Paul Sabatier and Hank Jenkins-Smith introduced the Advocacy Coalition Framework (ACF) in the late 1980s to refine the theoretical and methodological tools available for the study of the policy process. Since the late 1990s, the use of the framework has grown in use outside the United States and it is now applied to study a broad range of policy arenas in all continents. ACF scholars have created a core community that regularly synthetizes findings from applications of the framework, giving the ACF the form of a true research program.
The ACF has three principal theoretical domains: advocacy coalitions, policy subsystems, and policy change. The ACF posits that advocacy coalitions and policy subsystems are the most efficient ways to organize actors interested in the policy process for empirical research. The policy subsystem is the main unit of analysis in the ACF, and there are four paths leading to policy change. Expectations about the interactions between and within the three theoretical domains are contained in 15 main hypotheses which have received different degrees of confirmation since the late 1980s. The aspect that has received more attention in existing applications is the effect that external events have on policy change.
The development of the ACF is supported by an active community of scholars that constantly reviews venerable as well as emerging criticisms, introducing adjustments that expand the heuristic power of the ACF in a controlled way. However, some areas in need of further refinement relate to: policy-oriented learning, interactions across subsystems, the theoretical foundations to identification of belief systems, and how the interactions between beliefs and interests affect coalition behavior.
Article
The Advocacy Coalition Framework Research Program: An Overview
Paúl Cisneros
Article
Executives, Executive Politics, and the LGBTQ Community
Mitchell Dylan Sellers
Executives in the United States influence politics and policies involving the lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer (LGBTQ) community. While this is more of a modern phenomenon, presidents and governors actively shape politics that directly influence the community. This allows executives to set the tone of discourse and the eventual result of LGBTQ politics. Most presidents in modern times shaped debate surrounding LGBTQ rights in a positive light, but President Trump’s tone and policies go against recent trends. Executives on every level of government can shape, and have shaped, LGBTQ politics using formal powers, such as executive orders, administrative orders, directives, memorandums, and councils. The various executive documents allow executives to directly set policy through orders or to provide guiding philosophy for how policy should operate. Councils and advisory boards inform executives by providing expertise that executives need to create sound policy. Executives rely on each of the policymaking tools to varying degrees, but all presidents and governors have the ability to use the powers. One often ignored way executives influence policy is by setting the agenda by “going public” to bring the issue to everyday citizens. Executives have shaped many policies that directly affect the LGBTQ community, but three policy areas deserve special focus: the ban on gay and transgender service members in the military, the HIV/AIDS epidemic, and nondiscrimination protections. In each of these cases, multiple executives have stepped in to shape policy and enforcement of regulations. In some cases, this is for the better. For instance, nondiscrimination policies came about in many states using gubernatorial executive orders. In other situations, executive action, or inaction, worked to the detriment of LGBTQ individuals, such as the failure of the Reagan administration to respond to the HIV/AIDS crisis. Executives have influenced policy and implementation of policies since the 1970s. This influence is likely to continue for decades to come, not just with these issues, but in many policy areas that affect the lives of LGBTQ individuals.
Article
Gender and the Military in Western Democracies
Helena Carreiras
Military institutions have been considered “gendered organizations” because gender is persistently related therein to the production and allocation of material and symbolic resources. Western states’ militaries consistently, even if unevenly, display three basic traits through which gendering occurs: the existence of structural divisions of labor and power along gender lines, organizational culture and ideology based on a distinction between masculinity and femininity, and patterns of interaction and identity formation that reflect these structural and ideological constraints.
Although women’s representation has been growing, and women have been accessing new roles, positions, and occupations in unprecedented numbers, their participation is statistically limited and substantially uneven. Notable differences between countries also exist. At a macro-sociological level, factors that explain these differences relate to the degree of convergence between armed forces and society, external political pressures, military organizational format, and the level of gender equality in society at large.
