series to ask a hard question: as Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion work faces coordinated political and organisational attack around the world, what actually sustains it? Moderating the discussion was Sofi Musleh, a Culture and DEI strategist from Ireland with nearly two decades of experience helping organisations align diversity work with broader political and organisational realities.
Backlash as a Reflection of Shifting Power
Soumeya Rachedi, an Algerian-French strategist and founder of NXT Evolution, opened by framing the DEI backlash not as an isolated workplace trend but as part of a much larger reckoning: a direct response, she argued, to the reclamation of space, rights, and resources by the Global Majority. As evidence, she pointed to two shifts already underway: funding cuts that have hit NGOs hard over the past two to three years, and a demographic change that will see one in four people on the planet be African within twenty years. Both, she argued, show old “power over” structures straining under a pressure they were never built to withstand.
A Quiet Backlash in Asia, an Explicit One Elsewhere
Jeiz Robles, a Thailand-based Principal Strategic Inclusion Advisor with over 15 years of experience across Asia, offered a contrast: where backlash in the West tends to be loud, in much of Asia it is “quiet, structural, and hidden behind compliance” — DEI roles quietly eliminated or folded into broader functions, framed as being against meritocracy or as an imported “Western concept.” Yet she also pointed to counter-currents: Hong Kong now mandates DEI policies for listed companies, and countries across the region are anchoring inclusion work in concepts like harmony and belonging that are already embedded in local culture. She made the economic case too — LGBTQ+ discrimination alone is estimated to cost Southeast Asia up to USD $33 billion in lost GDP.
South Africa was represented by two voices: Dr. Lungile Ntombela, an HR Management scholar with over a decade in higher education, and Vhutshilo “Vee” Masibigiri, an HR consultant and DEI strategist. Together they brought a South African lens, describing a backlash that is subtle precisely because the country’s legislation is already strong — meaning the real fight is over evidence: showing where legal protections and lived reality diverge. Vee also pushed back on flattening global backlash into a single American narrative, arguing that South Africa’s transformation agenda has its own history and its own resilience, and that funding disruption has, paradoxically, pushed local actors toward more locally-grounded solutions.
Moving from Survival to Redistribution
Perhaps the most striking thread of the session was a reframing of what “the future of DEI” should even mean. Soumeya argued that representation and visibility, while necessary, are not enough — the deeper work is redistributing power, authority, and decision-making itself, and building what she called “capacity for non-conformity.” She also named something rarely spoken aloud in DEI spaces: the absence of room for grief — for lives lost, for collapsing systems, for the exhaustion of constantly having to justify one’s own humanity.
Participants carried these threads into breakout discussions on building coalitions, communicating evidence to resistant audiences, and imagining what DEI could look like a decade from now — from Afrofuturist visions of systems built from scratch, to practical questions about how rebranding DEI under safer language can either protect the work or quietly erase it.
The session closed on a note that echoed throughout: as Jeiz put it, communities like SGP matter precisely because “while one person may become exhausted, others can continue the work.”
Why This Collaboration Mattered
Reflecting on the partnership as a whole, its value went well beyond four well-attended events. For CCINDLE, the Gender Cafés were co-creation in the fullest sense: spaces where our comparative research on anti-gender politics and democratic backsliding was tested, challenged, and enriched by people applying that knowledge on the ground, under real pressure, in over 20 countries. For SGP, the series offered a platform to bring academic rigour into member-led conversations, deepening the connections between gender theory, policy, and everyday practice that sit at the heart of its mission.
The Society of Gender Professionals exists precisely to fill a gap: it is the only cross-cutting professional association currently working to unite gender practitioners, academics, and activists across every sector, in every region.
As backlash against gender and DEI work grows more coordinated across borders, the case for this kind of collaboration only becomes stronger. Academic research and practitioner knowledge need each other, and communities like SGP are where that exchange actually happens. We’re grateful for four years of it, and for everyone who showed up to keep the conversation going.
Authors: Conny Roggeband (CCINDLE, University of Amsterdam), Joan de Klerk and Bren Kutch (Society of Gender Professionals). 8th September 2026
Cover photo by Hannah Busing on Unsplash