The last 30 years have seen the global consequences of newly emerging and re-emerging infectious diseases, starting with the international spread of HIV/AIDS, the emergence of Ebola and other hemorrhagic fevers, SARS, MERS, novel influenza viruses, and most recently, the global spread of Zika. The impact of tuberculosis, malaria, and neglected tropical diseases on society are now better understood, including how these diseases influence the social, economic, and political environment in a nation. Despite international treaties and norms, the specter of intentional use of infectious disease remains present, particularly as technological barriers to access are reduced. The reality is that infectious diseases not only impact population health, but also have clear consequences for international security and foreign policy.
Foreign policy has been used to coordinate response to infectious disease events and to advance population health around the world. Conversely, collaboration on infectious disease prevention, preparedness, and response has been used strategically by nations to advance diplomacy and improve foreign relations. Both approaches have become integral to foreign policy, and this chapter provides examples to elucidate how health and foreign policy have become intertwined and used with different levels of effectiveness by governments around the world. As the scope of this topic is extensive, this article primarily draws from U.S. examples for brevity’s sake, while acknowledging the truly global nature of the dynamic between infectious diseases and foreign policy, and noting that the interplay between them will vary between countries and regions.
In 2014, U.S. President Barak Obama called upon global partners to, “change our mindsets and start thinking about biological threats as the security threats that they are—in addition to being humanitarian threats and economic threats. We have to bring the same level of commitment and focus to these challenges as we do when meeting around more traditional security issues”. With world leaders increasingly identifying disease as threats to security and economic stability, we are observing infectious diseases—like no other time in history—becoming an integral component of foreign policy.
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Rebecca Katz, Erin Sorrell, and Claire Standley
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Elizabeth Ann Stein
Considering incidents that make headline news internationally, given the modern information and communication technology revolution, the facility of citizens to rapidly mobilize represents a considerable threat to autocratic survival. While the speed with which popular movements emerge has increased exponentially, and the news of their existence spreads faster and farther, civil unrest has threatened the stability and survival of dictators for centuries. The paranoia and machinations of dictators depicted in films, such as the portrayal of Ugandan dictator Idi Amin in The Last King of Scotland, while sensationalized, capture the astounding array of threats with which unelected leaders must concern themselves. On the one hand, they must worry about insider threats to their standing, such as conspiratorial plots from people within the dictator’s own circle or mutiny among government soldiers. On the other hand, dictators also must monitor threats originating from non-regime actors, such as new alliances forming among once-fragmented opposition groups or the possibility of sustained insurgency or a popular revolution. From force to finesse, autocratic leaders have developed a broad and evolving range of tactics and tools to diminish both internal and external domestic threats to their reign. The success of dictators’ endeavors to insulate their regimes from forces that might challenge them depends on accurate and reliable information, a resource that can be as valuable to the leader as would a large armory and loyal soldiers. Dictators invest significant resources (monetary as well as human capital) to try to gather useful information about their existing and potential opponents, while also trying to control and shape information emitted by the regime before it reaches the public. New information and communication technologies (ICTs), which have drawn a great deal of scholarly attention since the beginning of the 21st century—present both risks and rewards for dictators; inversely they also create new opportunities and hazards for citizens who might utilize them to mobilize people opposed to the regime. While civil unrest could encompass the full range of domestic, nonmilitary actors, there also needs to be a specific focus on various forms of mass mobilization. Historically, more dictators have been forced from office by elite-initiated overthrows via coups d’état than have fallen to revolution or fled amid street protests. Civil unrest, in its many forms, can affect autocratic survival or precipitate regime breakdown. While mass-based revolutions have been a relatively rare phenomenon to date, the actions of many 21st-century dictators indicate that they increasingly concern themselves with the threats posed by popular protests and fear its potential for triggering broader antigovernment campaigns. The ease of access to information (or the lack thereof) help explain interactions between authoritarian regimes and citizens emphasizes. The role of information in popular antigovernment mobilization has evolved and changed how dictators gather and utilize information to prevent or counter civil unrest that might jeopardize their own survival as well as that of the regime.
