Leandra Bias is a postdoctoral fellow at the Institute of Political Science at the University of Bern, Switzerland. Her research on anti-gender politics in authoritarian contexts, in particular Russia and the Western Balkans, lies at the intersection of political science and gender studies. She is an expert in interpretive-qualitative methods. Her three-year postdoctoral research project looks at the rise and use of the narrative of defending 'traditional values' in a 'culture war' against the West to justify Russian aggression. She is furthermore Co-Principal Investigator of the Horizon Europe project UNTWIST: Policy recommendations to regain ‘feminist losers’ as mainstream voters.

Leandra Bias is part of the newly created Feminisms & Wars Community, initiated by the Swedish Defence University, the Finnish Institute for International Affairs and the University of Iceland and funded by NordForsk. She also co-founded the Research Network of Gender and Political Science within the Swiss Association for Gender Studies. In 2020, she defended her PhD in Politics at the University of Oxford. In a comparison of Russia and Serbia, she analysed how authoritarian anti-gender politics impacts the feminist interpretation of power relations and strategies for subversion, both nationally and transnationally. Her dissertation was awarded prizes by the Swiss Association for Gender Studies and the Walter Benjamin College at the University of Bern. From 2020 to 2022, she worked as a gender advisor at the practice and research institute swisspeace, where she specialised in policy-relevant research.

‘Traditional Values’ in the Service of Authoritarian Foreign Policy

• Gendered aspects of (de-)democratisation and political violence
• Transnational feminism
• Social movements
• (Feminist) Foreign Policy

SELECTED PUBLICATIONS