Philip Ayoub on LGBT activism between Europe and Africa
In this conversation with our guest contributor Eszter Horvath, Phillip Ayoub discusses recent developments in the LGBT movement, introduces the concept of locally rooted messaging, and his own trajectory from activism to academia.
Phillip Ayoub is a Professor in the Department of Political Science and School of Public Policy at University College London. He also serves as Editor of the European Journal of Politics & Gender. Ayoub’s research bridges international relations and comparative politics, engaging with literature on transnational politics, sexuality and gender, norm diffusion, and the study of social movements, with a strong interest in how the transnational mobilization of marginalized peoples and international channels of visibility influence socio-legal change across states. He is the author of When States Come Out: Europe’s Sexual Minorities and the Politics of Visibility (Cambridge University Press, 2016), and The Global Fight Against LGBTI Rights: How Transnational Conservative Networks Target Sexual and Gender Minorities (with Kristina Stoeckl, New York University Press 2024). He has also contributed to a number of journals and edited volumes.
Eszter Horvath: Please, could you give us a short background on how you came to research LGBTI activism and what are some of the recent problems that occupy your thoughts?
Philip Ayoub: I have been researching this topic for about 20 years. It mostly stemmed from my personal interest in the topic. In the mid-2000s, there were a lot of surprising changes happening around the world, but there was also a persistent backlash to LGBT rights. We saw some aspects moving forward – honestly, 20 years ago, I did not expect that we would be living in a world where so many countries have marriage equality. Those seemed like momentous changes at the time. But there were also many states that were doubling down or did not want to move forward. That created a puzzle for me, which I thought was interesting. It influenced my dissertation work, which then led to my book and other publications.
Unfortunately, a lot of these problems still persist. There are still good news stories, but there is also a continued struggle around LGBT rights, even in countries where it might seem that the rights have been won. We have a lot of serious challenges. In the United States, for example, there are over 400 bills right now in state parliaments trying to curtail the rights of trans people. In the UK, where I live, this is also a really big topic, with the political establishment using this issue to stoke the threat. We also see a lot of really troubling things in other parts of the world.
We can see that in many places, LGBT rights have not been introduced yet, not even at minimum basis. For political scientists, this is an important topic. For better or worse, it provides a lot of important questions to study.
Were you active in civil society, or is it purely an academic interest for you?
It has mainly been an academic interest. Before I became an academic, I was involved in civil society, and I was deeply passionate about it. I had some of my own issues with how visible or out to be. I was never much of a leader in that sphere, but rather active and eager to protest. Then I saw my role shift quite quickly when I entered academia, which does not need to be the case for everyone, but it was for me. There are many fantastic scholar activists and I feel closely connected to the movement in many countries. I have many friends who are leaders in civil society and who have offered me a lot of their time.
I always see it as my responsibility to give back to civil society as much as I can. As academics, we can look at issues from the bird’s eye view and provide comparisons. I often feel like we can say nothing interesting or new to civil society actors who are dealing with these problems on the ground. But there are patterns that academics can detect. Academics can also sometimes give legitimacy to issues that civil society activists are developing or working on. Thus, we can support the movement in that way.
Finally, I think that being a teacher also has a value. You meet many inspiring young people who might have more innovative ideas and be involved in activism. You can inspire future generations of civil society actors. So, I have seen my role change a little bit. I am more in the academic side of things now, but I feel closely connected to civil society nonetheless, just with a different role to play.
You have already mentioned that in the early 2000s, the LGBTQ movement gained momentum, which is a topic that you explore in your earlier book When States Come Out. Could you elaborate on this a little bit? Why did it gain momentum and how did this momentous wave change, what is the current backlash against the movement?
The book When States Come Out was really trying to highlight not only domestic explanations for acceptance of LGBT rights, but also international ones. There had been a lot of thinking in the early literature that countries accepting LGBT rights would have to be very secular or very rich. We had countries like the Netherlands or Sweden as kind of ideal type.
But in the mid-2000s, we saw a lot of interesting countries that we did not expect to progress in this matter, including those in Central Eastern Europe. There was a lot of variation. Some states really doubled down or stagnated, while others progressed, which posed a lot of puzzles.
My book shone a light on the transnational and international factors that supplement the domestic explanations.
