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Contemporary Politics
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The global politics of lesbian, gay, bisexual and

transgender human rights: an introduction
a a
Kelly Kollman & Matthew Waites
a
University of Glasgow , UK
Published online: 09 Mar 2009.

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human rights: an introduction, Contemporary Politics, 15:1, 1-17, DOI: 10.1080/13569770802674188

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 Contemporary Politics
Vol. 15, No. 1, March 2009, 1 –17

The global politics of lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender human rights:
an introduction
Kelly Kollman and Matthew Waites

University of Glasgow, UK

This introduction provides a brief overview of key political developments in global lesbian,
gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT) organizing and advocacy over the past three
decades as well as a summary of recent academic research and debates on these issues in
politics, sociology and other disciplines. It introduces the three questions addressed by the
volume’s subsequent contributions: (1) How can recent global developments related to
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LGBT human rights advocacy and organizing be explained by political and sociological
theories? (2) What is at stake in focusing on ‘human rights’ rather than concepts such as
‘equality’, ‘justice’, ‘liberation’, ‘self-determination’ and/or ‘queer politics’? (3) How do
transnational human rights networks and global norms of LGBT rights affect domestic
politics in both the global North and global South? The article pays particular attention to
the ‘human rights turn’ of the LGBT movements in the early 1990s and the political
successes and failures that have ensued. Finally, it summarizes the main findings of the
volume’s contributions and how they relate to the questions raised in this introduction.
Keywords: lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender; human rights; politics; sociology;
equality; liberation; queer

The global politics of lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT) human rights has emerged
at the heart of global political struggles over culture and identities. The drafting and signing of
two high-profile documents, the Declaration of Montreal (International Conference on LGBT
Human Rights 2006) and the Yogyakarta Principles on the Application of International
Human Rights Law in Relation to Sexual Orientation and Gender Identity (Corrêa and Muntarb-
horn 2007), by global LGBT activists in 2006, derives from and symbolizes a significant
acceleration and intensification of international struggles by LGBT movements. LGBT non-
governmental organizations (NGOs) are at last achieving substantial and secure representation


Kelly Kollman is a lecturer in politics at the University of Glasgow. She received her PhD in political
science in 2003 from George Washington University and joined the Politics Department at the University
of Glasgow in 2005 after teaching at Carleton College in Minnesota, USA, for three years. Her research
focuses on the influence that transnational actors and norms have on domestic political outcomes in
Western democracies. She has conducted research on the environmental and the lesbian, gay, bisexual
and transgender (LGBT) movements as well as the effects of transnational business norms. Her articles
have appeared in World Politics, International Studies Quarterly, Policy Sciences and International
Studies Review. Email: k.kollmon@llbs.gla.ac.uk

Matthew Waites is a lecturer in sociology in the Department of Sociology, Anthropology and Applied
Social Sciences, University of Glasgow. He studied for a PhD, researched and lectured at London South
Bank University until 2002, and then lectured at Sheffield Hallam University (2002– 6) prior to joining
the University of Glasgow in 2006. He is the author of The Age of Consent: Young People, Sexuality
and Citizenship (Palgrave Macmillan, 2005) and co-editor, with Jeffrey Weeks and Janet Holland, of
Sexualities and Society (Polity Press, 2003), an international reader. He is on the editorial boards of
Sociology, Sexualities, Journal of Gender Studies and Journal of LGBT Youth, and has authored articles
in Sociology, Sexualities, Social and Legal Studies, Parliamentary Affairs and Sociological Research
Online. Corresponding author. Email: mwaites@lbss.gla.ac.uk

ISSN 1356-9775 print/ISSN 1469-3631 online

# 2009 Taylor & Francis
DOI: 10.1080/13569770802674188
http://www.informaworld.com
 2 Kelly Kollman and Matthew Waites

in global forums, recently even at the United Nations (UN), and ‘sexual orientation’ and ‘gender
identity’ issues are finally finding a place on international human rights, law and policy agendas.
This volume offers much needed analysis of these under-explored developments.
The collection draws attention to the emergence of ‘human rights’ as a central vehicle and
framing device for LGBT political claims, particularly in international contexts. However, our
emphasis on ‘the global politics of LGBT human rights’ crucially also problematizes the concept
‘LGBT human rights’, which has its own significant history and meanings. Analysing ‘LGBT
human rights’ requires critical examination of both the consolidation of the culturally specific
identity categories ‘lesbian’, ‘gay’, ‘bisexual’ and ‘transgender’ into ‘LGBT’ and the conjoining
of ‘LGBT’ with ‘human rights’. The latter enacts a redefinition of human rights in a context of
the historical absence of sexuality and gender nonconformity from human rights conventions
and discourses (Petchesky 2000). The very emergence of the concept ‘LGBT human rights’ is
suggestive of the absence of LGBT people from previous conceptions of the human (Butler
2004).
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LGBT movements originating in the West have increasingly defined themselves as global,
seeking to organize across borders and lobby intergovernmental organizations (Adam et al.
1999, Altman 2001, Binnie 2004). Since the emergence of gay liberation movements in
Western countries in the late 1960s and early 1970s, LGBT organizations have often framed
their demands in terms of equality and/or liberation, but human rights discourses did not
become central to national and international debates over gender and sexuality until the early
1990s. The engagement with a human rights frame has proven successful in opening the
doors of powerful international organizations such as the European Union (EU) (Swiebel this
volume), and more recently shows signs of becoming a vehicle for access to the UN (Saiz
2004). These international developments have reverberated in domestic political settings, as
is illustrated by the adoption of same-sex union policies by a majority of Western democracies
over the past two decades (Kollman this volume), but also by controversies over the persecution
of LGBT people in sub-Saharan countries (Seckinelgin this volume) and Iran (Waites 2008a,
Long this volume). Although LGBT rights claims are increasingly influencing political
discourse in many countries, the contributions in this volume seek to problematize the
‘global’ nature of the LGBT movement by analysing the variable influence of international
LGBT human rights claims in different societies.
Despite these developments the study of LGBT human rights politics – both domestic and
international – has remained peripheral to most fields in the social sciences and almost non-
existent in the discipline of politics. A central rationale for this volume, as for our conference,
‘The Global Politics of LGBT Human Rights’, held at the University of Glasgow on 16 Novem-
ber 2007 (from which all speakers were invited to submit articles), is to bring together politics,
sociology, and interdisciplinary gender and sexuality studies scholars, as well as LGBT human
rights activists. We seek to facilitate the kind of dialogue between academics and activists that
will be necessary to develop appropriate analyses of ‘LGBT human rights’. As such, we are
pleased to present contributions here from Joke Swiebel (activist, former Member of the Euro-
pean Parliament and author of the Declaration of Montreal), Kate Sheill (Amnesty International,
International Secretariat), and Scott Long (Human Rights Watch), which represent the central
contribution of ‘non-academics’ in the original conference, and justify our convictions about
their areas of expertise, to which academics should pay greater attention. The conference, orga-
nized with a small budget for speakers’ travel, addressed relations between national, European
and global levels of governance, and was not intended to yield a globally representative selection
of papers. Rather the contributions here illuminate how global conceptions of human rights
relate to specific regional and national contexts.
 Contemporary Politics 3

