The dominant belief in Africa is that same-sex intimacy is a child of modern civilization and Western culture. Hence, we see a high level of homophobia and continuous policing of same-sex relationships in most African countries, including those that have decriminalized them. Over time, different scholarly discourses have emerged about homosexuality in Africa. Although some writers believe that same-sex intimacy is fundamentally un-African, others argue that same-sex intimacy is inherent in African culture. Arguably, the introduction of Western religion, such as Christianity, which forms part of the colonization agenda, favors the monogamous, heterosexual relationship (the basis of the “ideal family unit”) as the acceptable natural union while any relationship outside it is regarded as unnatural. Given deteriorating socioeconomic and political situations in Africa, political leaders often find it expedient to use religious-based homophobic narratives to distract their impoverished citizens and muster popular support. Put together, this has led to the criminalization of same-sex unions in most African countries. Modern discourses in Africa on gender equality and sexual freedoms reveal more liberal attitudes, but the same cannot be said about how same-sex desire is viewed. Toleration of same-sex intimacy is seen as a threat to the dominant African definition of marriage, family, and patriarchal gender and power relations.
Despite the prevalence of homophobia, the establishment of gay networks and movements that championed the liberation struggles of sexual minorities in South Africa from the apartheid to postapartheid era have sharpened the sense of belonging of LGBTIA groups. While some countries (e.g., South Africa, Lesotho, Cape Verde, Rwanda, Mali, and Mozambique) have abandoned sodomy laws that criminalized same-sex relationships (often after much pressure was exerted), others (e.g., Chad, Sudan, Nigeria, Ghana, Egypt, Tunisia, Tanzania, Uganda, and Mauritania) have upheld the laws with stiff punishment—prison terms up to 14–30 years or death sentences for the crime of being homosexual. The first half of 2019 raised some hopes about LGBTIA rights in Africa when Angola (January 2019) and Botswana (June 2019) decriminalized homosexuality. However, Kenya, which had previously shown a “glimmer of hope” in decriminalizing same-sex relationships, upheld laws that criminalize homosexuality in May 2019. Currently, more than 30 of the 54 recognized African countries still have laws (with harsh punishments or death) that outlaw consensual same-sex relationships. Both theoretical and empirical insights into the current state of Africa’s LGBTIA rights and scholarship are discussed.
Article
Africa’s LGBT Movement and Interest Groups
Oluwafemi Adeagbo and Kammila Naidoo
Article
The American South and LGBT Politics
Jay Barth
The cultural distinctiveness of the South led to a backlash in the region in the years following the rise of a national LGBTQ movement. In the decades that followed, political science research showed that the South remained fundamentally different than elsewhere in the nation in terms of attitudes regarding LGBTQ individuals and policies, both regarding overall views and Southerners’ imperviousness to personal contact with queer individuals in terms of reshaping attitudes. In electoral politics, explicit group-based appeals regarding LGBTQ individuals were often employed. And, policy divergence between the South and non-South was stark. While unambiguous shifts have occurred in the South in a more pro-LGBTQ rights direction, the region remains distinctively conservative when it comes to LGBTQ politics. Particularly striking are Southern attitudes toward transgender individuals and policies. That said, “two Souths” have begun to cement on LGBTQ politics as urbanized and suburbanized areas have diverged. Moreover, within the region’s Republican Party, a factional divide has begun to show itself across the South. The South remains consequential in gauging whether backpedaling on the dramatic progress made on LGBTQ rights is occurring in the United States.