From a micro-sociological perspective, research shows that, because of their minority situation and less valued status in an organization normatively defined as masculine, women still have to face the negative consequences of tokenism: performance pressures, social isolation, and role encapsulation. However, this research also highlights two important conclusions. The first is that there is significant variation in individual and organizational responses depending on context; the second, that conditions for successful gender integration depend on specific combinations of structural, cultural, and policy dimensions: the existence or absence of institutional support, changes in the composition of groups, increase in the number of women, type of work, occupational status, level of shared experience, changing values of younger cohorts, and quality of leadership.
The Women, Peace and Security agenda, evolving from the approval of United Nations Security Council Resolution 1325 in 2000, has become the major reference framework to evaluate progress in this respect at both domestic and international levels. Despite the existence of an extremely robust set of norms, policies, and instruments, and the recognition of their transformative potential, results have been considered to lag behind expectations. Improving implementation and enhancing gender integration in the military will require context-sensitive and knowledge-driven policies, the reframing of an essentialist discourse linking women’s participation in international missions to female stereotypical characteristics, and greater congruence between national policies and the international agenda.
Article
Gender Equality Policies and European Union Politics
Christina Fiig
The European Union (EU) has been characterized as a “gender regime” with its distinctive patterns of gender (in)equalities and path dependencies. Gender equality policies have developed as a genuine policy field over the past decades from a single treaty article to a comprehensive legal and political framework dealing with multiple sources of discrimination. Besides, gender equality policies are frequently linked to other political projects and policy goals.
Gender equality is often presented as a foundational value of the EU with reference to the Treaties of Amsterdam and Lisbon. Research has pointed out that it is an important aspect of the foundational myth of the EU. The development of gender equality policies has been characterized by alternations between progress and stagnation. These policies are also met by resistance. However, a general conclusion is that EU institutions have been important catalysts in shaping women’s economic, political, and social equality in Europe and in putting equality rights into effect. Historical, political, and sociological interpretations of the EU’s gender equality policies illustrate these dynamics.
Gender equality policies are described in terms of the following phases: the 1970s (associated with women’s civil and economic rights and equal treatment), the 1980s (equal opportunities, positive action), and the 1990s (gender mainstreaming in the whole union and for all policy areas). Since the 2000s, a fourth phase of new policies against multiple discrimination has been developing. These different stages of EU gender policy continue to coexist. When the Treaty of Amsterdam entered into force in 1999, the EU committed to a new approach to work for gender equality through mainstreaming. Gender equality and nondiscrimination became guiding legal principles of the union. The Treaty of Lisbon reflects core vaues of the EU such as democracy, human rights and gender equality.
One can approach gender equality policies as situated between concerns for gender equality and multiple discrimination on the one hand and priorities of economy and finance on the other. Critical voices in the literature have pointed out that these priorities have outperformed ideas about gender equality. In the aftermath of the financial crisis, EU austerity policies represent a “critical juncture” that could undo the long-term progress achieved in gender equality in Europe. Besides, gender equality policies suffer from a gap between institutionalization on the one hand and a lack of consistency and full political commitment on the other. In a context of a more permanent crisis scenario in the EU, gender equality policies are undergoing transformations and they are subject to change to the worse.
A key point is that dynamic gender relations, multiple discrimination, and women’s various roles in society matter for understanding the EU and European integration. This raises questions about the EU’s role as a driving force for gender equality and against multiple discrimination. What happened to gender equality policies and to gendered effects of other policies as a result of the various crises in the EU?
Article
HIV/AIDS Politics and Policy in Eastern Europe and Central Asia
Ulla Pape
Eastern Europe and Central Asia (EECA) is the only region in the world where annual HIV infection rates continue to grow. According to the Joint United Nations Program on HIV/AIDS (UNAIDS), in 2019 approximately 1.4 million people in the region were living with HIV. The main factors that have contributed to the spread of the epidemic over the past two decades include injecting drug use, the stigmatization and marginalization of vulnerable groups, the increasing spread of HIV into the general population, and the lack of evidence-based prevention and treatment programs necessary for controlling the epidemic. Limited access to life-saving antiretroviral treatment has intensified the impact of the epidemic in EECA and increased mortality rates among people living with HIV (PLWH).
