By: Christina Koikaran
I came to Bulgaria primarily interested in conflict resolution and the Women, Peace and Security agenda. My placement at the Bulgarian Center for Not-for-Profit Law focused on anti-SLAPP legislation, democratic participation, and protecting civic space. As my research developed over the summer, I found myself increasingly drawn to one question: who is most affected by strategic lawsuits against public participation, and how should equality be understood when assessing those impacts?
My year of legal education made adopting a substantive equality framework feel intuitive.
To date, I have been taught that treating everyone equally before the law is often insufficient, as structural inequalities shape people’s opportunities, experiences, and access to justice.[1] While formal equality may guarantee identical legal treatment, substantive equality asks whether people can actually exercise their rights in practice.
So, naturally, I approached my research from that perspective.
Then I started talking to people.
As I discussed equality frameworks with colleagues at BCNL, professors, and journalists, and began reading more deeply into Bulgaria’s legal and political history, I found myself confronting a picture I had never really been exposed to before. Our conversations about formal versus substantive equality were not simply debates over legal theory. They reflected entirely different historical experiences of what equality had meant, what it had promised, and what it had failed to deliver.
That made me unpack assumptions I did not realize I was carrying.
I assumed that many of the legal and feminist frameworks I had encountered in my studies would translate relatively naturally to the Bulgarian context. I understood, of course, that European countries had different histories and political systems, but I had not fully appreciated how much the division between Western and Eastern Europe, and in particular, the experience of state socialism, could shape the meaning of concepts like feminism and equality. I had unconsciously treated “Europe” as a single coherent legal and intellectual tradition.
The more I researched Bulgaria, the more I challenged my assumptions.
The history of women’s equality here cannot be separated from the history of state socialism. Under communism, women’s participation in the labour force was not simply encouraged; it was institutionalized. The state expanded childcare systems, integrated women into paid employment, and established formal legal equality decades before many Western countries adopted comparable measures.[2]
Of course, that did not mean women experienced equality in practice.
That history complicates a familiar Western feminist narrative in which equality is often understood as a struggle to secure women’s entry into public, political, and economic life. In Bulgaria, women’s economic participation had already been made a central feature of state ideology. Equality, at least in its formal legal sense, had long been proclaimed.
Women continued to shoulder disproportionate domestic responsibilities, political participation remained tightly constrained, and many policies promoting women’s equality also served the state’s economic and ideological objectives.[3] State socialism expanded opportunities in important ways while simultaneously restricting agency in others.
What struck me was not simply that Bulgaria had a different history of feminism. It was that this history changed the meaning of the legal questions I thought I was asking. Formal equality could not be understood here simply as an inadequate precursor to substantive equality. It was also connected to a political history in which the state had claimed to have already achieved equality, while the lived reality of women remained far more complicated.
This forced me to reconsider not only the position from which I was approaching my research, but the assumptions I was bringing to it. While I still believe that substantive equality provides a strong framework for understanding structural discrimination, I am now much more conscious of the dangers of treating legal frameworks developed in Western contexts as easily transferable.
My research on anti-SLAPP legislation became an unexpected exercise in intellectual humility, reminding me that legal concepts are shaped by the societies and histories in which they develop. Even within Europe, equality does not carry a single, universal meaning; the same language can reflect very different political histories, institutional experiences, and social realities.
Perhaps that has been one of the most valuable lessons of my time in Sofia: comparative research is not only about comparing laws. It is about recognizing the assumptions we bring with us before we ever begin asking questions, and being willing to reconsider them when the context demands it.
References
- Sandra Fredman, “Substantive Equality Revisited” (2016) 14(3) International Journal of Constitutional Law 712.
- Kristen R. Ghodsee, “Pressuring the Politburo: The Committee of the Bulgarian Women’s Movement and State Socialist Feminism” (2014) 73(3) Slavic Review 538.
- Nanette Funk, “A Very Tangled Knot: Official State Socialist Women’s Organizations, Women’s Agency and Feminism in Eastern European State Socialism” (2014) 21(4) European Journal of Women’s Studies 344.