Analyzing Mobilization, Politicization and Legal Intervention on Femicide in Western EuRope (Belgium, France, Italy, Spain) – AMPLIFIER

Defined since Diana Russell’s works as “the killing of a woman because she is a woman”, femicide was theorized publicly for the first time in Brussels in 1976, at the International Tribunal on Crimes against Women. On the symbolic occasion of the fiftieth anniversary of this founding event in 2026, the future ERC StG project intends to offer the first socio-historical, qualitative and comparative assessment of the complex post-1976 history of this notion, its politicization (and resistance to politicization) and the public, political and legal responses to it.
By comparing four countries (Belgium, Italy, France and Spain), whose national women’s liberation movements were present at the 1976 ITCW, chosen for their rich history of mobilizations against femicide and for the various tools they forged to combat this phenomenon, our aim is (1) to analyze, through interviews and the study of activist archives, the genealogy of the concept of femicide, first framed in Brussels and returned there several decades later after circulating through the USA, South America and Southern Europe; (2) to compare national and supranational responses to femicides, by analyzing the public policies developed in each country and by the EU in the light of past politicization trajectories; (3) to investigate which victims of femicides are taken into account by public action, distinguishing between traditional and marginal victims.
The ERC StG will thus have not only a scientific impact, but also a social and political one, as it proposes to assess (supra)national policies aimed at putting an end to femicide and to extend their scope beyond the conjugal sphere.