The contributions in this collection address three questions that we feel are crucial for under-
standing the global politics of LGBT human rights:
1. How can recent global developments related to LGBT human rights advocacy and orga-
nizing be explained by political and sociological theories?
2. What is at stake in focusing on ‘human rights’ rather than concepts such as ‘equality’,
‘justice’, ‘liberation’, ‘self-determination’ or ‘queer politics’?
3. How do transnational human rights networks and global norms of LGBT rights affect
domestic politics in both the global North and global South?
As illustrated by the three questions, we see a distinct need to draw upon, develop and stage
dialogue between perspectives on LGBT human rights from politics and sociology, as well
as from other related academic disciplines. As editors, we are based in a Department of Politics
(Kollman) and a Department of Sociology, Anthropology and Applied Social Sciences
(Waites), but we share a perception that work on sexuality and LGBT themes developed
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earlier and in more depth in sociology, whereas politics has been slower to make LGBT
issues a focus of research. Contributors to the present volume draw on work from politics
(Swiebel, Kollman), political philosophy (Wilson, Seckinelgin, Long), sociology (Hines,
Wilson, Waites), socio-legal studies (Sheill), and social policy (Seckinelgin); all are also
informed to varying degrees by interdisciplinary feminist, gender and/or sexuality studies.
This collection reflects and embodies moves to draw human rights scholarship beyond the
field of law (Steiner et al. 2008), following the development of human rights studies as an
interdisciplinary field (Orend 2002, Nickel 2007, Normand and Zaidi 2008), and contributing
to the new sociology of human rights (Woodiwiss 2005) as well as to long-established work
in politics on the international human rights regime (Risse et al. 1999, Donnelly 2003).
In the remainder of this introduction, we provide a brief historical account of the changing
relationship between LGBT politics and human rights. We then outline a multi-disciplinary map
of the academic literatures related to ‘LGBT human rights’ that exist in the humanities and social
sciences. The survey of literature begins with a body of work in interdisciplinary human rights
studies, including feminist and women’s studies. Focusing on politics, we then outline how the-
ories of agenda setting and transnational norm diffusion can help explain the rise and variable
influence of LGBT human rights movements. Finally, we move on to sociology, and explore
how sociological analysis of gender and sexuality can be used to examine the problematic
nature of the human rights discourse for LGBT and other gender/sexuality-related movements,
with particular reference to ‘sexual citizenship’ debates. These issues are explored further in a
final section that summarizes, and discusses links between the findings of the volume’s
contributions.

International LGBT politics and human rights in historical perspective

Movements for progressive ‘sex reform’ that focus on same-sex behaviour and dissidence from
gender norms have existed since at least the late nineteenth century. The emergence of ‘sexol-
ogy’ as a scientific approach to sex led Magnus Hirschfeld, for example, to found the Scientific
Humanitarian Committee in 1897 and later the World League for Sexual Reform, both of which
campaigned against harsh punishment of same-sex sexual behaviour (Waites 2008b). These
movements were destroyed by the rise of fascism in Germany in the 1930s. After World War
II, social organizations for homosexuals in Western societies such as Norway, Sweden and
France began to reappear in the late 1940s (Adam 1987, pp. 60– 61). Homosexuals in many
of these continental Western European countries enjoyed some minimal forms of citizenship,
as same-sex sexual activity had been de-criminalized in the Nordic countries, France,
 4 Kelly Kollman and Matthew Waites

Belgium, The Netherlands, Luxembourg, Italy and Greece by the early 1950s (Waaldijk 2000).
These citizenship forms were limited, however, by unequal age of consent laws, lack of legal
recourse against discrimination and states’ refusal to recognize same-sex families. The early
de-criminalization of same-sex relations in these countries, especially in the Nordic region,
made possible the creation of largely moderate lesbian and gay movements that sought steady
legal reform (Adam et al. 1999). The human rights rhetoric of these movements, however,
was not always pronounced, as they often preferred to use the concept of equality that resonates
well in social democratic societies.
In the English-speaking part of the Western world, legal reform came more slowly despite
the creation of organizations in the USA and the UK that called for the de-criminalization of
same-sex relations from the 1950s (Blasius and Phelan 1997). The internationally influential
Wolfenden Report (1957), which advocated the partial de-criminalization of male ‘homosexual
acts’ in private for men aged over 21 in England and Wales, expressed a utilitarian ethos focus-
ing on management of a perceived social problem – not a concern for rights. It employed the
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concepts of ‘citizen’, ‘privacy’ and (occasionally) ‘individual freedom of choice’ with reference
to homosexuals, but while asserting privacy for adults over 21, it did not explicitly assert a
(human) ‘right to privacy’ as such (Committee on Homosexual Offences and Prostitution
1957, Waites 2005, pp. 111 –112).
The emergence of gay liberation movements after the Stonewall riots in New York in 1969 is
associated with public claims for ‘equality’, and demands for ‘liberation’ (Waites 2005,
pp. 123– 131). Reflecting these movements’ collectivist rather than individualist ideologies,
the concept of rights was generally absent from US gay liberation manifestos such as Carl
Wittman’s Gay Manifesto (1970) and Radicalesbians’ lesbian feminist manifesto, The
Woman-Identified Woman (1970), although ‘the right to be gay’ is claimed in the statement
of the Male Homosexual Workshop from the Revolutionary People’s Constitutional Convention
(1970; reprinted in Blasius and Phelan 1997). In the UK Gay Liberation Front Manifesto, there is
some brief mention of rights, but not human rights (Power 1995, p. 321). The emphasis was on
looking beyond rights to challenge social structures of oppression.
This lack of emphasis on ‘human rights’ needs to be understood in a broader context of shifting
political lexicons. Until the 1960s, ‘civil rights’ was a concept more commonly used by Western
NGOs concerned with individual rights; even Amnesty International began, from 1961, with a
more specific focus on political ‘prisoners of conscience’. Only later, particularly from the
1980s, did ‘human rights’ emerge as a focus for progressive organizations (Buchanan forthcom-
ing). The human rights turn of many national LGBT movements owes a great deal to the
strengthening of transnational LGBT networks at this time. Although a global organization, the
International Lesbian and Gay Association, had existed since 1978, it remained a loose affiliation
of disparate national groups until the organization embraced human rights rhetoric and began to
focus more on professional international political lobbying in the early 1990s. As a part of these
professionalization efforts, the organization created six regional groups: ILGA-Africa, ILGA-
Asia, ILGA-ANZAPI (Australia, New Zealand, Aotearoa and Pacific Islands), ILGA-Europe,
ILGA-North America and ILGA-LAC (Latin America and the Caribbean). At about the same
time another prominent international LGBT human rights NGO, the International Gay and
Lesbian Human Rights Commission, was created by the US and Russian LGBT activists. The
early 1990s also witnessed the creation of new organizations for transgender activism such as
Press for Change in the UK, formed in response to a failed case at the Council of Europe’s European
Court of Human Rights (ECtHR) (Stryker 2006, p. 5). Such organizations, together with other
transnationally linked national LGBT groups and more mainstream human rights organizations
such as Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch, now make up an increasingly influential
global network of human rights LGBT activists.
 Contemporary Politics 5