In summary, I argue the reason why we see LGBT rights diffused to so many different countries is that some countries are deeply connected within their international societies. There are certain social and political channels and a long history of transnational movements that connect states across borders. Countries that are really connected with those movements experience a lot more pressure to adopt these rights. These international channels, I argue, thus supplement the domestic ones. Domestic channels are still really important though. There are domestic conditions that in some cases make it much harder for LGBT rights to progress. But the transnational/international channels are part of the story.
That is why you could see, in a very short time, many different countries moving forward on a particular LGBT rights issue, be it anti-discrimination or marriage equality. Without those factors, it would be much harder to explain why many dozens of states adopt a certain rights policy in a very short time. There are, however, certain domestic conditions, which we will talk about later in the podcast, that lead to intense opposition to these international pressures. Some countries move steadily forward without much pushback. Others move, and then double down in their resistance, which is what the second half of the book deals with in terms of predicting when the reaction might be tougher.
You mentioned that in Central Europe this was connected to these states entering the EU in early 2000s, which went hand in hand with implementing more liberal forms of thinking or funding going to civil society organisations with a strict adherence to human rights. I was researching some of the earlier Prides in Budapest, in their language they were quite different from what we use in the human rights scene now. But fundamentally, they had the same struggles that we have with the Prides and with LGBT rights today. It seems that society is increasingly tolerant and getting used to people that are LGBT, while politicians go against it and see it as something that is imposed and can be used as a political tool. So, my questions are, when do opponents of LGBT rights mobilize? Is there some form of political homophobia? When do you think this can be a political tool? Do you think it is more connected to the populist language? And how do you think it can be fought against in different contexts?
LGBT rights are presented as a form of foreign imposition in many different countries in many different parts of the world. That is, unfortunately, because gender and sexuality are often presented as kind of fluid issues. A lot of times, populists or nationalists and political elites in general use these issues to present LGBT people as a threat to the fixity of nation, or the fixity of tradition or religion, and kind of galvanize their own political supporters by targeting LGBT people.
Sometimes, even before an LGBT movement has asked for anything in the country, political leaders will target them. This deals with the political homophobia concept that scholars have been developing for some time.
In my article with Douglas Page, we showed that when political elites construct this sort of threat and use this type of language, it works. If you have political leaders that use this language to an overwhelming extent, it galvanizes some people who have conservative or intolerant views towards LGBT people. It basically makes them feel like more effective political actors as their prior political beliefs get confirmed by the political establishment, which leads to their mobilisation. That paper argues that in countries where tolerant people have their prior beliefs affirmed by the government, it mobilizes more tolerant people.
But if you have governments that present LGBT people as a threat, this can mobilize some people to be politically active who might otherwise not have been. This is because it makes them feel like they know something about politics, it makes them feel like efficacious political actors who have something to contribute to the debate. That is an unfortunate finding, but it is one that might explain some of the polarization we see in the world right now and which might also explain why so many illiberal actors use this kind of language.
Primarily, we can see this in authoritarian states and states experiencing democratic backsliding. It is also a language we see amongst certain political parties, even in states that we would consider gay-friendly. For example, in the United States, Ronald DeSantis policies, including the so-called “Don’t Say Gay Bill,” are using a lot of the same threat narrative without providing any evidence. It is a way to give something to a specific part of the electorate that makes them feel like their thoughts are valid and then perhaps also galvanizes them politically in the process.
You wrote another article with Douglas Page and co-author Sam Whitt where you analyze the LGBTQ movement in Bosnia and Herzegovina and offer the example of Sarajevo Pride. In the article, you argue that local support increased towards the movement after the Pride. I feel in Hungary this would be a better argument in the early 2000s when there was not this anti-LGBTQ propaganda in the media saying that the Pride is a negative movement, where, for example, pedophiles are marching down the streets. Would you still agree with this finding or do you think that this has now changed in other conservative societies?
No, I actually still think that the finding holds, but, of course, it matters a lot on specific context. That paper was looking at the first ever Pride in Bosnia and Herzegovina. What I really like about that paper with Sam and Douglas was the research design because we tracked attitudes before this event happened and after. I should clarify that activists in Bosnia and Herzegovina had been working very carefully and had planned it for a long time and decided in many cases not to host a Pride. Therefore, the point of the paper is not that everyone should have their own first Pride, it is really risky and it comes with a lot of important threats.