Article
Australia’s History of LGBTI Politics and Rights
Noah Riseman
In the past 50 years, lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and intersex (LGBTI) activism in Australia has grown from small, localized organizations to national campaigns calling on all Australians to affirm LGBTI people’s equality. While the issues and activist strategies have evolved over the past 50 years, there have been two persistent patterns: most organizations and activism have been state based and have drawn on international influences, especially from the United Kingdom and United States. In the 1970s the organizations CAMP (Campaign Against Moral Persecution) and Gay Liberation presented competing visions of LGBTI equality, but both recognized the importance of visibility in order to change societal attitudes and influence law reform. Campaigns to decriminalize male homosexuality began in the 1970s and continued across the states through the 1980s and even into the 1990s in Tasmania. After law reform, activists shifted their advocacy to other areas including anti-discrimination laws, relationship recognition, and eventually marriage equality. HIV/AIDS was another important cause that generated grassroots activism within LGBTI communities. State AIDS councils worked in partnership with the federal government, and Australia had one of the world’s best public health responses to the epidemic. Pop culture, international media, and visibility at events such as the Sydney Gay and Lesbian Mardi Gras gradually shifted public opinions in favor of LGB equality by the 2000s. Transgender and intersex rights and acceptance were slower to enter the public agenda, but by the 2010s, those two groups had attained a level of visibility and were breaking down preconceived stereotypes and challenging prejudice. Indeed, politicians lagged behind public opinion on marriage equality, delaying and obfuscating the issue as the major political parties grappled with internal divisions. In 2017 the Commonwealth government held a postal survey asking Australian voters whether or not they supported same-sex marriage. This was an unprecedented exercise in Australian polity that was divisive, but LGBTI activists succeeded in their campaign and secured an overwhelming victory. The postal survey’s outcome also set the stage for new political fights around LGBTI people’s rights: so-called religious freedom, transgender birth certificates and support for LGBTI young people.
Article
Blackness, Race, and Politics in Argentina
Judith M. Anderson and Patricia Gomes
Africans and Afro-descendants in Argentina have a long tradition of organizing to resist all forms of oppression. This can be traced back to the 17th century with various forms of organizations including cofradias (religious brotherhoods or fraternal organizations), naciones (Afro-descendant social and cultural organizations), mutual aid societies, and military-based organizations in Río de la Plata, the region that would become Argentina and Uruguay. From the mid-19th to the early 20th centuries, as a part of the construction of the Argentine nation as European, white, and “civilized,” the myth of black disappearance was reified through discursive elimination and the cessation of collecting data on race or color in official records.
The rise of Peronism in the 1940s would cause the return of race to public discourse, as large internal migrations of nonwhites from the interior of the country descended on major cities like Buenos Aires. The opponents of Perón, and his policies that embraced these poor migrants, mocked these individuals as cabecitas negras (derogatory term meaning “little black heads”), but they would open the possibility for a new reworking of a more inclusive Argentina. The new migrants represented a merging of categories of race and class, as these negros included Afro-Argentines who formed part of Perón’s constituency.
The late 20th century would bring more direct challenges to black invisibility, with multiple new organizations and events centered on the experiences of the African diaspora in Argentina. One of the first organizations created after the return to democracy in Argentina was the Comité Argentino Latinoamericano contra el Apartheid (The Argentine Committee against Apartheid) in 1984. The example set by this organization, alongside inspiration from black liberation movements in the United States, Brazil, and on the African continent, would be a catalyst for the creation of numerous new black organizations for decades to come.
Black organizing in Argentina found support in activist networks across the globe as well as across international organizations, which was reflected by the multicultural turn in Latin America during the 1990s. The era sparked the creation of significant legislation and activities due to pressure from local activists and the international community through organizations like the Inter-American Development Bank and the World Bank. One of the earliest conferences organized by Argentine black activists was the first Jornada de Cultura Negra (Black Culture Conference) in 1991. The National Institute Against Discrimination, Xenophobia, and Racism (INADI) was created in 1995 by the Argentine state to address the needs of marginalized populations in Argentine society.
The late 1990s and early 2000s saw increased immigration of highly visible Africans and Afro-descendants from Latin America and Caribbean countries, which led to the creation of novel organizations to serve their specific needs. New conferences and events that provided opportunities for these diasporas to organize and interact, like the Semana de África (Africa Week), were also created. Along with the existing black communities in Argentina, these organizations contributed to new legislation officially recognizing Afro-descendant populations and condemning racism. Many of these legislative acts were passed under the Fernández de Kirchner administration (2007–2015), like the 2015 Law No. 5.261 Against Discrimination, which provided a more comprehensive antidiscrimination policy, and the historic 2010 Argentine census which restored the possibility of identifying as Afro-descendant. The reappearance of the category in the 2010 census after over a 120-year absence had been prompted by the World Bank’s landmark census 5 years prior. Though these gains were primarily symbolic, they helped fortify black activism.
