In From Global to Grassroots: The European Union, Transnational Advocacy, and Combatting Violence against Women, Celeste Montoya endeavors to explore the European Union's impact on improving local opportunities to end violence against women. Attentive to policy rhetoric, she maintains that the international community's higher standards are often imperiled on the ground. Her research thus seeks to explain the gaps between global rhetoric and local practices by mapping out the jurisdictional divide that advocates must cross to increase the responsiveness of authorities to abused women.
After a valuable review of the general literature pertaining to political opportunity structures, international organizations, and advocacy networks, Montoya moves to a European terrain of the 27 (currently 28) EU member states and several candidate countries. Her cartography of multilevel governance covers the EU's recent treaties, central institutions, and multiple strategies with attention to their potential to address violence against women. Throughout she recognizes their disparate impact on particular groups of women and various states. With the exception of her occasional reference to candidate countries as member states (e.g., Montenegro and Turkey, 212), her mapping skills provide the book with its greatest asset.
Montoya's diagrams and her concise user-friendly guide to the EU's central institutions offer an antidote to confusion surrounding the mistaken impression that the EU functions as a unitary actor. She makes clear that some EU institutions have been more amenable than others to mitigating violence against women. She notes, for instance, that the European Council (formerly the Council of Ministers) was especially intransigent while the Parliament was a reliable and powerful advocate for women's rights. By highlighting the dynamic character of this transnational polity, she cautions against any assumption that these institutions will remain static.
The author is similarly reluctant to rush to judgment about legal remedies. She notes that although most countries have laws and national action policies to counter violence against women, there are crucial differences between them that binding EU level legislation (i.e., hard laws) might ignore in an effort to exact greater uniformity. Among these differences Montoya notes that without financial backing and enhanced state capacity for laggard states, the enforcement of hard laws could prove ineffective and coercive. In general, she prefers a softer and more flexible approach to encourage tailored interventions that she believes will prove more effective.
While Montoya can convincingly argue either of these (hard versus soft law) positions in the abstract, she is more interested in substantive redress. For her, the greatest obstacles to it remain “outside the language of the law” (250) in the unequal distribution of resources and sexist societal attitudes. Given Europe's economic crisis, she favors public awareness campaigns that require only limited resources.
Framing matters to Montoya, and she reveals how frames can either promote or obstruct our understanding of and opportunities for social change. She prefers framing violence against women as a pervasive problem while also recognizing the unique positions women occupy when experiencing oppression's multiple forms. Montoya calls on inclusive policies to alleviate marginalization, and she is explicit about the language she refuses to employ in this process. First, she refuses gender-neutral frames of “gender violence,” insisting they prevent us from acknowledging that “gendered” violence is perpetrated predominantly by men against women. She similarly regards acronyms like VAW (violence against women) with suspicion because she thinks they anesthetize us to its harm. That said, Montoya disavows the term genital mutilation with quotation marks while employing the euphemism “female circumcision.” It would be helpful if Montoya further explicated these rhetorical shifts. Montoya also favors expansive definitions of violence against women, including prostitution and pornography (as “othered” manifestations) into that rubric when analyzing EU documents. But she could usefully go further and confront the fundamental flaw in the global rhetoric's refusal to condemn outright the sexualized violence central to everyday abuse and the emergence of the global sex industry.
Montoya credits the United Nation's 1993 Declaration on the Elimination of Violence Against Women (DEVAW) with framing violence against women as a human rights issue and reveals that its emphasis on concrete regional and intergovernmental initiatives, in turn, inspired nearly every EU initiative that works toward ending violence against women. She applauds the balance the DEVAW strikes between universality and the recognition that some groups of women are especially vulnerable to violence (e.g., women belonging to minority groups, indigenous women, refugee women, migrant women, women living in poverty and in conditions recognized as armed conflict). Not least, she emphasizes the instrument's framing of violence as an obstacle to gender equality, peace, and development. Missing, however, is mention of the UN's curious decision to condemn only “forced prostitution,” a concept that enabled the UN to retreat from its earlier recognition of prostitution as a contemporary form of (sexual) slavery. The global sex industry and its customers are thus shielded from accusations of coercion. Crucially, the UN's 1949 Convention for the Suppression of the Traffic in Persons and of Prostitution decriminalized the victims but not the perpetrators, as happens in state-sanctioned systems of prostitution. The DEVAW's retreat from that position and its insertion of this term “forced prostitution” into the global antiviolence lexicon is a matter that Montoya's next work might address.
Montoya's intersectional feminist analysis together with her attention to the differences among EU institutions, member states, and candidate countries exposes the uneven impact and complexities involved in framing violence for differentially situated women over time. Her findings point to incongruities and make the reader think about these differences, such as the fact that in 2008, the Commission provides its most intersectional and comprehensive approach to violence against women with reference to nonmember states. By contrast, this more inclusive approach is entirely absent from the EU's internally focused policies. This finding is consistent with other scholarship pertaining to EU human rights policies.
Montoya's conclusion considers two contradictory forces currently facing abused women and their advocates. She notes that more binding international instruments have been gaining political traction at the same time the economic crisis is likely to erode, if not reverse, the most promising of these efforts.
Montoya's book will be of great interest to those wishing to better grasp why the reach of global rhetoric has fallen short in confronting the harsh realities experienced by particular groups of abused women throughout the EU's member states and candidate countries.