In the post-Soviet space, Russia is experiencing by far the biggest HIV/AIDS epidemic. This can be attributed largely to the government’s failure to introduce evidence-based prevention measures for vulnerable groups, e.g., harm reduction programs, which are recommended by international health organizations. Other countries in the region have been more pragmatic in their approach and introduced harm reductions programs on a broader scale. In Ukraine, the efforts to combat HIV, which led to an initial stabilization of the epidemic in 2012, have been endangered by the military conflict in the eastern part of the country and subsequent internal displacement, which has increased HIV vulnerability. In comparison with Russia and Ukraine, the countries of the South Caucasus and Central Asia are less affected by HIV. However, labor migration to Russia constitutes a persistent risk factor for HIV transmission from higher-prevalence Russia to lower-prevalence South Caucasus and Central Asia.
Although initially the HIV/AIDS epidemic has been mainly driven by injecting drug use, it is also clearly linked to lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) politics and policies in EECA. Because of widespread stigmatization and marginalization, the spread of HIV within LGBT communities remains underreported and is barely visible in official HIV statistics. This makes it difficult for prevention programs to reach out to vulnerable groups. In all countries in the region, prevention efforts among LGBT communities remain inadequate and largely depend on local civil society organizations (CSOs), which lack the capacities to provide nationwide information campaigns and other prevention programs for the LGBT community. In addition, the work of CSOs that advocate for HIV prevention among LGBT groups is further undermined by repressive laws, e.g., the 2013 “gay propaganda law” in Russia, which has increased the stigmatization of LGBT people and has made prevention outreach more difficult. Research has contributed to our understanding of HIV vulnerability and its impact in EECA. Further research is needed, however, into the social and political factors that explain the persistent failure of regional decisionmakers to adequately address the growing HIV epidemic.
Article
HIV Law and Policy in the United States: A Tipping Point
Scott Skinner-Thompson
The fight to effectively treat and stop the spread of the human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) has made meaningful progress both in the United States and globally. But within the United States that progress has been uneven across various demographic groups and geographic areas, and has plateaued. While scientific advances have led to the development of medicine capable of both treating and preventing HIV, law and policy dictate who will have ready access to these medicines and other prevention techniques, and who will not. Law and policy also play a crucial role in determining whether HIV will be stigmatized, discouraging people from being tested and treated, or will be identified for what it is—a preventable and treatable disease. To make further progress against HIV, the United States must address healthcare disparities, end the criminalization of HIV, and devote additional resources toward combatting HIV stigma and discrimination.
Article
Hurricane Sandy: A Crisis Analysis Case Study
Sara Bondesson
Spontaneous, so-called emergent groups often arise in response to emergencies, disasters, and crises where citizens and relief workers find that pre-established norms of behavior, roles, and practices come into flux because of the severity and uncertainty of the situation. The scholarship on emergent groups dates to 1950s sociological theory on emergence and convergence, whereas contemporary research forms part of the wider disaster scholarship field. Emergent groups have been conceptualized and theorized from various angles, ranging from discussions around their effectiveness, to their possibilities as channels for the positive forces of citizen’s altruism, as well as to more skeptical accounts detailing the challenges emergent groups may pose for established emergency management organizations in relief situations. Scarce scholarly attention, however, is paid to the role of emergent groups when it comes to empowering marginalized and vulnerable communities. The few empirical studies that exist suggest linkages between active participation in emergent groups and empowerment of otherwise marginalized communities, as shown in an ethnographic study of the work of Occupy Sandy that emerged in the aftermath of Hurricane Sandy that struck New York City in 2012. Although more systematic research is warranted, such empirical examples show potential in terms of shifting emergency and disaster management toward more inclusionary, participatory, and empowering practices. As low-income communities, often of color, experience the increasingly harsh effects of climate change, important issues to ponder are inclusion, participation, and empowerment.