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The International Criminal Court (ICC) has generated considerable controversy since it came into force in 2002, principally because of its overriding focus on African conflict situations and suspects. This has led to accusations that the ICC is a neocolonial meddler in African affairs, wielding undue and unaccountable influence over the domestic political arena. Drawing on the author’s field research in Uganda and the Democratic Republic of Congo since 2006 this article contends that the neocolonialism critique of the ICC exaggerates the power of the Court while underestimating the capacity of African states to use the ICC to their own ends. Delivering distanced justice from The Hague with limited expertise on African societies and spending scant time in the field, the ICC has failed to grapple sufficiently with complex political dynamics “on the ground.” Combined with the Court’s heavy reliance on state cooperation, these factors have enabled African governments to use the ICC to target their political and military enemies while protecting themselves from prosecution. This has also emboldened African states in continuing to commit atrocity crimes against civilians, especially during periods of mass conflict and fraught national elections. While claiming to hover above the political fray, the ICC has become heavily politicized and instrumentalized by African states, with lasting and damaging consequences for the practice of national politics across Africa. To avoid being willfully used by African governments, the ICC must bolster its political expertise and become politically savvier. Rather than claiming to be neutral while hovering above the domestic terrain, the ICC must embrace its inherently political nature and deliver justice in a way that improves rather than undermines the practice of national and community-level politics across Africa.
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Evgeniia Iakhnis, Stefanie Neumeier, Anne Van Wijk, and Patrick James
Quantitative methodology in crisis studies is a topic of substantial scope. The principal rallying point for such research is the long-standing International Crisis Behavior (ICB) Project, which from 1975 onward has produced a comprehensive and heavily accessed data set for the study of conflict processes. A prehistory of crisis studies based on statistical methods, which identified connections between and among various conflict-related events, pointed increasingly toward the need for a program of research on escalation. The potential of quantitative methodology to contribute seriously to crisis studies has been realized along multiple dimensions by the ICB Project in particular. For example, quantitative methods have been applied productively to study the effects of both global and regional organizations, along with individual states, upon the process of crisis escalation. Current research in crisis studies is based on the premise that research designs so far have covered only one of multiple relevant stages regarding the process of escalation. This is where the concept of a “near crisis” becomes relevant: a near crisis entails perception of threat and finite time, but not an increased likelihood of military hostilities. Data analysis pertaining to multiple stages of escalation is at an early stage of development, but initial results are intriguing. A further critique of quantitative research begins with the observation that it is mostly state-centered and reductionist in nature. A key question emerges: How can the concept of crisis and associated data collection be revised to include a humanistic element that would entail new and potentially more enlightening configurations of independent and dependent variables?
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Kyle Beardsley, Patrick James, Jonathan Wilkenfeld, and Michael Brecher
Over the course of more than four decades the International Crisis Behavior (ICB) Project, a major and ongoing data-gathering enterprise in the social sciences, has compiled data that continues to be accessed heavily in scholarship on conflict processes. ICB holdings consist of full-length qualitative case studies, along with an expanding range of quantitative data sets. Founded in 1975, the ICB Project is among the most visible and influential within the discipline of International Relations (IR). A wide range of studies based either primarily or in part on the ICB’s concepts and data have accumulated and cover subjects that include the causes, processes, and consequences of crises. The breadth of ICB’s contribution has expanded over time to go beyond a purely state-centric approach to include crisis-related activities of transnational actors across a range of categories. ICB also offers depth through, for example, potential resolution of contemporary debates about mediation in crises on the basis of nuanced findings about long- versus short-term impact with regard to conflict resolution.