Grassroots organizing and political mobilization has remained steadfast in spite of shifts in national politics, continuous economic instability, and increased antiblack racism at both the systemic and individual levels. As black activism increased incrementally over the decades, it inspired an upsurge of academic studies that in turn provided knowledge which helped propel activist efforts. The 21st century has been a particularly fruitful time in the Argentine academy as anthropological studies on Africans and Afro-descendants have proliferated. This time period has also marked a much-needed expansion of black organizing into more rural areas of the country, especially the northwest, which has historically had a large population of African descent. By holding more activities in the provinces and outside of the City of Buenos Aires, the decentralization of black activism has helped increase consciousness across the nation.
Article
Bolivia and the Challenges of a Plurinational Democracy
Waltraud Queiser Morales
Bolivia is in the process of consolidating 36 years of democracy amid important reforms and challenges. Despite a history of colonialism, racist oppression of the indigenous majority, and a national revolution and military reaction, the democratic transition to civilian rule and “pacted” electoral democracy among traditional political parties was established in 1982. The governments of pacted democracy failed to fully incorporate all of Bolivia’s citizens into the political process and imposed a severe neoliberal economic model that disproportionately disadvantaged the poor and indigenous. The constitutional popular participation reforms of 1994–1995 altered the party-dominated pacted democracy and opened up the political system to the unmediated and direct participation of indigenous organizations and popular social movements in local and national elections. Grassroots political mobilization and participation by previously marginalized and excluded indigenous groups and social movements, and the election of their candidates into office increased significantly. Indigenous and social movement protests erupted in the Cochabamba Water War in 2000 against the multinational Bechtel Corporation, and in the Gas War in 2003 against the export and exploitation of Bolivia’s natural gas. These mass demonstrations resulted in the turnover of five presidents in five years. The social and political agitation culminated in the game-changing, democratic election in December 2005 of Juan Evo Morales Ayma, as Bolivia’s first indigenous-heritage president.
In office for 14 years, longer than all previous presidents, Morales and the Movement Toward Socialism party launched the “Refounding Revolution,” and passed the new Constitución Política del Estado (CPE), the progressive reform constitution that established a multicultural model of plurinational democracy. The Morales-MAS administration provided unprecedented continuity of governance and relative stability. However, amid charges of interference, relations deteriorated with the United States. And disputes erupted over regional and indigenous autonomy, and extractive economic development in the protected lands of native peoples, especially over the proposed road through the Isiboro Sécure National Park and Indigenous Territory (Territorio Indígena Parque Nacional Isiboro Sécure, TIPNIS). These conflicts pitted highlanders against lowlanders, and divided indigenous organizations and social movements, and the government’s coalition of supporters. Contested term limits for the presidency created another acute and ongoing challenge. President Morales’s determination to run for re-election in 2019, despite constitutional restrictions, further tested the process of change and the resilience of Bolivia’s indigenous and social movement-based democracy.
Article
Border Politics in Africa
Paul Nugent
African borders, which mostly follow the contours of the former colonies, are widely regarded as artificial and yet have enjoyed remarkable longevity. On the one hand, there have been relatively few serious secessionist and/or irredentist bids. On the other hand, a limited number of border disputes have been settled and mostly without recourse to conflict. This is often attributed to the willingness of states to accept the principle of the intangibility of borders inherited from colonialism and the associated legal principle of uti possidetis. Most claims to secession are based on a preexisting sense of territoriality, whereas there are relatively few that are premised on the rights of peoples to self-determination. It has been pointed out that claims to secession are often tabled as a bargaining position rather than as a nonnegotiable demand. However, the secession of South Sudan has created a genuine precedent, and there has been an upsurge of secessionist movements that reflects this reality. In addition, there has been a proliferation of fresh border disputes, which reflects the increased competition for valuable resources such as oil. This would suggest that some of the landscape of border politics is undergoing a shift.
However, a number of factors continue to work in favor of the reproduction of existing borders. Paradoxically, the fact that guerrilla insurgencies tend to breed in borderlands, from where movements either aspire to take over the existing state or seek to carve out zones of de facto control, means that the borders themselves are not challenged. War economies depend on transboundary flows in which local populations themselves are deeply invested. Moreover, the flight of displaced populations and refugees toward borders may create greater insecurity at the margins but also tends to reinforce borders in both a legal and a practical sense. Finally, the struggle to determine the basis on which trade and transport is managed involves associational actors operating at the national level. Equally, fishermen, herders, farmers, and other local actors frequently invoke national affiliations to justify their own right to exploit resources within border zones. At the border itself, one observes a convergence of international, national, and local political scales in a particularly striking manner.