The past three years in particular has seen major developments in global campaigning. The
Declaration of Montreal was presented at the International Conference on LGBT Human Rights,
the largest ever international conference on LGBT human rights, which accompanied the First
World Outgames in Montreal, Canada, in July 2006. Its proposals include the creation of a
United Nations convention on elimination of all forms of sexual orientation and gender identity
discrimination. The Declaration of Montreal was written primarily by Joke Swiebel, a long-time
LGBT activist and former Dutch Member of the European Parliament, whose contribution to this
volume documents this work. Swiebel describes the Declaration as ‘an attempt – probably the
first one – to summarize the main demands of the international LGBT movement in the broadest
possible terms. [. . .] It was intended as a political document’ (Swiebel this volume).
Perhaps an even more influential document, the Yogyakarta Principles on the Application of
International Human Rights Law in Relation to Sexual Orientation and Gender Identity, was
agreed at an ‘experts’ meeting’ in Yogyakarta, Indonesia, in November 2006, and published
in March 2007. Michael O’Flaherty, a professor of applied human rights, was a key figure in
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drafting the principles, although there are 29 signatories including former UN High Commis-
sioner for Human Rights, Mary Robinson (O’Flaherty and Fisher 2008). The Yogyakarta
Principles present a statement of global human rights related to sexual orientation and gender
identity which are asserted as already existing international human rights law. Consequently,
it is these principles that various states have endorsed rather than the Declaration of Montreal,
and which have already been successfully introduced in courts in countries such as Nepal (Roy
2007). It is clear that in one sense the principles are being used politically, but they state an
interpretation of existing law, whereas the Declaration of Montreal is perhaps a broader state-
ment of proposals and demands. This difference, rather than being seen as problematic, can
perhaps be seen as a strength (within a certain conceptual frame), since the Declaration of
Montreal sustains attention to broader demands for social transformation. Both can, however,
be criticized for the limited inclusiveness of processes leading to their articulation, and their
content. The use of ‘LGBT human rights’ to frame the Declaration of Montreal can be seen
as employing more culturally specific categories than the broadly defined concepts of ‘sexual
orientation’ and ‘gender identity’ utilized in the Yogyakarta Principles.
The increasingly sophisticated international organizing of LGBT human rights groups has
begun to influence the agendas and policies of both certain international organizations and
states across the globe. As the contributions by Kollman and Swiebel make clear, the movement
has been most influential in Europe, where sexual orientation has now been incorporated into the
EU treaties’ non-discrimination clauses and where the ECtHR has now firmly entrenched a right
to same-sex sexual activity for adults by applying the right to privacy.
During the mid-1990s, the UN human rights organs also emerged as a new focus for LGBT
campaigns (Stonewall 25 1994 quoted in Blasius and Phelan 1997, pp. 840 – 841). The Toonen
vs. Australia case in 1994, in which the UN Human Rights Committee judged ‘sexual orien-
tation’ discrimination a contravention of the right to privacy in the International Covenant on
Civil and Political Rights, marked a major milestone (Morgan 2000). Fundamental progress
at the UN, however, has been thwarted repeatedly. A Brazilian resolution condemning sexual
orientation discrimination was tabled but refused at the UN Commission on Human Rights
(now abolished) in 2003 and 2004, due to opposition from the Vatican and member states of
the Organization of The Islamic Conference such as Pakistan (Saiz 2004, p. 57). In 2006, a
groundbreaking Joint Statement on Human Rights Violations Based on Sexual Orientation
and Gender Identity, submitted to the UN’s new Human Rights Council by Norway, was
finally signed by 54 states, marking an intent to pursue these issues in the Council (Permanent
Mission of Norway 2006). Finally, at the end of 2006, the two LGBT organizations with con-
sultative status at the UN Economic and Social Council (the US-based International Wages
 6 Kelly Kollman and Matthew Waites