Article
LGBT Military Service Policies in the United States
Andrew Goodhart and Jami K. Taylor
For most of its history, the U.S. military has maintained a policy of exclusion toward lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) people serving in uniform. The justifications for these exclusions have included the view that being homosexual or transgender is a psychological disorder, that it undermines military morale and effectiveness, and a fear that LGBT people would be vulnerable to foreign espionage. Explicit policies banning consensual homosexual sex—and excluding from service those who engage in it—date to the period between World Wars I and II, but de facto efforts at exclusion have existed since the early days of the republic.
Regulations governing homosexuals in the military came under pressure in the 1970s and 1980s as societal views toward lesbian, gay, and bisexual (LGB) people changed, and those LGB service members discharged under the policy increasingly challenged their treatment in court. (Public pressure to change regulations governing transgender people in the military arose mostly in the 2000s, though litigation efforts date to the 1970s.) In addition to general shifts in public and legal opinion, the debate over LGB people serving in the U.S. military was affected by the experience of foreign militaries that allow LGB people to serve. United States law began to loosen formal restrictions on LBG people serving in uniform with the passage of “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” (DADT) in 1994, but it still required LGB people to serve in secret. Changing public perceptions of LGB people and problems implementing the ban galvanized support for eliminating such restrictions. In 2010, President Obama signed legislation repealing DADT and removing all restrictions on LGB people serving in the military. However, transgender people do not enjoy the same rights. The Trump administration has revised Obama-era rules on transgender service members to enable greater exclusion. The issue is being contested in the courts and appears ripe for further political and legal dispute.
Article
Mainline Protestants and Divestment as International Economic Activism
Maia Hallward
Mainline Protestant denominations in the United States have a history of using divestment as an economic form of nonviolent moral activism. While such activism can have a domestic focus, at times church divestment efforts have emphasized foreign policy issues as an extension of church activism in the areas of social justice and moral reform. Churches have used economic activism such as divestment from apartheid South Africa and investment screens to prevent church pension and other funds from being used for products and services—such as alcohol, tobacco and munitions—deemed “immoral” by church bodies. The case of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict illustrates the broader themes and tensions involved in church divestment debates, given the media coverage that has been generated by the topic due to the special relationship between Christians and the holy land and the troubled history of Christianity and anti-Semitism. Some Protestant denominations, particularly those with a history of engagement in Israel/Palestine, have responded to the Palestinians’ call for boycott, divestment, and sanctions (BDS) to advance their freedom and human rights. However, such responses have not been immune from debate and controversy. Some mainline Protestant denominations, including the Presbyterian Church USA (PCUSA), the United Methodist Church, and the Episcopal Church have debated resolutions dealing with church divestment from companies profiting from Israel’s occupation of Palestinian territories. Such resolutions have resulted in pushback from some parties, including efforts to criminalize boycott of Israel.
Article
Marriage Equality Policy Diffusion
Helma G. E. de Vries-Jordan
Marriage equality movements have been successful in achieving policy change in an increasing number of states. Hence, a growing body of scholarship has explored institutional and cultural factors that influence activists’ tactics and messaging and, in turn, contribute to marriage equality policy diffusion. Democracies with parliamentary, presidential, and semi-presidential systems, federal and unitary states with varying levels of centralization, and the presence or absence of constitutional anti-discrimination protections provide social movements with divergent political opportunity structures, contributing to dynamics in their tactical choices. In addition, the type of electoral system and party system, the presence of political parties that are movement allies, the use of conscience votes, the level of party discipline, the presence of out LGBT elected officials and straight political allies, and the degree of political will to enact policy change also impact activists’ strategic calculations. Finally, the use of personalized narratives in advocates’ messaging, the framing of marriage equality and LGBT rights as human rights norms, the adoption of family values frames to coopt opponents’ messaging, and the use of homonationalist versus homophobic discourses to justify policymaking decisions regarding same-sex marriage are explored. This article provides a comprehensive review of state-of-the-art research concerning all of the states that have legalized same-sex marriage as well as a detailed analysis of the mechanisms used to achieve policy change. After examining how different explanatory factors perform in accounting for the dynamics in marriage equality activism and policy convergence across a broad range of national contexts, new directions for future scholarship are suggested.
