13 January 2026

by Bianca Bălănescu (student of Equal Opportunity Policies, Faculty of Political Science at University of Bucharest)

‘I made a bet with an Erasmus student, who also gave me, when she left, a very heartfelt letter and some chocolate. I made a bet and said ‘God, if we dodge the far-right at the presidency this year, I'll throw a party.’’

I am sitting with Ionela Băluță in her living room, as her two cats stroll around us gently scratching themselves against the coffee table. Then she goes on: ‘I liked that bet because it clearly showed that it was actually born out of desperation, that nobody believed anymore.’ 

Ionela Băluță is a university professor and doctoral supervisor at the Faculty of Political Sciences, University of Bucharest, Romania. A gender studies researcher, feminist, and the founder of the Master for the Study of Equal Opportunity Policies (MPES) and the Center for the Study of Equal Opportunity Policies (CPES) at the same university. We met in 2023, when I started my master's degree, though I had already come across pieces of her work before, while working on my bachelor’s thesis on Romania’s attempts to implement gender quotas.

She welcomed my invitation to talk about how she managed to build and sustain a community around the Master and Research Center she founded, about the challenges this year has brought, and the broader struggles that gender studies, as a field of research, continues to face within Romania’s academic landscape.

The Master’s programme and the Research Center both emerged in 2011, after Ionela joined a European network of professors who taught gender studies in various universities, and together had the initiative to launch a European consortium in the field - ÉGALES (Études sur le Genre et Actions Liées à l’Égalité dans la Société)¹. She encountered many bureaucratic adventures at the institutional level but, together with a few colleagues who believed in the project, she managed to establish the programme. It was, as she describes it, a favourable context: ‘I often joke with some colleagues saying that we didn't realize it, but we were living in the best of all possible worlds. Because at that time, despite the 2008 financial crisis that hit society, nevertheless, the commitment and political agenda for equal opportunities, gender equality, with an increasingly intersectional approach, was of great interest. European funding in the area, but also from the World Bank, had various indicators in many programmes, which somehow obliged states to develop knowledge, training, and research in the field of gender equality and equal opportunities.’

Learning about the dynamics and practices in partner universities through the collaboration in the ÉGALES consortium, prof. Băluță realised that there was also a need for a Research Center alongside the Master’s programme, for the bigger aim of all these efforts was to advance both on the fundamental knowledge side and on the production of applied knowledge - analyses, policy papers, public policy recommendations - in partnership with civil society and public institutions. And this is also the ethos of her feminism: ‘Feminism means both an epistemological stance when conducting research on politics and society, as well as a civic stance, which means that not only are we aware that the process of knowledge acquisition is a political act with a political dimension, but we are also interested in the impact that we can have.’

Since its formation, the Center for the Study of Equal Opportunity Policies (CPES) has organised events bringing together students from across faculties, PhD candidates, young researchers, professors, activists, artists and journalists. The most notable for me, during my time as a student, was a series of meetings and debates with gender studies scholars from the Romanian diaspora. While we got to explore their specific projects and niche research interests, we also discussed the phenomenon of intellectual migration and the lack of material support for conducting research - a chronic issue in the Romanian academic landscape. Beyond these exchanges with researchers from abroad, another meaningful aspect was seeing NGOs engaging with academia: in 2024 and 2025, CPES hosted the release of the first issue of the Roma feminist magazine ‘Romnja - Decolonising the gadje narratives’ and the release of the ‘Queer in Romania in 2023’, report issued by the LBGTQIA+ rights NGO MozaiQ. 

Besides public events which are held inside the faculty, between or after courses, the Center lacks the capacity, infrastructure and resources to sustain regular activities like internal meetings or working groups. This is something prof. Băluță sees as symptomatic of how precariously gender studies have been institutionalised so far: ‘In Romania, a research center doesn't mean very much. We need to contextualise this because in France, Germany or Belgium, research centers are given at least a small space and, generally, an annual budget for minimal activities and so on. In Romania, none of this exists. So, apart from the fact that you can put on a website that you create yourself with your own resources, you don't really receive anything from the university.’ She believes that having at least a small space with a computer and a library would help the autonomization process of the Center, making it easier for members and students to gather and initiate projects more independently.