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Ekim Arbatli and Cemal Eren Arbatli
Why do coups d’état happen? Although many studies have investigated this question, they pay relatively little attention to the international causes and ramifications of coups. Especially, empirical studies on the external determinants of coup risk and outcomes still remain limited. There are two current lines of research in this direction. The first line studies international linkages and coup risk, looking at the external determinants of coups: regional spillover effects, foreign linkage, and foreign leverage. A promising angle on this front is focusing on the role of post-coup reactions from international actors to illuminate how coup plotters shape their incentives under outside pressure. The second line of research investigates interstate conflict and coup risk, considering diversionary behavior and external threats as potential coup-proofing strategies. In this effort, studying the relationship between external threat environment and coup risk can be fruitful, whereas empirical tests of the classical diversionary war theory will yield relatively marginal contributions.
Currently, three issues stand out in the empirical coup literature that should be further addressed by scholars. First is the need for more extensive and systematic data collection efforts to obtain detailed information about the identities, targets, and motives of coup perpetrators. Second, the external sources of leader insecurity beyond interstate conflicts remain an underexplored area. Third, although many studies have tried to determine when coup attempts happen, scholarly knowledge of when and how they succeed remains very limited. More work is needed to uncover the determinants of coup success across different regimes and leader survival scenarios.
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Sebastian Bitar and Tom Long
Latin America exhibits some of the world’s most worrisome patterns of insecurity. Homicide rates have reached alarming levels in dozens of cities in Mexico, Central America, Brazil, Venezuela, and Colombia. Drug and other illicit trafficking generate massive income for criminal organizations. Fighting among these organizations, and between criminal groups and the state, threatens human security in zones of production and along transit routes. Refugee crises—especially an exodus of 4 million Venezuelans by 2019—could increase substantially. Receiving countries struggle to respond.
Insecurity in Latin America cannot be fully understood through comparison of the domestic challenges of each country in the region. The sources of contemporary insecurity are not contained within countries, but extend to transnational criminal networks, flows of illicit goods, and human trafficking and displacement. Likewise, isolated state responses are insufficient to respond to transnational dynamics; although some coordination has been achieved, intergovernmental responses have produced limited gains and substantial unintended consequences. Thus, we consider security challenges in the region as a “security complex” that includes Latin American and Caribbean countries, but in which the United States remains significant.
On the other hand, international conflict and civil war, as traditionally defined, have almost vanished from Latin America. Threats of military coups and politically motivated violence have declined after being a key security issue for decades. However, some troubling cases and trends complicate this positive trend. Venezuela’s governing civilian–military alliance eroded basic democratic institutions and produced an economic, political, and humanitarian crisis. In response, the United States has raised the specter of military intervention or coup sponsorship. Honduras and especially Nicaragua have turned to authoritarianism, accompanied by alarming levels of repression of protesters and civil society activists. U.S. policies under the Trump administration toward migrants from Central America and Mexico are creating great tension in the region and fear of reprisals. Although most border disputes have been settled a few still are unresolved or contested and could generate tensions between countries in the region.
The academic literature about international security in Latin America reflects the complex dynamics described above, covers historical and contemporary security challenges in the region, and presents debates and developments on Latin American security at the international and national levels. Despite its wide scope, the existing literature presents areas where more work is needed to account for emerging trends of (in)security.
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Soli Vered and Daniel Bar-Tal
Intractable conflicts are demanding, stressful, painful, exhausting, and costly in both human and material terms. To adapt to these conditions, societies that are engaged in protracted, violent conflict develop an appropriate socio-psychological infrastructure that eventually becomes the foundation for the development of culture of conflict. The infrastructure fulfills important functions for the societies involved but can be a major socio-psychological barrier to peaceful resolution of the conflict. Transforming the nature of the relations between two societies that were in hostile and violent rivalry requires a dramatic societal change, replacing the socio-psychological repertoire among society members and establishing a new culture of peace. Peacemaking is a slow, arduous process; however, if successful, the previous rivals may establish stable and lasting peaceful relations.