Article
The Politics of Language Education in Africa
Russell H. Kaschula and Michael M. Kretzer
Language policies in sub-Saharan African nations emerge out of specific political, historical, socioeconomic, and linguistic conditions. Education plays a crucial role for all spheres of language policy. Policies either upgrade or downgrade indigenous languages through their application at various educational institutions. The most significant example is the selection of the language(s) used as languages of learning and teaching at higher-education institutions. The region’s colonial history also influences the language policies of the independent African states. Language policy in Senegal is an example of a francophone country focusing on a linguistic assimilation policy in which minor reforms in favor of indigenous languages have taken place. Rwanda’s language policy is unique as the former francophone nation now uses English as an exoglossic language in a type of hybrid language policy. Botswana is an example of an anglophone country that follows a language policy that is dominated by a very close connection to the notion of nation-building through its concentration on a single language, Setswana, alongside English. Tanzania is an anglophone African country whose policy focuses on Kiswahili, which is one of the very few indigenous and endoglossic languages. Kiswahili is broadly used in Tanzanian educational institutions until the tertiary level, but its use as medium of instruction focuses on the primary level. South Africa demonstrates the very close relationship between general political decisions and language policy and vice versa. Language policy decisions are never neutral and are influenced by the politics of a specific country. As a result, individual and societal language attitudes influence language policies. In addition to this, the overt and official language policy on a macro level may differ from the implementation of such policies on a micro level. At the micro level, practice can include covert language practices by various stakeholders.
Article
Regime Resilience in Malaysia and Singapore Revisited: Ideologically-Bounded Democracies?
Kai Ostwald
Malaysia and Singapore were long seen as quintessential hybrid regimes that combined elements of electoral democracy and autocracy to achieve remarkable political stability: the United Malays National Organisation (UMNO) dominated Malaysia’s politics for over six decades before its unexpected defeat in 2018, while the People’s Action Party (PAP) has led Singapore since the country’s independence and remains in power today. Both parties attained dominance through similar channels. UMNO and the PAP accrued significant legitimacy by overseeing decades of rapid socioeconomic development that transformed the citizenry’s lives. Embedding ideological frameworks—based on empowerment of the Indigenous Malay majority in Malaysia and overcoming systemic vulnerability in Singapore—throughout the state and the electorate provided electoral advantages and further bolstered legitimacy. This was supplemented by regularly reshaping institutions to strengthen incumbency advantages, as well as occasional usage of coercion to limit inroads by opposition challengers.
Both regimes have evolved in key ways since the turn of the 21st century. UMNO saw its dominance gradually erode in the decade before its 2018 defeat. It mounted a brief comeback in 2020, but its decisive loss in the 2022 election marked a clear end to its hegemonic rule. While the PAP remains in power, it faces stiffer opposition and a “politically awakened” electorate, also marking a departure from earlier phases of uncontested dominance. While there is disagreement on how extensively these developments change the nature of the underlying regimes, several points are clear. Even if party dominance has declined, the ideological frameworks that both parties established remain intact and fundamentally shape political competition, which is free and relatively fair within the ideological bounds imposed by those frameworks. Moreover, the strength of the ideological bounds is such that no political actor has the agency to unilaterally remove them, which may preclude democratization as it is typically understood. On the opposition side, strong inroads, made in part by conforming to the ideological frameworks, have allowed opposition parties to accrue legitimacy of their own. This has made coercion more costly and has diminished its role in maintaining power.
In short, elements of the regimes in Malaysia and Singapore remain resilient. But they are fundamentally different than during the peak of UMNO and PAP dominance: the opposition has accrued legitimacy, the role of coercion has diminished, and political competition now occurs relatively freely within the bounds imposed by the respective ideological frameworks. This puts the current regimes in tension with the assumptions underpinning their earlier “hybrid” classifications, and raises a question: rather than assessing how every political twist and turn moves the needle on a two-dimensional autocracy–democracy spectrum, could it be more practical to think of Malaysia and Singapore as having evolved into relatively stable vernacular democracies that, albeit not fully democratic by conventional standards, are as democratic as the ideological constraints left behind by their founding and long-dominant parties credibly allow?