Due Lesbians and the Australia-based Coalition of Activist Lesbians) were joined by three
others, gaining high-profile recognition: ILGA-Europe, LBL (the Danish National Association
for Gays and Lesbians – Landsforeningen for Bosser og Lesbiske) and LSVD (the Lesbian
and Gay Federation in Germany – Lesben – und Schwulenverband in Deutschland). Other
groups have followed (ILGA 2008).
Other notable developments within international organizations continue to occur. On 3 June
2008, the Organization of American States, with 34 active member states in North, South and
Central America, and the Caribbean, adopted a Brazilian resolution ‘Human Rights, Sexual
Orientation and Gender Identity’ criticizing human rights violations (Organization of American
States 2008). Meanwhile the new Human Rights Council of the UN is undertaking a universal
periodic review of the human rights records of all UN states (Arc-International 2008). Objec-
tions to addressing sexual orientation by Egypt and other states have been overruled. Despite
these important legal and policy developments, very few legally binding provisions protecting
LGBT people exist in international law, particularly outside Europe.
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These international and increasingly global developments in LGBT rights politics both draw
on and influence national and local LGBT movements and outcomes. Without the pioneering
legal developments of the Nordic and Benelux countries in Europe, for example, it probably
would not have been possible for either the EU or the ECtHR to incorporate sexual orientation
protections into their treaties and/or decisions. These decisions have in turn helped shape the
human rights practices of the rest of continental Europe (Kollman this volume). Although
states and local communities still remain paramount in determining the quality of citizenship
enjoyed by LGBT people, the strengthening of the global LGBT human rights movement and
the access it has gained to international human rights bodies has contributed to making the
human rights framing of LGBT politics increasingly dominant in numerous national settings.
In many Western countries, these international developments have coincided with domestic
cultural and policy change. This has been the case with the Nordic countries, where legal reform
began early, but it is also true of countries such as Canada and Spain. In Canada, the rights focus
of LGBT movements and the far-reaching legal victories secured over the past two decades – in
2005, Canada opened marriage to same-sex couples – are largely attributable to the adoption of
the Charter of Rights and Freedoms in 1982 and the consequent ‘rights revolution’ (Smith 1999).
In Spain, which also established same-sex marriage in 2005, LGBT rights politics are part of the
country’s attempts to come to terms with its fascist past. More so than in Canada, Spanish LGBT
politics has also been influenced by the transnational LGBT rights movement and the increasing
willingness of the EU and the ECtHR to recognize the rights of LGBT people as human rights
(Platero 2007).
The effect that international LGBT human rights movements and norms have had in non-
Western countries is more difficult to discern, not least because there has been less academic
research on these countries. Contributors to Adam et al.’s (1999) edited collection on national
LGBT movement histories noted that ‘human rights’ were not foregrounded as a structuring
concept in the formation of many LGBT organizations, as, for example, in Brazil, where the
Workers Party provided an important vehicle for gay, lesbian and transgender political claims
in the 1980s– 1990s (Green 1999). However by contrast, Stephen Brown notes that the Comu-
nidad Homosexual Argentina (CHA), the most important Argentinian gay and lesbian group in
the 1980s, ‘deliberately used the human rights discourse’ associated with opposition to the coun-
try’s collapsed military dictatorship. CHA’s motto from the early 1980s was ‘Freedom to
express one’s sexuality is a human right’ (Brown 1999, pp. 115– 116). Similarly, when formerly
communist Romania sought to join the Council of Europe, human rights became crucial as the
Council demanded repeal of paragraph 1 of the Romanian Penal Code, which criminalized all
homosexual sex until the mid-1990s (Long 1999). In South Africa, LGBT human rights
 Contemporary Politics 7

discourse also became influential comparatively early. During the transition to democracy in the
early 1990s, elites friendly to LGBT rights were able to get a prohibition against sexual orien-
tation discrimination written into the new constitution. South Africa was the first country to
adopt such a constitutional prohibition (Lind 2001).
There is growing evidence that the global LGBT human rights movement is influencing
politics in other non-Western countries (Drucker 2000). Since 1998, a number of these countries,
including many in the global South, have adopted legal provisions that prohibit sexual orien-
tation discrimination nationwide: for example, Ecuador, Costa Rica, Mexico, Peru, South
Korea, Taiwan, Uruguay and Venezuela (Ottoson 2006). However, the increasingly high
profile given to LGBT human rights has also contributed to what Long (2005) calls a ‘backlash’
against LGBT people in other countries. This is particularly true in formerly colonized states in
Africa such as Nigeria and Zimbabwe, and in some countries with Muslim majority populations
such as Iran; this phenomenon is also apparent, however, in some parts of Eastern Europe and the
USA (Long 2005, Waites 2008a).
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Despite these political victories, there have also been considerable costs in the use of a
human rights frame. Whether any universal conception of human rights is appropriate
remains debatable, but it has been demonstrated that the existing human rights conventions
and discourses have foregrounded culturally specific concepts such as ‘privacy’ and ‘the
family’, with gendered implications, while avoiding ‘sexuality’ (Petchesky 2000, Sheill this
volume). In this context, the rigid application of the Universal Declaration and human rights
conventions has been problematic. Relatedly, concepts of ‘rights’ have sometimes been
advanced in local contexts where poor individuals lack the education, language or resources
to claim and operationalize them, contributing to feelings of disempowerment unless individuals
are assisted in developing a sense of ownership of such rights. This sense has to emerge from the
relational context of families and communities, in which people live interdependent lives, since
an abstract individualistic approach will not resonate (Petchesky 2003). The political use of
human rights discourses including ‘LGBT human rights’ needs to be critically considered in
light of post-colonial and global South perspectives. Some Western governments, particularly
those of the USA and the UK, have selectively invoked human rights, and more particularly
women’s human rights and human rights relating to sexual orientation, in debates over the legiti-
macy of wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and threatened military intervention in Iran (Puar 2007,
Waites 2008a). Hence, a key cost of the rigid universalism of the human rights lexicon is that it
can impede dialogue, and risks being perceived as part of Western imperialism. In response, we
need a conception of human rights in which the substantive culturally specific content of human
rights conventions and discourses remains subject to debate and revision. The next section offers
a brief introduction to literatures on gender, sexuality and human rights that have emerged at the
margins of various academic fields: first in interdisciplinary work from women’s and gender
studies, health and socio-legal studies; and subsequently in politics and sociology.