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Reed M. Wood
Contemporary civil conflicts frequently impose disproportionate costs of civilian populations. By some estimates, roughly 90% of conflict causalities were combatants in the wars of the early 20th century, but by the end of the century nearly 90% of causalities were civilians. While scholars have spent decades examining phenomena such as genocide and terrorism, they have only recently begun to systematically examine the causes, consequences, and potential solutions to the more general occurrence of civilian victimization during intra-state armed conflict. What is civilian victimization, and how does it differ from other forms of political violence? Is it possible to differentiate between “collateral damage” and intentional civilian targeting during civil conflicts? While virtually all conflicts impose significant costs on civilians, those costs vary tremendously across armed conflicts. Moreover, while collateral damage is an unfortunately common feature of warfare, violence perpetrated against civilians often includes massacres, bombings of civilian targets with negligible military value, summary executions, ethnic cleansing, and other forms of intentional attacks on noncombatants. Yet, these practices are comparatively more common during some wars, in some areas, or by some groups. This variation suggests that while all internal conflicts are violent, certain characteristics of actors, the conflict spaces, and/or the patterns of interactions between rebels, the government they challenge, and civilians within the conflict zone explain why some conflicts produce greater levels of abuse against civilians than do others. Do similar factors explain both government-sponsored civilian victimization and violence committed by non-state actors during civil conflict? A cursory review of available data clearly demonstrates that both state and non-state forces often engage in high levels of civilian victimization. In general, the existing evidences suggest that the motives for state and non-state actor violence are similar. However, key differences in the nature of institutional and organizational arrangements suggest that rebels and governments experience different types of constraints on their ability to act on their motives. How can the international community effectively respond in order to reduce the severity of civilian victimization in ongoing conflicts? This important policy question has produced a range of conflicting answers; however, the most recent scholarship on the topic suggests that both United Nations peacekeeping operations—particularly when they include a strong mandate for civilian protection and a robust military force—and international condemnation (“naming and shaming”) can effectively reduce the magnitude of intentional violence against civilians.
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Massimo Prearo
The Italian LGBTQI+ movement emerged in the 1970s in the context of the 1968 and post-1968 protests. Its history is characterized by a discontinuous trajectory, marked by several key moments of internal divisions and conflicts, related to political events, such as the alliance with the Radical Party, in the mid-1970s, or the approval of the same-sex Civil Unions Bill, in 2016. In the history of the Italian LGBTQI+ movement, three moments in particular can be identified that have led from the first revolutionary homosexual front (FUORI), an anti-institutional one, to the foundation of a structured and organized, and then institutionalized, movement both at a local and national level: 1974–1985, a founding moment; 1996–2000, a re-founding moment; 2016–2018, a reconfiguration moment. An intra-comparative diachronic analysis, within the Italian national context, shows how confrontations between different meanings and projects of what an “LGBTQI+ movement” is and has to be have led Italian activists to shape specific social movement organizations and practices.
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The soldiers and sailors of Imperial Japan (1868–1945) are often presented in Western popular publications as obedient robots, unblinkingly following their commanders to certain death. In fact, however, the Imperial Japanese Army and Navy were among the most disobedient military forces in modern history. Structural flaws in the political code of the early Japanese state, as well as a series of misguided reforms to the Army, incubated an ideology of military independence from civilian rule. The Army, placed directly under the Emperor, did not institutionally believe it had to unconditionally obey the civilian government. Even worse, generals used their connections with the sovereign as an excuse for their individual disobedience.
In the 1920s, this ideology of military independence converged with a subculture of insubordination from below, recalling revolutionary traditions of the mid-19th century. According to this ideology, prevalent among both officers and civilian activists, spontaneous political violence was justified when motivated by sincere patriotism and imperial loyalty. By the 1930s, insubordination from above and from below converged to produce a strong sense of military superiority, independence from any kind of civilian supervision, and endemic violence. The result was an unending series of unauthorized military operations, political assassinations, and coups d’état. These terrified the civilian leadership and eventually drove Japan to imperial overreach and disastrous, unwinnable wars.