Article
Regional Institutions and the European Union
Arjan H. Schakel and Emanuele Massetti
European integration and regionalization have been parallel processes over the past five decades, leading to a multilevel governance system where decision-making powers are allocated across European, national, and regional governments. The upshot of both processes is that regional governments have gained representation within European Union (EU) institutions and they have gained the ability to affect EU policy through domestic institutions.
Regional governments are involved in the EU policymaking process at the EU level through two institutions: via their representatives in the Committee of the Regions and via the participation of their ministers in the Council of Ministers. Similarly, regional governments are institutionally involved with EU affairs within the member states through three institutional channels: formulation and implementation of EU Cohesion Policy, intergovernmental meetings between national and regional governments to coordinate EU affairs, and subsidiarity monitoring of EU legislation by regional parliaments.
The analysis shows that the EU’s multilevel governance system is highly asymmetric. Regional involvement in EU affairs through EU and domestic institutions is mainly restricted to powerful regions which can be predominantly found in the populous, federal, and regionalized member states from Western Europe. In addition, the analysis reveals that regional impact on EU policy is far more apparent within the member states than at the EU level. Furthermore, regional governments prefer to impact EU affairs through or in collaboration with their member state governments rather than bypassing them.
Article
Revisiting the African Renaissance
Sabelo J. Ndlovu-Gatsheni
The concept of the African Renaissance was popularized by Cheikh Anta Diop in the mid-1940s. But in 1906 Pixley ka Isaka Seme had introduced the idea of “regeneration” of Africa, while in 1937 Nnamdi Azikiwe of Nigeria had engaged with the idea of a “renascent Africa,” both of which formed a strong background to the unfolding of the idea of African Renaissance. President Thabo Mbeki of South Africa made it the hallmark of his continental politics in the 1990s. Consequently, in 1998 South Africa became a host to an international conference on the African Renaissance and by October 11, 1999, Mbeki officially opened the African Renaissance Institute in Pretoria in South Africa. Scholars such as Ngugi wa Thiong’o picked up the theme and defined the African Renaissance as a “re-membering” of a continent and a people who have suffered from “dismembering” effects of colonialism and “coloniality.” “Coloniality” names the underside of Euro-North American-centric modernity, which enabled mercantilism accompanied by the enslavement of African people. The reduction of African people into tradable commodities (thingification and dehumanization) and their shipment as cargo across the Transatlantic Ocean formed the root cause of the underdevelopment of Africa. The rise of a capitalist world economic system involved the forcible integration of Africa into the evolving nexus of a structurally asymmetrical world system with its shifting global orders. The physical colonial conquest was accompanied by genocides (physical liquidation of colonized people), epistemicides (subjugation of indigenous knowledges), linguicides (displacement of indigenous African languages and imposition of colonial languages), culturecides (physical separation of African people from their gods and cultures and the imposition of foreign religions and cultures), alienations (exiling African people from their languages, cultures, knowledges, and even from themselves), as well as material dispossessions. The African Renaissance emerged as an anti-colonial phenomenon opposed to colonialism and coloniality. As a vision of the future, the African Renaissance encapsulated a wide range of African initiatives such as Ethiopianism, Garveyism, Negritude, pan-Africanism, African nationalism, African humanism, African socialism, Black Consciousness Movement (BCM), the demands for a New International Economic Order (NIEO), the various African economic blueprints including the Lagos Plan of Action (LPA) and New Partnership for African Development (NEPAD) as well as the regional integration economic formations such as the Economic Community of West African Countries (ECOWAS) and the Southern Africa Economic Development Community (SADC), among many others. These liberatory initiatives have been framed by five waves of popular African movements/protests, namely: (a) the decolonization struggles of the 20th century that delivered “political decolonization”; (b) the struggles for economic decolonization that crystallized around the demands for NIEO; (c) the third wave of liberation of the 1980s and 1990s that deployed neoliberal democratic thought and discourses of human rights to fight against single-party and military dictatorships as well imposed austerity measures such as structural adjustment programs (SAPs); (d) the Afro-Arab Spring that commenced in 2011 in North Africa, leading to the fall some of the long-standing dictatorial regimes in Tunisia, Egypt, and Libya; and finally (e) the Rhodes Must Fall (RMF) movements (Fallism discourse of liberation) that emerged in 2015 in South Africa, pushing forward the unfinished business of epistemological decolonization.