Article
Cameroon: The Military and Autocratic Stability
Kristen A. Harkness
The military plays a vital role in upholding Cameroon’s authoritarian government. Since independence, in 1960, the country has been ruled by a single political party and only two presidents: Ahmadou Ahidjo and Paul Biya. Both have gone to great lengths to secure military loyalty: counterbalancing rival forces, personalizing command hierarchies, ethnically stacking both the regular military and presidential guard, and providing extensive patronage benefits to soldiers. Ahidjo and Biya have both also repeatedly used the security forces to repress threats from below and stabilize their dictatorships. Combined gendarme, army, and paramilitary units have been deployed to defeat the southern maquis rebellion of the 1960s; the mass protests for democratization in the 1990s; the fight against Boko Haram, beginning in 2014; and the Anglophone separatist movement, which exploded in 2017. Whether facing nonviolent demonstrators or armed rebels, the military has never defected or refused to obey orders. Yet, as the 1984 coup attempt demonstrated, the bounds of military loyalty are not limitless. When Ahidjo retired, the northern Muslim Fulbe members of the elite Republican Guard attempted to prevent Biya—a southern Christian Beti—from rising to power.
Article
Canada’s LGBT Movement and Interest Groups
David Rayside
The Canadian LGBT movement has had enormous success in gaining political and legal recognition for sexual minorities—as much as any of its sister movements in other countries. This is especially remarkable because the sexual repressiveness of the Canadian social and political climate remained largely in place until the 1990s. And although activist groups across the country have had challenges in marshalling resources, mobilizing beyond the regional level, and overcoming internal inequities, advocacy pressure has been effective enough to produce a political sea change with few precedents in other issue areas. Starting in the 1990s, Canada experienced a country-wide “takeoff” in the formal recognition of sexual diversity, most dramatically in the legal status given to same-sex relationships. Even if a vocal minority of the general public opposed such moves, the acceptance of sexual minorities as legitimate members of the Canadian mosaic has become politically normalized.
Sexual diversity is far from being fully accepted, and those communities traditionally under-represented in the LGBT movement still face marginalization in a period of growing socioeconomic inequality. But the movement has made impressive gains, aided by social and institutional factors that have allowed activist leverage when the political winds blew in their favor. This success, however, presents new challenges, creating complacency within and beyond LGBT circles and increasing the difficulty of mobilizing people and resources.
The decline of religiously conservative opposition to the public recognition of sexual diversity in Canada has also created room for the movement to become more fragmented than it has been in the past. And yet there is still much need for advocacy. Socially conservative politicians are still pandering to public anxiety about recognizing sexual diversity. Activist attention is still needed in areas such as schooling, policing, social service provision, and immigration. Trans people, “two-spirited” Indigenous people, and sexual minorities within Canada’s large ethnocultural and religious minorities are often on the margins of their own communities, the broader society, and the LGBT movement itself.
From the early 1970s through the mid-2000s, the Canadian movement’s trajectory was similar to activism elsewhere. A “liberationist” period generated a long-lasting strand of radicalism alongside a slowly growing current focused on seeking rights through mainstream political channels (Adam, 1987, 1999). The analysis to follow first points to distinctive elements of the Canadian social and political context and then traces the evolution of what would become the LGBT movement from these early stages and into a period of legal and political “takeoff.” It points to strong commonalities in movement agendas, even across imposing regional lines, but also recognizes the challenges of mounting coherent movement responses to remaining inequities in a political environment so marked by activist success.