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Henrik Laugesen
The classical theoretical civil–military relations (CMR) perspective is traditionally concerned with how to obtain civil control of the armed forces. This theme is preeminent in the writings of Samuel Huntington and Morris Janowitz, the two most dominant voices in the debate of this subject field since the 1960s. By 2019, the character of the Kenya Defence Forces (KDF) was heavily influenced, if not determined, by CMR, as CMR seems to be the only constant factor when trying to understand KDF. During British colonial rule in the East African protectorate, the use of force was primarily dedicated to securing the extraction of natural resources from Kenya and maintaining internal security. It was in this colonial context of exploitation and extraction that the KDF was born in 1902, in the form of the King’s African Rifles (KAR). Therefore, to understand the “genetics” of the present-day KDF, one has to understand the political context in which the KDF was born and raised. The surprising point here is that although Kenya has since undergone far-reaching political changes, the KDF still seems to be caught in King Edward VII’s long shadow of colonial repression. The effective, ethnically driven political system and Britain’s military guaranties have dominated CMR and kept an iron grip on the military for more than 100 years.
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Catherine Boone
Land-related disputes and land conflicts are sometimes politicized in elections in African countries, but this is usually not the case. Usually, land-related conflict is highly localized, managed at the micro-political level by neo-customary authorities, and not connected to electoral competition. Why do land conflicts sometimes become entangled in electoral politics, and sometimes “scale up” to become divisive issues in regional and national elections? A key determinant of why and how land disputes become politicized is the nature of the underlying land tenure regime, which varies across space (often by subnational district) within African countries. Under the neo-customary land tenure regimes that prevail in most regions of smallholder agriculture in most African countries, land disputes tend to be “bottled up” in neo-customary land-management processes at the local level. Under the statist land tenure regimes that exist in some districts of many African countries, government agents and officials are directly involved in land allocation and directly implicated in dispute resolution. Under “statist” land tenure institutions, the politicization of land conflict, especially around elections, becomes more likely. Land tenure institutions in African countries define landholders’ relations to each other, the state, and markets. Understanding these institutions, including how they come under pressure and change, goes far in explaining how and where land rights become politicized.
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Peter White
International conflict—war, crises, international disputes, and rivalries between states—has a clear influence on the military’s role in politics and vice versa. Given that the military is the primary instrument for defending the state from conventional military threats, international conflict has been an early focus of the civil–military relations literature. Generally, very high levels of involvement in politics—for example, coups, military rule, military officers in high-level government positions—are associated with a greater propensity to initiate international conflict on the part of states. However, there is disagreement as to the reasons for this pattern—for example, preferences for aggression on the part of a politically active military, diversionary incentives for a coup-threatened civilian leader, or institutional pathologies brought on by shared civil–military power are all proffered as possible explanations.
Politically active militaries tend to do poorly in conflict. There are two reasons for this. The first is the dysfunction endemic in a military that splits its time between politics and proficiency in arms—as opposed to one that specializes in defense. The second reason is that when the politically active military poses a risk of coup to the political leadership of the state, the latter will often engage in such “coup-proofing” practices as purges, onerous command and control measures, the reshuffling of commanders, and the build-up of security organizations intended to offset the military. These measures not only make it harder for the military to stage a coup, they also make it harder for the military to defend the state.
Although military involvement in politics makes “acute” conflict—war, militarized disputes, or crises—more likely, these types of international conflict tend to lead to reduced levels of political involvement by the military. War or a crisis can make a coup more difficult as the military is moved away from the centers of political power. International conflict—especially when it goes poorly—also can lead to reform and professionalization within the military, which decreases the appetite for political involvement. At the same time, indicators of a more severe “chronic” threat environment—hostile neighbors, unfavorable geography, or long-standing international rivalries—can make military intrusions into politics more likely.