Article
Sex Reclassification for Trans and Gender-Nonconforming People: From the Medicalized Body to the Privatized Self
Ido Katri
Sex reclassification is a core issue of gender nonconforming legal engagements. Access to proper identification documents for trans and nonbinary people relates to lower levels of exposure to anti-trans violence, discrimination, and suicidality. In the first decades of the 21st century, the majority of global jurisdictions have seen some kind of reform with respect to sex reclassification. Nonbinary classifications, such as the X marker, are also becoming available for those who wish not to be classified as either M or F. Across the globe, five major policy streams can be found: total ban on reclassification, that is, having no law or policy in place that allows for reclassification; reproduction-related prerequisite, that is, requiring applicants to undergo sterilization or genital-related surgery; other medical intervention-based schemes, that is, requiring applicants to provide proof that they have modified their body using some kind of gender-related medical technology; corroboration requirements, that is, requiring that a third party, usually a medical professional, corroborates the identity of the applicant; and the emerging “gold standard,” gender self-determination, that is, laws and policies requiring only an expression of a desire or need to be reclassified.
These streams of policy provide varying levels of access to proper identification documents and place different burdens on applicants, some requiring bodily modifications while others rely on autonomous will. Yet all these policies still demand an alignment between the internal truth of the body and external facts, resonating with the logic of birth assignment of sex itself—that is, the idea that the allocation of differentiated legal status of M or F reflects an immutable truth about legal subjects. Current laws and policies fail to address harms caused to gender nonconforming people by state mechanisms themselves. They only provide remedies ex post facto. In the early 21st century, all countries assign a differentiated legal status of either M or F at birth based solely, in almost all cases, on external genitals of newborns. This differentiated legal status is recorded on the birth certificate and becomes a part of one’s legal identity for life. This allocation of status reflects the idea that external genitals of newborns are proof of their owners’ future roles as men or women, that is, an idea that there is a pre-legal alignment between certain bodily configurations, social role, and gender performance. This mundane administrative mechanism not only justifies different treatment for men and women but also marks trans and nonbinary people as others. In order to better address the harm caused by systems of gendered distribution of resources and opportunities, there is a need to go beyond sex reclassification to question birth assignment itself.
Article
The Special Role of Religion in LGBT-Related Attitudes
Abigail Vegter and Donald P. Haider-Markel
Religious tradition and religiosity affect attitudes toward LGBT people, their rights, and their position within religious communities. There is significant variability within the American context concerning how religious traditions approach issues related to sexuality and gender identity, with monotheistic religions holding more conservative positions. These positions and the elites who hold them often influence the attitudes of their congregants, but not always, as some congregations diverge from the official positions of their denominations in terms of attitudes toward LGBT rights, religious leadership, and congregational membership. As the religious landscape is consistently changing in terms of attitudes toward sexual minorities, understanding the special role of religion in LGBT-related attitudes remains important and an area ripe for future scholarship.
Article
Storytelling and Narrative Research in Crisis and Disaster Studies
Alessandra Jerolleman
Storytelling is a common and pervasive practice across human history, which some have argued is a fundamental part of human understanding. Storytelling and narratives are a very human way of understanding the world, as well as events, and can serve as key tools for crisis and disaster studies and practice. They play a tremendously important role in planning, policy, education, the public sphere, advocacy, training, and community recovery. In the context of crises and disasters, stories are a means by which information is transmitted across generations, a key strategy for survival from non-routine and infrequent events. In fact, the field of disaster studies has long relied on narratives as primary source material, as a means of understanding individual experiences of phenomena as well as critiquing policies and understanding the role of history in 21st-century levels of vulnerability. Over the past several decades, practitioners and educators in the field have sought to use stories and narratives more purposefully to build resilience and pass on tacit knowledge.