Theorizing the global politics of LGBT human rights

Interdisciplinary research on gender, sexuality and human rights
Interdisciplinary work in women’s, gender and feminist studies began to yield comment on
human rights from the late 1970s (for example, in journals such as Human Rights Quarterly)
(Lockwood 2006). This work initially focused on sexual violence and reproductive rights
rather than sexuality more broadly, and was slow to gain a foothold in traditional disciplines
such as law, sociology and politics; in each, fieldwork on gender and sexuality tended, until
the 1990s, to maintain a national focus. Rosalind Petchesky argues that although ‘reproductive
rights’ initially emerged as a concept from women’s movements in North America and Europe,
 8 Kelly Kollman and Matthew Waites

‘distinct movements on behalf of women’s reproductive health and rights rapidly formed during
the early-to-mid-1980s in Latin America and the Caribbean, Asia and Africa’, and there has been
much cross-fertilization of ideas (Petchesky 2003, p. 227). But only since the early 1990s have
rights related to sexuality, sexual orientation and gender identity become sustained themes in
academic literature; prior feminist concepts of reproductive and sexual rights have been used
to contest and gain entry into an expanding human rights discourse. The arrival of ‘sexual
health’ and ‘rights’ related to sexuality in the language of international declarations, such as
the Platform for Action produced by the Fourth World Women’s Conference in Beijing
(1995), fostered academic work analysing these developments (Petchesky 2000). Much work
on sexuality and rights initially emerged from health literature, particularly from feminist
work on women’s reproductive and sexual health (e.g. the journal Reproductive Health
Matters, Gruskin et al. 2004).
A crucial contribution of this feminist work has been its problematization of ‘human rights’
as a universal discourse. Feminists have questioned the content of human rights conventions by
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considering them as constituted through patriarchal discourses, questioning culturally specific

concepts such as ‘privacy’, ‘marriage’ and ‘the family’ in the Universal Declaration of
Human Rights (1948). This scholarship has also questioned the implicitly male individual
historically assumed as the bearer of ‘rights’ in liberalism and human rights discourses; and
suggests ‘human rights’ discourses might limit conceptions of ‘sexual rights’ (see Corrêa
et al. 2008). This work has stood in productive tension with much mainstream scholarship in
law, which has tended to take the content of human rights as a given starting point, albeit
with attention to issues of interpretation.
However, since the 1990s, there has been a rapid growth of attention to sexual and gender
diversity in law, and particularly in socio-legal studies. Much of this high-quality scholarship
has engaged with normative questions in political theory, analysed governance, gendered and
sexual citizenship, and collected data on political movements, crossing into the territories of
politics and sociology (Morgan 2000, Whittle 2002, Herman and Buss 2003, Stychin 2003).
However, the potential of politics and sociology to offer distinctively valuable approaches to
understanding ‘LGBT human rights’ remains under-explored. Therefore, in this volume, we
consciously focus on developing these approaches.

Politics research and international LGBT human rights: agenda-setting

and transnational norms
The past two decades has seen a virtual explosion of work on transnational activism and the
international human rights regime by politics scholars. Despite this fact and the rapid develop-
ments within international LGBT rights politics described above, very few empirically-
orientated politics scholars have written about either transnational LGBT movements or the
partial incorporation of sexual orientation and gender identity into the existing international
human rights regime. The field, however, has developed theories that can help explain why
transnational movements are able to form and sustain themselves, as well as the conditions
under which these movements are able to influence different fora of global governance.
Interest in transnational politics – or political processes that involve non-state actors who
forge links across borders – increased after the Cold War, as international relations scholars
became increasingly willing to look beyond interstate relations. Most of the works that
examine transnational social movements and advocacy networks associate their rise with
certain processes related to globalization (for an overview, see Price 2003). In particular, the
communications revolution and decreased cost of international travel have enhanced the
ease with which non-state actors can create and disseminate information as well as increased
 Contemporary Politics 9

the value of such knowledge creation. These new technologies allow social movement
organizations to define and frame new issues as political problems and to persuade global
publics, international organizations and powerful states that action is needed. Globalization
has also increased the incentives social movements have to organize transnationally, as the
number and power of many international organizations has grown in the wake of global and
regional political and economic integration (Risse-Kappen 1995). In their widely read book
on transnational activism, Margaret Keck and Kathryn Sikkink (1998) argue that many national
groups turn towards transnational organizing and lobbying international organizations (IOs)
precisely because access to their home governments is blocked. This ‘boomerang pattern’ can
help bring about change that simply would not be possible through domestic politics alone.
More recent work on transnational activism has explored how these networks influence
intergovernmental organizations and states and why this influence varies across political
arenas and issue areas. One of the most common findings is that transnational activists use pro-
cesses of agenda-setting to try to influence the policies of prominent IOs (Clark et al. 1998, Price
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2003). Agenda-setting involves defining a problem, identifying proper solutions for that
problem, and politicizing the issue (Joachim 2003). At each stage, NGOs seek to shape and
deploy information, symbols and expertise to frame the issue in ways that suit their purposes
best. To explain when groups are able to do this successfully, students of transnational activism
have turned to the literature on domestic social movements. In particular, different authors have
argued that the success of transnational advocacy networks is dependent on the political oppor-
tunity structures available to these actors, the quality of the resources they are able to marshal,
and how resonant the frames they bring to policy arguments are (Keck and Sikkink 1998,
Joachim 2003). Political opportunity structure includes factors such as how institutionalized a
particular policy area in the international realm is, how open these institutions are to non-
state actors, and how many allies advocacy groups can find within them. Because of the success-
ful institutionalization of the international human rights regime and the widespread acceptance
of human rights rhetoric, human rights NGOs have often found the international political
opportunity structure reasonably favourable.
A great deal of this research has focused on transnational groups’ efforts to shape the actions
and policies of international institutions. How these advocacy groups and their international
lobbying efforts affect the domestic politics of states is somewhat less clear. The negotiation
of formal international treaties is relatively rare, and the ability of NGOs to shape the text of
these documents is also far from perfect. The influence these actors have on states and state
practices is thus often more subtle and less direct than simply shaping the drafting, adoption
and implementation of formal treaties. Constructivist scholars in international relations have
developed theories to explain these more informal processes of influence. These scholars
posit that internationally created norms of proper behaviour can cause states to redefine their
interests, and under the right circumstances, change their behaviour and policy even if these
norms are not entrenched in formal agreements (Finnemore and Sikkink 1999, Risse 2000).
International NGOs (INGOs) can play an important role in creating, persuading IOs to
endorse, disseminating and shaming states into complying with these norms. The extent to
which individual states actually do internalize these norms and embed them in policy depends
on how these norms resonate with domestic culture and are filtered by national political insti-
tutions and processes (Checkel 1999).
Several articles in this volume, most notably those by Swiebel and Kollman, draw on these
politics theories to explain the rise and effects of the transnational LGBT human rights move-
ment. These accounts illustrate that global LGBT politics is not such an exotic creature that it
cannot both be interpreted by and refine mainstream politics theories (see also Haider-Markel
and Meier 1996, Andersen 2006, Rayside 2008). Work on the sociology of sexuality and
 10 Kelly Kollman and Matthew Waites

gender, which can also help shed light on the domestic reception of international human rights
norms, may be needed to move the politics field away from a prevailing bias of seeing INGOs
and human rights movements and norms in an overwhelmingly positive light. Critical
approaches from sociology, to which we now turn, could push politics scholars to
problematize the processes by which international human rights relate to local citizenship
practices and cultures.