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Since Lebanon’s independence in the mid-1940s, its military—the Lebanese Armed Forces (LAF)—has played a pivotal role in the country’s politics. The political role of the LAF in Lebanon might seem surprising since the Lebanese state did not militarize, and its political leaders have continuously managed to keep their military relatively weak and small. Indeed, in this respect Lebanon has been markedly different from its close neighbors (Syria and Israel), but also from several other Middle Eastern states (especially Egypt and Iraq), where the military, which was large and powerful, was continuously involved in politics. Additionally, both Lebanon and the LAF have persistently striven to distance themselves from regional conflicts since 1949, particularly in relation to the Palestinian issue, albeit not always successfully. Still, and despite these ostensibly unfavorable factors for the military’s involvement in politics in Lebanon, the LAF has played an important political role in the state since its independence. This role, which has been marked by elements of continuity and change over the years, included mediation and arbitration between rival political factions (in 1945–1958, 2008, 2011, and 2019); attempts to dominate the political system (in 1958–1970 and 1988–1990); intervention in the Lebanese civil war (in 1975–1976 and 1982–1984); attempts to regain its balancing role in politics (in 1979–1982 and 1984–1988); and facilitating the state’s postwar reconstruction (since 1991). The political role of the military in Lebanon can be explained by several factors. First, the weakness of Lebanon’s political system and its inability to resolve crises between its members. Second, Lebanon’s divided society and its members’ general distrust towards its civilian politicians. Third, the basic characteristics of Lebanon’s military, which, in most periods, enjoyed broad public support that cuts across the lines of community, region, and family, and found appeal among domestic and external audiences, which, in their turn, acquiesced to its political role in the state.
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Maria Josua
In research on authoritarianism, both legitimation and repression have received growing attention since the late 2000s. However, these two strategies of political rule do not form separate pillars of power; they are interlinked and affect each other. Autocrats not only rule with an iron fist, but they also seek to legitimize their use of repression vis-à-vis at least some of their citizens and the outside world. These legitimizing discourses are part of political communication in autocracies and can be studied using the approach of framing. So far, few researchers of the protest–repression nexus have studied how protesters are being framed by officials in autocracies.
The communication of repression varies widely across autocracies. Authoritarian incumbents differ in their degree of openness vs. opacity, impacting also on how they publicize, admit to, or conceal certain forms of repression. When choosing to justify acts of repression, multiple factors influence which types of justification are used. One decisive factor is against which targets repression is employed. In framing the targets of repression in a certain way, autocratic elites pursue a twin strategy in that they seek to attain the approval of certain audiences and to deter potential or actual dissidents. Furthermore, justifications diverge regarding which actors use them and towards which audiences. Past experiences and regime characteristics also impact on how repression is justified.
This research program offers great potential for studying state–society relations in autocracies. It cuts across research on political violence, authoritarian legitimation, and political communication. For understanding the persistence of autocracies in times of contention, it is an important piece in the puzzle of authoritarian survival strategies illuminating the “dark side” of legitimation.
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Matthew Waites
The Commonwealth is the international governmental organization of states that emerged from the British empire, and since 2000 it has emerged as a focus for contestation relating to the regulation of same-sex sexualities, gender diversity, and diverse sex characteristics. Following colonial criminalizations focused on same-sex sexual acts, and later formal decolonizations, there have appeared many national movements for decriminalization and human rights in relation to sexuality and gender. The Commonwealth has emerged as a site of politics for some significant actors claiming human rights in relation to sexual orientation, gender identity and expression, and sex characteristics. This has been led by specific organizations of lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) people, increasingly with intersex people and allies, but it is also important to consider this in relation to queer people, understood more broadly here as people in all cultures experiencing forms of sexualities, biological sex and genders outside the social structure of heterosexuality, and its associated sex and gender binaries. A range of forms of activist and non-governmental organization (NGO) engagement have occurred, leading to shifts in Commonwealth civil society and among some state governments. This has required researchers to develop analyses across various scales, from local and national to international and transnational, to interpret institutions and movements.