Article
U.S. Military Service and LGBT Policy
Marissa Reilly, Elizabeth L. Hillman, and Elliot Koltnow
Examining the evolution of U.S military policy reveals how debates about the rights and opportunities of lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) people have been shaped by military personnel policies, federal laws, and cultural practices within military units. LGBT individuals have experienced U.S. military service through regulatory regimes that have often defined them as burdensome deviants and denied them civil rights enjoyed by other service members.
LGBT people have served as volunteers and conscripts, openly and in the closet. Key periods of U.S. military history for LGBT service include World War II, the Cold War, as well as the Vietnam War era, the “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” (DADT) regime (1994–2010), and the post-DADT period (2011 and beyond). During these periods of time, the armed forces and the United States reassessed the regulation of the service of LGBT service members and implemented changes that affected the rights, opportunities, and safety of LGBT military personnel and potential recruits. Those changes traced a path from outright exclusion of open service by LGBT persons to exemption, under which LGBT persons may serve under certain conditions, which often included the threat of expulsion, punishment, and extra-legal violence. In the post-DADT period, inclusion, or open service by some, but not all, LGBT groups, was made legal and safer through changes in law and military regulations and training that protected against some types of gender-identity and sexual orientation discrimination.
Because serving openly in the military is a sign of full citizenship in the United States as well as a means of achieving economic security, eliminating limits on LGBT military service has long been a focus of advocates for civil rights. Military service has been perceived as proving a citizen’s loyalty and patriotism as well as offering material and social advancement. With many LGBT people at greater risk of unemployment, homelessness, and premature death as a result of violence and social ostracism, military service has been an especially critical opportunity for political and economic advancement.
Honoring this history and identifying existing trends can help the United States, other nations, and international organizations to adapt their policies in recognition of gender and sexual diversity. Even when excluded by formal policy, people have found ways to serve, sometimes at great personal risk. Although their labor is officially lauded as an asset, their contributions and needs have not been fully recognized or appreciated by the state they pledged to serve. As the nation’s largest employer and provider of structural resources, the U.S. military’s support of LGBT military personnel and veterans matters greatly to social equity for a still-vulnerable LGBT population.
Article
The U.S. Politico–Military–Industrial Complex
John A. Alic
The three large military services—Army, Navy, and Air Force—comprise the core of the U.S. politico–military–industrial complex. They dominate decision making on multi-billion dollar weapon systems and the operational concepts these are intended to embody. The armed forces need private firms to realize their visions of new weaponry, since government has limited capacity in engineering design and development and limited production facilities. Running a successful defense business means giving the services what they want, or think they want, whether this makes technical and operational sense or not; thus industry caters to the views of the services, and while it seeks to influence them, does so mostly at the margins.
The political dynamics of the complex take place in two primary domains, only loosely coupled. The first is largely contained within the Defense Department. This is the main arena for conflict and bargaining within and among the services and between the services, individually and collectively, and Pentagon civilians. Most of what happens here stays hidden from outsiders. Service leaders generally seek to resolve disagreements among themselves; the goal, often although not always achieved, is to present a united front to civilian officials and the public at large. The second domain extends to the rest of government, chiefly Congress, with its multiple committees and subcommittees, and the White House, home of the powerful Office of Management and Budget among other sources of policy leverage.
The complex as a whole is an artifact of the Cold War, not greatly changed over the decades. Repeated efforts at restructuring and reform have led to little. The primary reason is that military leaders, senior officers who have reached the topmost ranks after lengthy immersion in generally conservative organizational cultures, usually have the upper hand in bureaucratic struggles. They believe the military’s views on choice of weapons—the views of seasoned professionals—should have precedence over those of civilians, whether Pentagon appointees and their staffs, elected officials, or outside experts. They usually prevail, since few of the political appointees on the civilian side of DoD and in policy-influencing positions elsewhere can command similar authority. If they do not prevail on a particular issue, service leaders expect to outwait their opponents; if they lose one battle over money or some cherished weapon system, they anticipate winning the next.