But if it is planned carefully, even in a context that is quite socially conservative, that means attitudes are quite low towards LGBT people and maybe the visibility of LGBT people is lower than in many other places, but what is interesting about a march like this is how its effects spread. What you said about the media is really interesting because one of the reasons we found why initially there was more positive changes close to the march was because people could interact with the real march and see that it was not threatening at all, and that people who were part of the march were local people who were part of their communities. It also provoked conversations at the dinner table where people found out their kids were supportive of their friends who were at this march. But, of course, the further you got away from the event, it opened the door for more problematic media portrayals and for more dissipating effects.
A debate started around the issue, which was partly a fictitious debate. In Sarajevo itself, because the march happened there, it was harder to push through this fictitious narrative because people actually saw the march and knew that this threat of decadent, degenerate people walking around was not what they saw with their own eyes.
However, for another paper, when we tracked attitudes in Bosnia at a later date we found that there were downstream effects and we saw more positive attitudes elsewhere in the country, which we did not see initially in the weeks after the march. This could have a lot to do with the fact that people in other parts of the country started to open up, started a conversation once they saw a more visible movement representing them. There is also the planning of more activism in rural areas or areas outside of the capital where maybe more people felt inspired. Actually, a lot of the activists said that queer people were very inspired by the Pride. Many knew about the Pride, they heard about it, they felt moved by it. Thus, that might have led to a more activism or more conversations in other parts of the country. Whether Pride should happen and how it should happen, or if other less visible tactics should be used instead is also discussed in the paper. There are different kinds of conditions under which this kind of visible activism makes sense or not.
You have an earlier article in which you compare Poland and Slovenia. The main factors there are the attitudes of the Church and some form of nationalistic views. Could you tell our listeners more about this comparison?
Of course. Surprisingly, the article has had quite an impact, and I was really happy about it because it was a more of an in-depth, qualitative piece looking at two different countries that responded very differently to the LGBT rights and norms that the EU had been developing, with it working out more smoothly in Slovenia than in Poland. Since the paper was written, Slovenia has moved further forward. It is really becoming a leader when it comes to marriage, rights for families etc., while Poland has moved forward a lot in attitudes, but the conservative government keeps doubling down on LGBT people and is still stoking a lot of threat, which they do quite successfully.
The explanation for why the norm provokes more resistance in Poland had a lot to do with the way religion was embedded in the national identity. That is important because I really wanted to challenge the idea that religion, or a certain type of religion, was uniformly bad for LGBT people. But we see a lot of variation.
At the time, there was a lot of writing claiming that Catholic states might be particularly bad for LGBT rights. But they had a harder time explaining why Catholic Ireland introduced marriage equality by popular vote or Spain has become a leader, Malta is above Portugal and there are so many other examples that challenge that notion. Slovenia is also a Catholic country that has moved forward quite quickly.
Following the advice of one of my advisors, I picked two Catholic countries for my research – Slovenia and Poland – to kind of make it not just about Catholicism. I did not want the argument to be too simplistic, instead, I was thinking about how the Catholic Church functions in very different ways in different states. We do see really different trajectories. In Poland, the Catholic Church was actually a liberalizing force. It was on the side of democratic movements; it had a lot to say in the 1990s about women’s reproductive rights and about LGBT rights. There was a really strong connection between national and religious identity. In the 1990s, Poles themselves felt to be very Catholic. They also felt that the Catholic Church had a lot of political authority. In Slovenia, the Church has a different history. In fact, it is remembered to be collaborating in some cases, even during National Socialism in the Second World War. It did not have this kind of memory in the national psyche the way it did in Poland where the Church was a stalwart defender of the Polish people against various occupations and defending the nation against various foreign impositions. That just was not as possible in Slovenia. We could say the same thing about Spain, for example, where the Church lost a lot of credibility due to its ties with Franco and did not have the same kind of democratizing role there. The argument is basically that we have to think about how the religion connects to the nation to understand when it will be an effective force against LGBT rights or when it might not be much of a force against those rights. That was the point of that paper.
It is really interesting from that point of view, even though Slovenia and Poland are in the same region, because of their different trajectory of regime change in the 1990s, they approach the LGBTQ movement so differently. Most recently, your focus shifted towards the global conservative fight against the movement. Your most recent book is written with Kristina Stöckl. Why did your focus shift? And what are your main findings in this book?