The British Empire criminalized same-sex sexual acts between males, and to a lesser extent between females, across its territories. In certain instances there were also forms of gender regulation, constraining life outside a gender binary. Such criminalization influenced some of those claiming LGBT human rights to engage the Commonwealth. Research shows that a majority of Commonwealth states continue to criminalize some adult consensual same-sex sexual activity. Yet the history of struggles for decriminalization and human rights within states in the Commonwealth has led up to such recent important decriminalizations as in India and Trinidad and Tobago in 2018.
LGBT and queer activist engagements of the Commonwealth itself commenced in 2007 when Sexual Minorities Uganda and African allies demanded entry to the Commonwealth People’s Space during a Heads of Government meeting in Kampala. Activism has often focused on the biannual Heads of Government meetings that are accompanied by civil society forums. A particularly significant phenomenon has been the emergence of a “new London-based transnational politics of LGBT human rights,” evident in the creation from 2011 of new NGOs working internationally from the United Kingdom. Among these organizations was the Kaleidoscope Trust, which shaped the subsequent formation of The Commonwealth Equality Network as an international network of NGOs that became formally recognized by the Commonwealth. Significant developments occurred at the London Commonwealth Heads of Government meeting in April 2018; Prime Minister Theresa May expressed “regret” for past imperial criminalizations while announcing funding for Kaleidoscope Trust and other UK-based groups to use in international law reform work. These developments exemplify a wider problematic for both activists and analysts, concerning how LGBT and queer movements should engage in contexts that are still structured by imperial legacies and power relations associated with colonialism, persisting in the present.
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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.
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Erin Mayo-Adam
Lesbian, gay, bisexual, trans, and queer (LGBTQ) migration is significantly understudied in the field of political science. The discipline has historically siloed the study of minority communities into different subcategories that have very little intellectual crossover. LGBTQ experiences are mostly absent in scholarship on migration, while scholarship on LGBTQ people tends to focus on white lesbian and gay citizens. As a result, there is a gap in political science scholarship when it comes to intersectionally marginalized people like LGBTQ immigrants. However, there is a burgeoning, interdisciplinary field that examines the politics of queer migration and spans a multitude of humanities and social science fields, including ethnic studies, American studies, history, anthropology, and sociology.
Like other humanities and social science fields, political science scholars should engage more directly with the interdisciplinary study of queer migration politics. Queer migration research encompasses overlapping subject areas that include studies on migration and gender and sexuality norms; queer complicities and migration; and queer migration and political movement formation. Scholars who study the politics of queer migration analyze how anti-normative sexualities and gender identities are constituted through migration processes and institutions. Thus, queer migration politics research is a sprawling field with studies that range from critiques that reveal how contemporary queer asylum seekers are marginalized and criminalized by the immigration state apparatus to historical studies that contemplate the formation of anti-normative identities in 19th-century Gold Rush migrations. Political science research can more actively engage in this area of interdisciplinary study by bringing queer migration studies concepts like homonationalism and homonormativity into transnational and comparative politics research, by expanding scholarship on prisons and mass incarceration to include the experiences of queer and trans migrants of color in immigration detention, and by examining how queer complicities are at work in LGBTQ social movement politics.
Article
Roger Southall
Liberation movements in Africa are nationalist movements that have resorted to armed struggle to overthrow colonialism, white minority rule, or oppressive postcolonial governments. Claiming to represent the national will, some are intolerant of opposition, others dubious of the legitimacy of multiparty democracy: this difference is a reflection of whether the military wing of the liberation movement dominates the political movement or whether the reverse situation applies. In the post–Cold War era, liberation movements espouse notions of the “developmental state,” continuing to ascribe the state a primary role in economic development event though they may simultaneously embrace the market. The extent to which they subordinate political considerations and freedoms to the pursuit of economic growth dictates whether they pursue paths of authoritarian development or developmental stagnation