Article
Central Africa: Regional Politics and Dynamics
Andreas Mehler
The variety in climate, vegetation, and population density in Central Africa is enormous, but some of the main features of policymaking and informal rules of politics—at first sight at least—appear quite similar between N’Djaména and Kinshasa, between Libreville and Bangui, in a vast territory bigger than the European Union: clientelism, personalization of power, politicized ethnicity, the impact of external intervention, and a legacy of repeated political violence establish some constant features. On the other hand, the variable size of countries (from island states in the Gulf of Guinea to large territorial states) has also come with various challenges. Also, Central Africa features land-locked countries such as Chad and Central African Republic, which negatively impacts economic development, in contrast to countries located at the Gulf of Guinea with an easy access to maritime trade routes. At closer inspection all of the eight countries have a specific history, but this overview article rather stresses the commonalities. Featuring in this contribution are the countries of Cameroon, Central African Republic (CAR), Chad, Congo, the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), Equatorial-Guinea, Gabon, and São Tomé and Príncipe. The limited achievements of pro-democracy movements in Central Africa in the 1990s have enduring consequences on politics in Africa. Authoritarian regimes have consolidated their grip on power after surviving severe crises in most Central African states. Big man politics continue to prevail, only few opposition parties have upheld their initial strength and lack internal democracy. Enduring violent conflicts in DRC and CAR (and arguably to a somewhat lesser extent in Chad), have undermined conviviality between groups and state capacities in providing public goods with dramatic consequences on effectiveness and legitimacy of the state and its representatives. Prospects for a future allowing for more participation, truly competitive elections, and a peaceful change of government are therefore also grim. However, both violent and peaceful forms of contestation since about 2015 are also signs of renewed mobilization of citizens for political causes across Central Africa. New topics, including consumer defense and ecological issues, plus now-ubiquitous social media, may all be drivers for a new episode of engagement after two decades of frustration. The limited achievements of regional integration and the lack of dynamism of subregional organizations means that Central Africa is still a much less consolidated subregion compared to, for example, West Africa.
Article
Children in LGBT Political Discourses in the United States
Patrick McCreery
The role of the symbolic child figure has shifted substantially within discourses of LGBT politics and activism in the United States since World War II. From the 1950s well into the 1980s, the putatively heterosexual child was portrayed as the potential victim of homosexuality—victimized by influence, predation, and infection. By the early 21st century, the child had become a figure who was often represented as benefiting from LGBT civil rights—either as the child of lesbian or gay parents whose union was strengthened by the acquisition of civil benefits and protections or as a young gay or trans person struggling to accept a non-normative identity. This cultural shift both reflected and helped generate specific governmental and institutional policies—from the sexual psychopath laws of the 1950s, to the emergence of school-based Gay-Straight Alliances in the 1990s, to the central role of the child in debates over same-sex marriage in the 2000s.
Article
Church, State, and Political Culture in Orthodox Christianity
Victor Roudometof
Conventional views assume a systematic intertwining between the Orthodox Church and the state, which makes Orthodox countries culturally hostile to modernity. These views have been shaped by a long history of antagonistic relationships between Western and Eastern European states and fail to grasp important long-term trends within the Orthodox religious landscape. The political culture in Orthodox countries has undergone several changes across the centuries. Under the East Roman (Byzantine) Empire, complementarity provided the blueprint for church-state relations. In later centuries, this model was modified to suit the Ottoman and Russian empires. Modernization also prompted Orthodox states to create state churches. Church-state separation was further pursued by communist and colonial regimes and was sometimes accompanied by the active persecution of clergy and the faithful. The political culture of modern Orthodox countries was decisively shaped by the nationalization of the faith, spurred by various national revivals. In the 19th century, Orthodox Christianity became a nationalized religion, whereby strong associations were established between newly constructed churches in Serbia, Bulgaria, Greece, and Romania and these countries’ respective nations. This version of Orthodoxy was exported into the New World through communities of East European immigrants. The communist takeover of Eastern Europe further strengthened administrative fragmentation. After 1989–1990, the fragmentation of the USSR allowed for a more open expression of the model of national religion. Orthodoxy was revitalized but also served as a cornerstone for Russian, Ukrainian, and Estonian national identities, leading to regional ecclesiastical disputes. Current institutional dilemmas have resulted from these long-term processes.
Article
Citizenship Law as the Foundation for Political Participation in Africa
Bronwen Manby
The question of membership and belonging is widely recognized to have been at the root of many political crises in Africa since independence. The legal frameworks for citizenship were largely inherited from the colonial powers and still show strong affinities across colonial legal traditions. However, most African states have enacted significant amendments to citizenship laws since independence, as they have grappled with issues of membership, aiming to include or exclude certain groups. Substantive provisions have diverged significantly in several countries from the original template. African states have shared global trends toward gender equality and acceptance of dual citizenship. In relation to acquisition of citizenship based on birth in the territory (jus soli) or based on descent (jus sanguinis), there has been less convergence. In all countries, naturalization is inaccessible to all but a few. Manipulation of citizenship law for political purposes has been common, as political opponents have at times been accused of being non-citizens as a way of excluding them from office, or groups of people have been denied recognition of citizenship as a means of disenfranchisement. Moreover, even in states where a substantial proportion of residents lack identity documents, it seems that the rules on citizenship established by law have themselves had an impact on political developments.