Sociology, LGBT human rights and the sexual citizenship debate

Critical research on gender, sexuality and related inequalities has a long history in sociology,
emerging particularly from the late 1960s in association with second-wave feminism and the
emergence of the gay liberation movement. Classic works include Mary McIntosh’s 1968 essay
‘The Homosexual Role’, which analysed homosexuality as a socially constituted rather than bio-
logical category, and was a precursor of the later social constructionist work of scholars such as
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Jeffrey Weeks and the post-structuralist work of Michel Foucault (see Seidman 1996). The ‘queer
theory’ that emerged from the 1990s tended to come from the humanities, and similarly criticized
‘essentialist’ approaches to identity categories, but also developed more political emphasis on
destabilizing gendered and sexual identities such as ‘heterosexual’, ‘lesbian’, ‘gay’, ‘bisexual’
or ‘trans sexual’ (Seidman 1996, Butler 2004). Human rights had only rarely been a focus in soci-
ology until the past decade, including sociological research on gender and sexuality. The recent
emergence of a sociology of human rights (Woodiwiss 2005) has been paralleled by developing
work on sexuality and human rights (Plummer 2003, pp. 131–146). But explicit and systematic
sociological attention to sexual orientation, gender identity and human rights remains rare.
Yet sociology has much to contribute to debates over human rights, particularly through the
concept of citizenship. This has been a central category in sociology since T.H. Marshall’s
(1950) classic essay ‘Citizenship and Social Class’ defined citizenship as ‘a status bestowed
on those who are full members of a community’. This essay made the distinction between
civil, political and social forms of citizenship, and argued that forms granted by states would
progressively extend from the former to the latter (Waites 2005, pp. 32– 35). Marshall concep-
tualized citizenship as defined by certain forms of ‘rights’ and ‘duties’. In this light, the relation-
ship of ‘citizenship rights’ to ‘human rights’ has been an important entry point for sociological
discussions of human rights.
However, the relationship of human rights to citizenship has been far from self-evident. One
might initially suppose that human rights form part of Marshall’s core ‘civil rights’ element of
citizenship. But the extension of human rights conventions to encompass social issues, such as
the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights negotiated in 1966,
suggests that ‘human rights’ can include much more than civil and political rights.
The most prominent debate in sociology and social theory to inform analyses of ‘LGBT
human rights’ is the ‘sexual citizenship’ debate. The concept originated with David Evans’
book Sexual Citizenship (Evans 1993; see also Plummer (on ‘intimate citizenship’) 1995,
2003, Waites 1996). Evans’ analysis is distinctive for its materialist, neo-Marxist approach,
arguing that in contemporary capitalist societies the state grants certain circumscribed forms
of economic citizenship to sexually defined social groups, particularly through permitting
forms of consumption in bounded spaces such as the commercial gay scene. In Evans’ analysis,
this defuses and sidelines demands for broader legal, political and social forms of citizenship.
Evans’ book was notable for its distinctive interdisciplinary references to both sociological
and political theories, including discussion of the political theorist John Rawls’ conception of
citizenship in A Theory of Justice (Rawls 1971, Evans 1993, pp. 56 –64), alongside discussion
of Marxist, Foucauldian and interactionist social theories. This important initial attempt to
 Contemporary Politics 11

integrate sociological and political theories has been neglected in the subsequent sexual citizen-
ship debate, where critical debates over liberalism in political theory have been under-utilized
(see Waites 2002, 2005, pp. 104– 114). The sexual citizenship debate has taken its structure
from an opposition between those such as Weeks who have emphasized the potentially transfor-
mative nature of claims for inclusion in mainstream citizenship practices and law, via inno-
vations such as civil partnerships (Weeks 1995, 1998, 2007), and those such as Evans (1993),
and subsequently Bell and Binnie (2000) and Richardson (2000, 2004, 2005), who have
expressed more scepticism. The sceptics, including Wilson in this volume, view engagement
in legal practices such as marriage as problematically aligned with capitalist neo-liberalism. It
is apparent in the contributions by Wilson and Hines in this volume that a revival of attention
to this approach is under way in some attempts to develop critical responses to neo-liberalism
and theorize its relation to sexuality.
Each of the bodies of literature we have discussed informs some of the contributions in this
volume, and most of the authors draw to varying degrees upon all three. In the final section of
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this introduction, we discuss the volume’s individual contributions, exploring cross-cutting

themes and debates, and examine where they suggest future research should be directed.

The volume’s contributions: what have we learned?

The authors in this volume cover a wide range of topics, although each addresses one or more of
the three thematic questions outlined in this introduction. Joke Swiebel examines the relative
success of LGBT activists’ lobbying efforts at the EU and UN, and seeks to explain why the
EU has been more receptive to LGBT human rights demands. Kelly Kollman, also engaging
largely with politics literatures, picks up on these themes and examines the impact that a soft-
law norm for same-sex relationship recognition created within European institutions has had
on national same-sex policies in the region, and compares Austria and Germany to examine
why the influence of this norm has varied across countries. Sally Hines utilizes a more sociologi-
cal approach to critique the manner in which the British government has translated principles for
the recognition of transgender people developed within European institutions into citizenship
law and practices in the UK. Hakan Seckinelgin also examines how norms and categories
used for the recognition of ‘LGBTI’ (lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and intersex) people
created at the global level interact with local conceptions of sexuality; his contribution
focuses on countries in the global South, particularly in sub-Saharan Africa and India.
Drawing together empirical research on HIV/AIDS politics, post-structuralism and political
philosophy, he argues that international LGBTI rights norms both open up spaces for the
political ‘recognition’ of non-traditional sexualities and genders, and close off other spaces.
Scott Long’s piece echoes many of the themes raised by Seckinelgin, by presenting a passionate
critique of the harmful ways in which certain Western LGBT organizations and activists have
interpreted what they perceive as LGBT rights abuses in Iran and other Muslim countries.
In their contributions, Angie Wilson and Kate Sheill utilize critical theories from politics and
sociology to analyse what they argue are the false universal claims embedded in much inter-
national human rights rhetoric. Both authors – indeed, several authors in the volume – note
the Western, patriarchal, heteronormative and/or assimilationist biases of human rights
norms. Wilson seeks to bridge the divide between activists’ strategic use of these claims and
the academy’s critique of them by creating a ‘multisectoral framework’ for analysing the
varied materialist and normative implications of deploying human rights rhetoric in different
political settings. Kate Sheill scrutinizes the ways in which LGBT human rights claims,
especially their reliance on the right to privacy, hinder lesbians’ claims for recognition in the
global movement. Matthew Waites critically analyses the implications of utilizing the categories
 12 Kelly Kollman and Matthew Waites