This fragile situation stems, on one hand, from chronic underfunding across the higher education system, and on the other, from the widespread hostility toward gender studies specifically. ‘From the very beginning we had this contestation that MPES is a Master's programme that's too left-wing, too Marxist, in a faculty that, to quote, has Weberian limits’, she recalls. One professor even labeled the programme as being a form of ‘neo-Stalinism’, claiming it is not scientific. These kinds of accusations have spread throughout the faculty, in corridors, in Faculty Council meetings, and among other students, leaving members of the community built around the Master and the Center feeling vulnerable or, at least, visible for the wrong reasons. In this atmosphere, prof. Băluță began to question more and more how she was being perceived: ‘My Master's students generally come knowing what it's about, they have knowledge, they have commitment, but in undergraduate courses I find myself wondering - how do I enter the classroom after it's been said in public that what I teach is proselytism, ideology and a new form of communism?’.

The most difficult moment since 2011, and what enabled a new wave of ‘epistemic violence’ as Ionela calls it, was in 2020, when the Romanian Parliament adopted a law that sought to ban the teaching of any notion related to gender identity, in all educational settings. Through massive mobilization, a group of four universities including the University of Bucharest managed to submit an Amicus Curiae, signed by 800 scholars and professors worldwide, to the Romanian Constitutional Court, after the law had already been challenged by the President at the time. In her words: ‘I had tremendous support from colleagues from other universities when that very critical moment came. The lesson of solidarity is one that has really helped me. I mean, I don't think I could have survived without it.’

Eventually and with great effort, the law was declared unconstitutional months later, but the threat to the very existence of the Master and the Center is not over. Between June 2024 and May 2025, Romanians went to the polls six times for the European, local, parliamentary, and presidential elections. In December 2024, two new far-right, populist and eurosceptic parties made their way into Parliament after years in which Romania seemed relatively untouched by the surge of the radical right that spread across much of Europe. In the same month, an unprecedented constitutional crisis erupted. Călin Georgescu, a far-right, pro-Russian, ultra-nationalist, and conspiracy-driven presidential candidate, won 23% of the vote in the first round, after running a full-scale Russian-funded campaign entirely on TikTok, away from the public eye. The Constitutional Court annulled the second round of elections, only to later clear the way for a new far-right presidential candidate, endorsed by Georgescu. LGBTQIA+ rights, women’s right to safe abortion, and the accusation that the so-called ‘gender ideology’ promotes gender transition for children were, unfortunately, recurring topics during the electoral debates.

Even though people in the end elected a centrist, pro-European candidate, the experience of 2025 and the realization that the far-right forces have become a lasting presence in the country left deep scars on the public, especially among those who knew they would have been targeted and silenced by a consolidated far-right leadership.

‘It was very difficult. It was truly exhausting. I went through periods when I felt paralysed and couldn’t do anything except stay glued to social media and the TV, talking to people — and then periods when I would bury myself in work, as a way of escaping from a reality that was hard to bear. A few friends helped me, mainly feminists, with whom I spoke constantly, creating small support networks. And then, speaking of students, I saw they were lost. The next day after Georgescu won, I had a class and I saw that everyone was exhausted, had been crying. And I said I didn't feel capable of handling what happened, what it all meant, and they told me they really needed to talk about this, because generally professors don't engage with these topics. Through these discussions, we helped each other. They helped me find arguments and things that would mobilise me’, prof. Băluță recalls.

Apart from the informal meetings at the beginning and the end of the academic year, and the Christmas party, the community met more frequently in 2025. Ionela would send invitations to theatre and cultural events, and in June she invited students to her garden to pick cherries and play badminton. ‘These kinds of interactions help strengthen the community and foster spaces of resistance. I am convinced that all these groups and relationships that have been built up and reshaped, not necessarily in relation to me, but also among the students themselves, since 2020 represent a space of resistance in the event of new attacks, which are not out of the question.’

After the experience of the past year, 2025, it became clearer than ever that the Center for the Study of Equal Opportunity Policies (CPES) is a true space of resistance. It remains one of the few spaces left to students and aspiring researchers and practitioners committed to gender equality and equal opportunities for all, in a context marked by chronic underfunding that hinders new initiatives in academia, the weak institutionalization of gender studies, and the hostility fueled by anti-gender campaigns.