The citizenship status of many thousands of people living in different countries across Africa remains unclear, in a context where many citizens and non-citizens lack any identity documentation that records their citizenship. The content of the law is arguably therefore less influential than in some other regions. A rapid development in identification systems and the increasing requirement to show identity documents to access services, however, is likely to increase the importance of citizenship law.
In response to these challenges, the African continental institutions have developed, through standard setting and in decisions on individual cases, a continental normative framework that both borrows from and leads international law in the same field.
Article
Citizenship of the European Union
Willem Maas
Citizenship is usually conceptualized as a unitary and exclusive relationship between an individual and a sovereign state; yet the European Union (EU) has developed the most advanced form of contemporary supranational citizenship. Citizenship of the European Union guarantees EU citizens and most members of their families the right to move, live, and work across the territory of the EU. It also guarantees the right to vote in local and European elections in the member state of residence, the right to consular protection outside the EU when the member state of nationality is not represented, the right to access documents or petition Parliament or the Ombudsman in any of the official languages, and the right to be treated free from nationality-based discrimination. Though on the political agenda since the postwar origins of European integration, EU citizenship was not formalized into EU law until the Maastricht Treaty. Since then, the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU) has declared that “EU Citizenship is destined to be the fundamental status of nationals of the Member States” and there are ongoing discussions about the relationship between EU and member state citizenship. In terms of identity, increasing numbers of Europeans see themselves as citizens of the EU, and questions of citizenship are at the heart of debates about the nature of European integration.
Article
Colonial Rule and Its Political Legacies in Africa
Amanda Lea Robinson
European colonialism in Africa was brief, lasting less than a century for most of the continent. Nevertheless, scholars have enumerated myriad long-term political effects of this brief period of colonial rule. First, Europeans determined the number, size, and shape of African states through their partition of the continent, with contemporary implications for state viability, strength, and legitimacy. Second, colonial rule influenced the nature of ethnic boundaries and their salience for politics through the use of indirect rule, language and labor policies, and the location of internal administrative boundaries. Third, colonial rule significantly shaped the nature of postcolonial state-society relations by divorcing the state from civil society during the colonial era and by engendering deep mistrust of the state as a benevolent actor. Fourth, many colonial institutions were preserved at independence, including the marriage of state institutions and customary rule, with deleterious effects. Fifth, differential colonial investments across communities and regions generated significant inequality, with continued political implications in the 21st century. The identification of these long-term effects has largely resulted from empirical comparisons across different forms of colonial rule, especially comparing territories administered by different colonial powers. Future research should move beyond this blunt approach, instead pursuing more disaggregated and nuanced measures of both colonial rule and its political legacies, as well as more scholarship on the long-term interaction between colonial and indigenous political institutions.
Article
Coming Out, Intergroup Relations, and Attitudes Toward LGBT Rights
Mark R. Hoffarth and Gordon Hodson
Intergroup relations and contact between groups has historically been considered a mechanism to promote support for LGBT (lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender) rights. However, LGBT identities are often concealable, and stigma discourages members of the LGBT community from disclosing that they are LGBT, which may prevent contact. Some subsets of the LGBT population make up a small percentage of the overall population, which may also decrease the quantity of contact. As such, the process of coming out to friends, relatives, and coworkers has been a common strategy of the modern LGBT movement. The strategy could be effective because the intergroup contact literature has found support for intergroup contact decreasing prejudice in meta-analyses. At the same time, researchers have challenged the assertion that intergroup contact promotes social change because intergroup contact is sometimes negative, or may be impractical or avoided, positive attitudes can coincide with acceptance of inequality, and intergroup contact may have unintended negative side effects.