‘sexual orientation’ and ‘gender identity’ in human rights discourses, as in the Yogyakarta
Principles, and argues that the dominant meanings of these concepts require contestation.
Collectively, the contributions of this volume demonstrate the value of different disciplinary
approaches to the study of ‘LGBT human rights’, particularly from politics and sociology. They
show that these disciplines have much to offer analysis of developments related to ‘LGBT
human rights’ that can productively inform existing research in law and socio-legal studies.
We will use the rest of this introduction to spell out what we have learned in relation to each
of our three questions, examining relations between different disciplinary approaches, and
end by assessing the possibility for future interdisciplinary work.

How can recent global developments related to LGBT human rights advocacy and
organizing be explained by political and sociological theories?
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The contributions by Hines, Kollman, Swiebel, Waites and Wilson directly address this ques-
tion, albeit with different purposes in mind. Both Kollman and Swiebel note the dearth of
work by politics scholars on LGBT human rights, particularly in international relations. By
employing mainstream politics theory to explain their empirical puzzles, they seek to show
not only the relevance of political science literatures to interpreting recent events in global
LGBT politics but also the added value these approaches bring to understanding the subject.
For Swiebel, this means utilizing theories of agenda-setting, social movement framing and pol-
itical opportunity structure to explain why LGBT INGOs have been more successful lobbying
the EU than the UN. Kollman employs constructivist arguments from international relations
to show how soft-law norms for LGBT human rights recognition interact with domestic political
institutions, culture and processes in Western European countries to determine policy outcomes.
These accounts demonstrate that the political processes involved in translating new, and increas-
ingly global, sexual categories into national and international policy change are contingent on
a myriad of factors including institutional structure, ruling party coalitions, elite attitudes,
economic climate, cultural understandings of welfare and historic timing. Social change alone
cannot create policy; only political institutions and processes can accomplish this. Nor, as
both Swiebel and Kollman’s contributions make clear, are these processes limited to the
making and implementation of formal law. Although these articles go a long way towards illus-
trating what the field of politics can contribute to our understanding of LGBT human rights
movements, neither author explicitly problematizes concepts of human rights, and therefore
both may appear overly optimistic about the success of LGBT rights movements.
Neither Hines nor Wilson, who also engage with the first question but from a more sociologi-
cally informed standpoint, can be accused of being too optimistic in this respect. Both articles use
sexual citizenship literature to explore and critique the use of international human rights prin-
ciples in Western democracies. Wilson notes that although LGBT groups employ these
principles with emancipatory ambitions in mind, citizenship rights are generally only granted
to individuals that states deem worthy. She argues that this not only limits sexual diversity to
legally recognized categories considered acceptable by a society and state at a certain point in
history, but it also means that the extension of rights is at least partially determined by the
prevailing material structures in that society. Wilson draws on work by Diane Richardson,
David Evans and others to argue that neo-liberal globalization and the market commodification
of sexuality in Western countries is related to LGBT rights expansion and ultimately to these
rights’ limitation. Wilson calls for a more subtle, ‘multisectoral’ analysis that takes multiple struc-
tures into account to understand when, the extent to which, and with how much sincerity Western
capitalist democracies grant their citizens the rights necessary to determine their sexual lives.
 Contemporary Politics 13

Hines takes up these issues by examining the impact that the new Gender Recognition Act in
the UK has had on the everyday life experiences of the transgender people she interviewed. She
finds that the conception of transgender contained in the law limits many of her interview
partners’ expressions of their sexuality. Because the law insists that recognition is dependent
on permanently declaring oneself as one gender and then remaining this gender, many more
fluid forms of transgender cannot be addressed. Sex and gender are still too intertwined in the
law’s formulation to be truly emancipatory. Drawing on queer politics and queer theory, under-
stood as approaches that challenge a prevailing hierarchical heterosexual/homosexual binary in
Western societies by disrupting dominant understandings of sexuality and gender (Seidman
1996), Hines suggests that we need a politics that embraces queer activism’s commitment to
diversity to overcome the limitations of this law. She notes, however, that queer theory’s
radical anti-essentialism has often been criticized for negating the ‘subject’ of movements and
the people who participate in them. What is needed, she argues, not unlike Wilson, is a material
queer epistemology that reintegrates social analysis into identity construction. Matthew Waites,
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like Hines, explores how social perspectives can inform a critical analysis of the concepts ‘sexual
orientation’ and ‘gender identity’, increasingly utilized in global human rights advocacy, but his
analysis responds more directly to the volume’s second guiding question, discussed below.