I met Kristina in 2013 and 2014 when we were both postdocs at the EUI in Florence. I was finishing my first book, which was about how LGBT people use transnational channels to diffuse rights. Kristina is an expert on the Russian Orthodox Church and a sociologist of religion. We were talking, and it was increasingly obvious that what we were observing around us was that moral conservative actors, actors who work to oppose LGBT rights and women’s reproductive rights and affirm traditional gender roles, were also increasingly using transnational advocacy tools. They seemed to be learning from the LGBT movement and from other progressive human rights movements that they should use international venues and they should come together across borders. For us, this was a bit surprising because many of them have deeply nationalist and deeply religious ideologies that might make it hard for them to work together across borders with other nationalists. There were also people with entrenched religious views in one particular denomination who might find it difficult to work together with other denominations in the way that we see these actors now doing. That was a bit of a puzzle.
The book charts these international advocacy groups. The organizations unite activists from different parts of the world, they have meetings in different places, including in Budapest. And we see certain groups like the Catholic Church or the Orthodox Church that give a lot of support to these movements.
That creates a bit of a puzzle for some of our theories in international relations because we might theorize that progressive movements are working in the international space and they meet resistance when they hit the domestic space and target a certain country, which says no. Then they have to work to convince that country to adopt this norm. But it seems in this era of populist nationalism, where we see the circulation of all sorts of ideas and politics that are pushed by right wing conservatives, that these tactics are being copied in many different places, so these channels are available to all sorts of movements. That means that LGBT movements and women’s movements also confront this resistance at different levels. They are also meeting opposition in international spaces from the more conservative movements. The anti LGBT movement is also diffusing a lot of harmful discourse. We can see these concerns around ‘protecting children from gay propaganda.’ Those kind of laws are popping up in many different places including, once again, the Florida example of Ron DeSantis, or Hungary, which introduced a similar law in 2021. The Russians have similar laws as well, and so do many other states. There are all sorts of laws around religious liberty or protecting children that pop up in many different states across different world regions. They are organized by activists who are diffusing certain ideas. In the book, we argue that we have to take this phenomenon seriously both theoretically and empirically to understand how it shapes world politics. It is also really interesting to see how the LGBT movement has responded, how it suddenly speaks in a different language, which is in part influenced by the fact that they have to meet their opposition at so many different levels, not just in distinct domestic contexts. They also have to think on a global level how these challenges are operating in the UN or the EU.
During your talk at the Inequalities Working Group, it was really interesting for me that you gave Poland as an example of a ‘locally rooted messaging,’ which is a term that you introduced to describe a strategy that LGBTQ activists can use in order to have their rights more easily accepted in their own country. Did you find this method of ‘locally rooted messaging’ in activist culture or was it something you found in the theory that you were talking about with your co-authors?
First, I noticed it happening in activism, which my co-author has noted as well. Then we had conversations with activists that inspired this project where we are testing how different activist messages are being used and which ones are the most convincing to the general population. But the whole theoretical framework on rooting came from an earlier paper and earlier interactions with activists. Poland is a case that I have thought about a lot over the years. In one paper, we looked at movement and counter movement interactions and traced the Polish movements’ frames for over 20 years. We argued that they shifted their framing considerably at different stages.
As the opposition intensified, especially in the mid-2000s, there was a period of increased conflict where the opposition movement really started targeting the LGBT movement and saying that they were foreign imposition or foreign agents who were dismantling national values. This led to a shift in the Polish movement that started to use memory politics, trying to root the movement by uncovering indigenous expressions around LGBT rights, and sometimes even incorporating religious themes into their activism because they were trying to appeal to a Catholic majority.
They also started using national symbols more than the global ones, which had been so central to their activism in the previous years when they used more abstract human rights frames. When Zimbabwean activists were talking to us about these dynamics, there were differences about what these roots were, obviously. But they were challenging similar kinds of activism. In Zimbabwe, opponents say that LGBT rights are neo-colonial imposition from the West. In Poland, opponents say that it is ‘Ebola from Brussels.’ The same expression of outside imposition is present in both cases. This rooting framing is something that activists are doing in many different places.
What do you think are the main differences in the challenges that Hungarian, Polish and Central European activists face as opposed to or in comparison with Zimbabwean activists, for example?
Well, the main difference – and this would take me back to the international level, which we talked about at the beginning of our conversation – is that while there are many resistance movements and political elites in these countries that you mentioned, Poland and Hungary are still embedded in an international framework, primarily the European Union that established LGBT values and rights as part of European values. That is something that has not been established in every region in the same way. At the end of the day, it still provides a lot of resources in terms of supporting civil society in certain ways or gaining legitimacy for LGBT people who have certain benchmark of rights and who can engage with activists in other places due to free movement of people. These things really do matter.