Research has generally found support for the notion that intergroup relations are more positive when there is greater contact. For LGBT people greater contact has been associated with decreasing anti-LGBT prejudice and increasing support for LGBT rights. However, similar to other domains of contact, the influence of LGBT contact is contextually sensitive, and a combination of psychological and structural barriers can decrease or prevent the positive effects of intergroup contact. There are strategies which may overcome these limitations, through policies (e.g., protection against discrimination), promoting types of contact that promote social change as opposed to merely positive attitudes, secondary transfer of contact effects, imagined contact, indirect forms of contact, and positive media representations of LGBT people. Gaps in the literature include a relative lack of research on contact with members of the LGBT community other than gays and lesbians (particularly non-cisgender people), intergroup contact between members of different subsets of the LGBT community, and a need for experimental and/or intervention-based research.
Article
Complicating Genocide: Missing Indigenous Women’s Stories
Ñusta Carranza Ko
Having existed for centuries, genocide is a criminal practice that aims to destroy in whole or in part a population from a particular ethnic, racial, and religious background. The study of genocide is one that builds on historic cases of genocidal violence. Specifically, it takes on various approaches to examine genocidal crime, the intent of genocide, and how the motivation to cause physical pain and harm is knowingly implemented as a strategy of war, a tool of colonization, and a government policy of progress and modernization. Predominantly the scholarship on genocide can be summarized into three methodological approaches: (a) the theoretical that emphasizes the historic context of the crime; (b) the legal that draws from the United Nations Genocide Convention; and (c) the applied perspective that focuses on specific cases of genocide using the theoretical and legal lens. Recently, in the 21st century, genocide studies involving Indigenous populations has gained more traction as governments have been forced to recognize their own involvement in genocide, such as the forced removal of children in Canada and Australia from Indigenous families in efforts to assimilate them to the majority culture. Among this group, however, the Indigenous populations of the Americas, specifically the Indigenous women, have been further targeted for genocide more than other communities of color due to their historic relations with settler-colonial and postconquest emerging societies. The experiences of Indigenous women and their genocides involving sexual violence and coercive sterilization practices are the missing story in the genocide literature.
Article
Croatia and the European Union
Pero Maldini
Croatia’s accession to the European Union (EU) meant, in political terms, the recognition of its political and normative-institutional achievements in the establishment of a nation state and the democracy. At the same time, for the vast majority of Croatian citizens EU membership also had a symbolic meaning: a departure from the troubled past and a return to the Western, European cultural circle, which they have always felt they belong to. This feeling is the source for the strong pro-European orientation, which, as state independence was being achieved, and democracy established—as an expression of the strong political will of Croatian citizens for freedom and autonomy—helped achieve those historical and political goals. The EU was perceived as a framework that would enable those goals to be realized, so there was a general political consensus about joining it among all relevant political actors, and the vast majority of Croatian citizens granted their consent.
The path to full EU membership was long and arduous, primarily because of the specific conditions that marked the process of establishing a Croatian state and a democratic order. On the one hand, these are endogenous structural and socio-cultural factors: the structure and activity of political actors and the functioning of institutions, which were significantly marked by their authoritarian political and historical legacy. On the other hand, was a war of aggression and a struggle for freedom and independence with long-lasting and difficult social and political consequences. These specific conditions—which none of the other acceding countries had—slowed down the process of democratization and, consequently, hampered the EU accession process.
All these reasons are why Croatia had the most comprehensive and longest accession negotiations, including the most extensive body of pre-accession conditions. Although the extent and duration of negotiations, as well as the lack of expected support from the EU (especially during the war) have led to an increase in Euroskepticism and criticism of the EU—and consequently to the low turnout in the referendum for accession—the pro-European orientation remained dominant in Croatia. In general, public support for EU accession in Croatia was based on a set of mutually connected factors: identity-based (cultural affiliation), institutional-political (democracy), and utilitarian (socioeconomic benefits).
In the period after joining the EU, due to insufficient preparation, Croatia has relatively slowly used the opportunities (especially economic) provided by EU. Nevertheless, EU membership has accelerated the increase in institutional capacity and better use of European Structural and Investment Funds (ESIF). At the same time, the free movement of people, goods, capital, and services, and the opportunities brought by the open EU market, had a double impact: strengthening the economy due to greater orientation toward the EU market, but also slower economic growth, due to structural problems (the lingering power of the state, and regulations to the economy and the market) and increased emigration of the highly educated younger population (chronic labor-force deficit).
Nonetheless, through Croatia’s participation in the EU institutions, the real benefits of full membership are becoming increasingly visible, and the sense of integration in the EU’s social, political, cultural, and economic space is growing stronger. At the same time, EU membership affects further improvement of the normative-institutional framework of Croatia.
