Guest article: Measuring up for Membership. What Can We Learn by Applying a Gender Lens to Relations between the Republic of Moldova and the EU?

The Republic of Moldova became an EU accession candidate in December 2023 and is currently busy laying the foundations for future membership negotiations. If the ambitious goal of entering the European Union in 2030 is maintained, much has to be done within a short space of time to ensure that the c...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Romanian journal of European affairs 2024-06, Vol.24 (1), p.5-20
Main Author: Longhurst, Kerry
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Accession
Ambition
Best practice
Candidates
Civil society
Content analysis
Displaced persons
Domestic violence
Equal rights
Equality
EU membership
Europeanization
Females
Gender
Gender equity
Gender roles
Gender-based violence
Geopolitics
Hypotheses
Membership
Military withdrawals
Non-binary gender
Oligarchy
Political integration
Political representation
Politics
Women
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Summary:The Republic of Moldova became an EU accession candidate in December 2023 and is currently busy laying the foundations for future membership negotiations. If the ambitious goal of entering the European Union in 2030 is maintained, much has to be done within a short space of time to ensure that the country meets all the membership criteria and achieves alignment with the EU's acquis communautaire. The aim of the current article is to deploy a novel gender lens through which to consider the Republic of Moldovas evolving EU perspectives and, in so doing, capture fresh and nuanced findings that traditional, political, economic, security scholarly, and policy approaches to EU enlargement tend to discount. Findings suggest that Moldova performs significantly better on multiple gender-indicators than its country peers in the Eastern Partnership (EaP) region. However, despite palpable improvements and examples of alignment with EU gender norms and international best practice, the article ascertains notable shortcomings and disparities with relevance for Moldovas EU accession. The article adopts a mixedmethod qualitative approach, intersecting content analysis of key documents, social and economic data and civil society reporting with stakeholder interviews. The added-value of the research derives from its use of agender lens aligned with the specificity of the Republic of Moldova, which represents a novel contribution to EU enlargement studies.
ISSN:1582-8271
1841-4273