I think, in a way, with these governments doubling down, activists still have a huge struggle, they still have a lot of work to do in terms of brokering these contentious issues to a local audience. They simply cannot take what worked in Germany and do it in Hungary, it does take much more work. But there is a knowledge system at the regional level that provides some conditions for norm diffusion that is still in place, despite the intense backlash that we see in Central Eastern Europe. And that, I think, is the necessary condition that is absent in Africa.
This does not mean that you cannot have pan-regional activism in Africa as well. I think that activists are inspired and connected to other activists across borders given that there are many similar threats. We have seen this again and again in recent waves of political homophobic laws and rhetoric coming from multiple countries, primarily in Sub-Saharan Africa but also in other places that target LGBT people. There are similar challenges to confront in many places.
The other thing that we have to think about with Africa is that the anti LGBT movement is connected to transnational support in many important ways. Colonialism, especially British colonialism, did deliver homophobia and anti sodomy laws to much of the continent and other parts of the world as well. Then we also have this more conservative movement that is targeting countries where they feel they can still win.
You see a lot of evangelical Americans and Europeans spreading ideas from the global North that are being exported, including anti-LGBT ideas and support for specific discriminatory bills and policies that make the situation for activists working in Zimbabwe and other African states really complicated.
There are also very important differences on the level of support in the wider society. If you compare Zimbabwe to countries that face homophobia challenges in Europe, these are on quite different levels. When you read the press, sometimes you see Poland being portrayed as a very challenging case. It is a challenging case, but the Polish society has progressed tremendously on LGBT rights in recent years. We do not have such a level of support in countries like Zimbabwe, which makes the activists’ work there more challenging.
Finally, I would like to ask some bigger picture questions. Could you highlight some important milestones that LGBT activism has given to democratic participation? For example, you mentioned the positive example of a rooted messaging, is it perhaps a tool that also other social movements could implement?
This is a great question and a hard one to answer, but I think also really important to think about.
I think if you look at the degree of attitudinal change and changes in legal frameworks of many different countries that have become more inclusive to LGBT people, despite intense backlash, it is really remarkable how much the world has changed on this issue. For that reason, I think this movement is something that all political scientists and sociologists should be studying very seriously to understand how this was possible.
Moreover, LGBT activists have worked across borders because many of them felt excluded from their nation states. They were able to build ties with each other because they felt they had a lot in common with other lesbian, gay, and trans people in different contexts, which brought them together. They also made a really innovative use of international transnational platforms for their work. Even before there was a social mandate, they were already targeting these institutions almost in a visionary way. I think that there is a lot to learn from that.
I also think that LGBT people cross cut many different demographic groups, which contributes to discussions on intersectional rights cutting across different class and racial divides. There are also important improvements in terms of visibility of these topics. All of a sudden, you see difficult conversations around sexuality and gender identity happening in very different echelons of society.
Another thing, but this is more of a theory, what is really interesting about LGBT people is that a lot of us grew up in families that do not understand each other. There is a lot of brokerage happening since childhood in terms of having to explain who you are. This can be very traumatizing. This is not necessarily something to celebrate, but there is a way of loving people who do not understand you. And I think for many activists this has become a bit of a secret weapon because they had to learn how to compromise and talk with people in ways that might lead to some kind of mutual understanding.
But again, this is just a hunch or a theory of mine. I have been wanting to write something about this for years now, but I have not really explored it yet because I am not a philosopher. But I think there is something to it in the way that LGBT movement, once it gained a degree of visibility, it managed to open doors to a lot of successes.
However, when we talk about successes, there is a lot of people and groups within LGBT communities that have been left out. We see a lot of these rights positively affecting mainly upper middle class white gay men. We do not see the same access to rights and inclusion for many other groups under the LGBTQI umbrella, we still see the attacks on trans people and how queer people of color are treated in many societies that we usually consider as LGBT friendly. We also see issues of homo nationalism in certain countries where the rights of gays and lesbians are exploited to limit human rights of other groups, and this is something we have to be aware of when talking about successes. There is still a long way to go in terms of making our societies more inclusive for queer people overall and LGBT activists are doing a lot of great work in this respect. So, I remain hopeful despite this intense resistance. We can see a lot of positive developments, but there is still a long way to go.
This transcript has been edited for length and clarity. In collaboration with Caglar Ozturk, Martins Kwazema, Karen Culver and Lucie Hunter.