Article
Decolonial Queer Politics and LGBTI+ Activism in Romania and Turkey
Bogdan Popa and Hakan Sandal
The role of a queer decolonial analytic is to put scholars of ethnic decoloniality in conversation with queer studies scholarship. In exploring not only the impact of the Ottoman Empire on the region but also of a larger global colonial gender/sex system, decolonial scholars analyze the intersection of imperial hierarchies with the coloniality of gender. This is why Romania and Turkey serve as a focus to think about repositioning ethnic and gender identities in the context of global capitalist and imperial hegemonies. Queer activists in collectives such as Macaz in Romania and Hêvî LGBTI in Turkey show that decolonial politics needs an alliance with queer studies. Refusing single-issue activism, decolonial queer politics in Turkey and Romania seeks a radical transformation of society by drawing on the success of intersectional analyses as well as by addressing growing concerns about global inequality.
Moreover, a queer decolonial analytic interrogates mainstream LGBTI+ terms such as “visibility” and “the closet” and calls for a different political imaginary on the basis of José Esteban Muñoz’s assertion that the future is the domain of queerness. Since the language of the closet and visibility in LGBTI+ activism has significant limitations in wider political and societal contexts, a new analytic proposes the transformation of current activist vocabularies. In Turkey, the historical oppression of the Kurds and their ongoing political struggle have given a unique position to Kurdish LGBTI+ organizational efforts and queer activists. Kurdish LGBTI+ activism raises critical questions about ethnic and class hierarchies both within Turkey and within a global queer movement. This sort of activism deemphasizes “the closet” or “gay marriage,” or a mere “visibility,” which traditionally have been a key component of the 2000s LGBTI+ organizations and Western non-governmental organizations’ agendas. Like in Turkey, new forms of queer activism in Romania seek to develop spaces and locations that create safe spaces, advocate sexual experimentation, and promote radical social interventions.
Article
Environmentalism in Latin America
Guillermo Castro H.
The environment is considered here as the product of the human interventions in natural systems through socially organized work processes. These processes also produce environmental conflicts, when different human groups try to make mutually exclusive uses of the same ecosystem. As a consequence, every society has a characteristic environment associated with particular landscapes, as well as a peculiar environmental culture, developed along time. Environmentalism, in this perspective, expresses the cultural values and political conducts of different social sectors resulting from the contradictions inherent to their role in the production of the environment, as well as those between the natural conditions necessary for the production of goods and the reproduction of human societies. In Latin America, this has led to the formation of at least three different environmentalisms: a liberal technocratic one, closely related with international organizations, centered on the concept of sustainable development; an ecological one, centered on the conflicts associated with the fracture of the social metabolism of nature due to an extra-activist approach to human and natural resources in the region, and a popular de facto environmentalism, associated both with peasant and indigenous groups that resist the transformation of their natural legacy into natural capital, and urban popular demands for the access to basic environmental conditions of life, such as potable water, sanitation, clean air, and public spaces.
Article
The Evolution of Transgender Policies in the United States
Emilia Lombardi
In the United States, increasing numbers of transgender people are coming forward and working to change legislation to better protect their lives and identities. These changes have come over a long period of time with the work of transgender people and allies. Societal acceptance and support for transgender people has evolved, first in the provision of medical resources allowing for physical changes, and later in legislation supporting and protecting people’s ability to publicly and legally express their gender. However, these changes have not been always been to benefit transgender people as others sought to control and limit people’s ability to express nonnormative genders. Policy changes occur in reaction to transgender people, but at the same time, transgender people have been working to allow themselves the freedom to express their genders freely.
Major changes first began when scientists and medical professionals became interested in medical technologies such as hormones and its affects on people’s bodies. It was these discoveries that also interested people who felt dysphoric about their gender expression and saw these procedures as being able to reduce their pain and improve their lives. The movement to utilize surgical techniques soon followed. As more people sought these services, medical professionals developed guidelines to identify those who would benefit from the procedures and how to utilize these technologies safely to help people transition from one gender to another. As more people were able to transition, policies arose to prevent or limit people’s ability to express their identity, but transgender people and allies also organized to counter this movement and propose policies that are more supportive and protective for them.