What is at stake in focusing on ‘human rights’ rather than concepts such as ‘equality’,
‘justice’, ‘liberation’, ‘self-determination’ or ‘queer politics’?
This second overarching question is addressed by Wilson, Hines, Waites, Sheill and Seckinelgin.
The critiques of international human rights norms developed in these five contributions all
revolve around a common theme that has been well articulated in sociology, gender studies
and feminist political theory. All five criticize the use of universally construed identity cat-
egories, namely ‘lesbian’, ‘gay’, ‘bisexual’ and ‘transgender’, in much human rights rhetoric.
It is clear that these categories neither are universal nor cover the diversity of sexual expression
available to human beings in different times and places. As a result, the recognition that comes
with state compliance with human rights norms is limited to those willing to define themselves
by these limited identity categories. Indeed, as Wilson, Hines and Sheill point out, recognition is
often limited not just to these categories but even more narrowly to the ‘public lesbian’, the
‘monogamous homosexual’ and the ‘male or female transgender’. For Seckinelgin, LGBT
rights curtail the recognition of many non-Western understandings of sexual behaviour and
gender. By tying recognition to specific categories and implying that these categories are univer-
sal and natural, human rights norms limit sexual diversity and the positive recognition of sexual
difference. Waites shares similar concerns, but shifts the critical focus to the interrogation of the
concepts ‘sexual orientation’ and ‘gender identity’, in human rights law, declarations and
discourses. Drawing on queer theory, he highlights the way these categories are developing
an association with, and becoming embedded in, human rights discourses, and argues for a sys-
tematic critique of their dominant meanings to be advanced in global queer politics.
All five contributions posit that a queer approach to sexuality and gender could address these
problems inherent in human rights claims. The radical anti-essentialist understanding of human
identity and meaning construction espoused by queer theory and activism allows for a greater
diversity of human expression by challenging many universal categories. The problem, which
all five authors acknowledge, is that law, policy and states appear to need identifiable categories
to combat discrimination. These categories, while constraining certain moves toward liberation,
appear necessary for movement creation and state action. Is there a way out of this problem?
These contributions would seem to imply that, in fact, there is no easy solution. However,
both Sheill and Hines suggest that a right of sexual autonomy or self-determination would
 14 Kelly Kollman and Matthew Waites

better encourage diversity than the rights to privacy and family life currently used in
international and domestic law. Waites argues that rather than calling for the abandonment of
all categories, we should acknowledge the possibility of contesting dominant meanings, and
engage systematically in such political contestation.

How do transnational human rights networks and global norms of LGBT rights affect
domestic politics in both the global North and global South?
Five of the pieces in this volume contribute to answering this final question, namely those by
Hines, Kollman, Long, Seckinelgin, and, implicitly, Wilson. As the critiques of the international
human rights claims to universalism outlined above make clear, the processes through which
international rights norms are translated into domestic cultural and state practices are
complex ones. It is precisely because these norms are based neither on universally held prin-
ciples nor naturally occurring sexual identities that the influence of such norms on individual
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countries and localities is extremely difficult to predict. Kollman demonstrates that even in
Western Europe, where the influence of LGBT rights norms has caused convergent change in
national same-sex unions policies, a great deal of diversity still exists in how countries and
societies interpret the European norm for relationship recognition. In some countries, the main-
streaming of this norm into state and cultural practices caused very little friction; in others, such
as Austria, Italy and Greece, policy change has proven more difficult, albeit for different reasons.
Similarly, Western European countries have decided to recognize legally same-sex couples in
different ways; a few have opened marriage, others have created registered partnership
schemes, while still others recognize gay and lesbian couples through unregistered, domestic
cohabitants schemes. The European same-sex unions case illustrates the power that soft-law
human rights norms can have in national settings. This influence, however, is not always
wholly positive. Wilson notes the danger of the heteronormatization of national movements
that she believes can result in domestic responses to international human rights norms. Hines
similarly demonstrates the ways in which European norms for transgender recognition have
been implemented by the UK government in a way that excludes many transgender people or
forces them to adopt labels and behaviour they would not otherwise choose to use.
The most compelling case for harm caused by international LGBT rights norms, however, is
found in Seckinelgin’s and Long’s contributions on global activists’ influence on sexual and
gender non-conformists in sub-Saharan Africa, India and Iran respectively. Here not only are
the Western identity categories, ‘LGBTI’, less likely to be representative of local sexual prac-
tices and ways of being, but also, and more urgently, globally framed demands for certain
kinds of political and legal recognition can cause violent backlashes against local activists. Seck-
inelgin uses examples from sub-Saharan Africa and India to demonstrate that global LGBT acti-
vism has in some instances opened spaces for people who identify as LGBT in the global South,
but it also closes off other spaces and at times puts vulnerable people at greater risk. Scott Long
addresses some of the same issues in an analysis of the interpretation and reception of develop-
ments in Iran among Western lesbian and gay activists and organizations. Long develops a pro-
found and impassioned critique of Western lesbian and gay activism, with extensive
implications for understandings of the relationships between LGBT politics and the situations
of Muslims worldwide. The complex accounts in these contributions of how international
human rights norms translate, or are not translated, into national and local practices make
clear that a great deal more sensitive research is needed. The academic fields represented –
especially politics, sociology, feminist, gender and sexuality studies – need further development
to understand when, how and with what effect national governments and societies will allow
international human rights norms to influence national dialogue and political agendas.
 Contemporary Politics 15

More interdisciplinary dialogue, and more truly interdisciplinary research, is required to

address all three of the questions posed in this volume, and to understand global – local inter-
actions. This approach is suggested by Wilson’s discussion and her call for a more ‘multi-
sectoral’ framework for understanding the deployment of rights and citizenship claims in
different political and cultural settings. While contributions by Swiebel and Kollman illustrate
the necessity of developing (explanatory) theory from empirical study, Wilson and Seckinelgin
show the importance of relating social theory and empirical study to an explicit normative pol-
itical theory. The contributions by Seckinelgin, Hines and particularly Long suggest increasing
moves to problematize and challenge a politics seeking ‘recognition’ of assumed LGBT identity
categories, in which claims for LGBT human rights have been implicated
The collection as a whole tends to suggest that despite the culturally specific origins of
its concepts, human rights is legitimate and valuable as a global discourse. However, the
essays suggest the importance of contesting the content and interpretation of human rights,
and also the need for a more socially contextualized evaluation of human rights claims related
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to gender and sexuality. The contributing authors collectively present a dynamic and fast-
developing field of scholarship, characterized by growing and productive interdisciplinary
dialogues, and driven by the urgent need to respond to the rapidly changing global politics of
LGBT human rights.

Note and Acknowledgements

The views expressed in the articles are those of the contributors and not necessarily endorsed by
the editors. We would like to thank all the participants, both speakers and audience members,
who took part in The Global Politics of LGBT Human Rights conference held at the University
of Glasgow on 16 November 2007, on which this volume is based. We would also like to
acknowledge support from the University of Glasgow’s Chancellor’s Fund, the International
Centre for Gender and Women’s Studies, and the Departments of Politics and Sociology at
the university, which made the conference and this volume possible. Finally, we would like
to thank Ian Holliday and two anonymous reviewers for commenting on drafts of this introduc-
tion; the remaining faults are our own.

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