This article examines how international lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and intersex (LGBTI) activism is governed through state funding. Through archival material documenting the Swedish International Development Cooperation Agency’s (SIDA’s) funding of two international LGBTI organizations – the International Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Trans and Intersex Association and the Swedish Federation of LGBTQI Rights – complemented with interviews, we analyse power relations and management practices, how these are reconciled with SIDA’s efforts to make LGBTI funding more partner oriented, and the consequences for recipients. Our main finding is that within the funding schemes, control is exercised in less direct, hierarchical and overt ways than seems to be implied in some critiques of donor influence and ‘neocolonialism’ in the Western promotion of LGBTI rights. Instead, government takes place in multifaceted and horizontal ways, involving a variety of actors, which makes the exercise of power less visible but nonetheless far-reaching. Through SIDA’s funding schemes, power relations are reproduced in specific ways, including the partial reshaping of activist organizations into bureaucratized and depoliticized state ‘partners’.

This chapter provides an empirical and theoretical overview of how the rights of lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and intersex (LGBTI) people are promoted by various international actors in the contemporary world. It examines where, by whom, with what means and with what results LGBTI rights are advanced and contested in international relations. In addition, it asks how we can understand the shift that has occurred in the last two decades, where LGBTI politics has become catapulted into global politics as a highly visible matter tied to national identity and international positioning. The discussion is based on a research review but also engages with some recent ‘real-world’ debates. The first part of the chapter focuses on four empirical sites where LGBTI rights are promoted and contested: UN bodies and multilateral diplomacy; development and international funding; international capital and financial institutions; and EU accession and integration. In the second part, the chapter discusses how to critically analyse international LGBTI rights promotion, outlining two broad theoretical approaches: norms research and queer postcolonial perspectives.

The article investigates Russian LGBTIQ activism in the context of Russia’s war in Ukraine, a conflict framed in highly gendered and sexualized geopolitical terms. The study aims to develop a deeper understanding of queer security and is based on interviews with Russian LGBTIQ activists, their international funders, as well as a text analysis of Russian official documents and news media. It shows how the safety of queer and trans people in Russia is undermined by wartime state discourses producing them as hypervisible enemies within, the complex ways in which activists navigate security and visibility, that international allies intervene in these negotiations in ways that may or may not align with activists’ priorities, and how the circumstances of war themselves reshape LGBTIQ activism. The study argues for a notion of queer security as geopolitically shaped but embodied and experienced in the everyday, and realized through horizontal grassroot networking. The findings broaden our understanding of queer security by going beyond the scope of institutionalized rights regimes, decentring the state and international organizations as providers of security for queer and trans people, and invite researchers to consider queer activists as actors of international security.

This article unpacks different meanings of visibility and adds to a more complex and nuanced understanding of visibility and its role in LGBT + activism in Uganda, a widely discussed case of political homophobia. Public visibility has a central, although contested, role here. The study aims to explore how visibility is understood and navigated by local LGBT + activists, unaffiliated people with same-sex desires, as well as international development partners. Interviews conducted in Kampala from December 2021–January 2022 reveal different and complex narratives surrounding visibility. Local unaffiliated individuals and activists agreed on the importance of making the LGBT + rights struggle more visible. This, however, did not translate into a wish to “come out” themselves. International development actors expressed a need for caution regarding their own visibility, mindful that explicit and visual support may generate accusations of neo-imperialism.

This article proposes Maarten Hajer’s concept of discourse coalition for analyzing anti-gender politics and its interlinkages with other forms of opposition to sexual and gender equality. The perspective conceptualizes how actors with disparate ideological, philosophical, and religious views can communicate and produce meaningful interventions, if they share certain storylines. This primarily conceptual contribution is illustrated with a study of how “traditional values” are promoted by the Russian state. Two storylines, stressing the needs to protect “traditional values” from outside interference, and children from harmful sexual information, enable discursive affinities and interconnections across differences, domestically, internationally, and transnationally. 

This essay aims to describe and analyze the movement for gay rights – later LGBTQ rights – in Russia from its inception in the late 1980s until the time of Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022. The study is guided by theoretical concepts from social movement studies, and is based on previous research as well as inter-views with activists conducted by the author. The essay outlines a complex trajec-tory, where the building of a more professional and well-organized movement has occurred alongside increased state repression and stigmatization of LGBTQ activ-ism. While the findings are not directly generalizable to other civil society move-ments, they allow us to make broader reflections about the dangers of a too-linear view on democratic transition, about the relation between a movement’s visibil-ity and its success, and about how a state’s geopolitical orientation impacts civil society.

Examining the Russian state's turn to 'traditional values' in the 2010s, this article aims to understand traditionalist state discourses in a global context where LGBT inclusion has been incorporated into notions of national exceptionalism. It argues that the Putin regime has articulated, provided ideological coherence to, and made visible a narrative according to which resistance to LGBT rights appears as a logical choice for states seeking to position themselves in opposition to the 'liberal West.' That narrative both counters the homonationalist idea of 'gay-friendliness' as a signifier of modernity and good statehood and incorporates some of its elements, notably externalization of homophobia onto racialized, Muslim Others.

This article examines how Russian geostrategic communication is entangled in global gender politics. The aim is to understand the resonance of disinformation in relation to culturalized, ethnicized and racialized narratives of gender, or “gendered boundarymaking.” The analysis is based on focus group discussions with Swedish, Danish, and Norwegian individuals, asked to share their impressions of news articles from the Russian media agency Sputnik, which all depicted Sweden as a warning example of multiculturalism and feminism gone “too far.” In the discussions, participants opposed a gender equal “self” to a patriarchal immigrant “other,” narrated Sweden as a country exceptionally concerned with gender, and tapped into competing temporalities of progress and decline. The article contributes to research on geostrategic communication by showing how disinformation efforts draw upon gendered national identities and debates about gender and immigration. More importantly, the article demonstrates that such gendered boundarymaking shapes audiences’ interpretations in crucial ways. Rather than viewing disinformation only from a state-centered lens of national security, in isolation from racism, Islamophobia, anti-feminism, and queerphobia within Western societies, research should acknowledge the interconnections between geostrategic communication and everyday boundarymaking. This will be pivotal to developing counterstrategies to disinformation, whether Russian or homegrown.

In 2018, North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) carried out Trident Juncture, its largest military exercise since the Cold War. The event was promoted on social media featuring Lasse Matberg as “the face of NATO.” Matberg is an Instagram influencer, model, and lieutenant in the Royal Norwegian Navy, with an impressive physique and Viking looks. He frequently appears on NATO’s social media accounts and lends his own platform to share activities such as working out with the Secretary-General. Drawing on the notion of “fantasmatic logics”, we study how visual narratives of influencer marketing can contribute to making war preparations appear normal, void of political significance and even desirable. The figure of Lasse Matberg is read in conjunction with international rearmament and increasing geopolitical antagonism bound up with ideas of “traditional masculinity” and “feminization.” We argue that the muscular yet ambiguously “soft” figure of Lasse Matberg projects a symbolic remasculinization of the West, operating through a fantasmatic logic that seemingly reconciles the contradiction between a West, which is imperial and militarily muscular on the one hand and caring, democratic, and progressive on the other. By shedding light on NATO's use of influencer marketing to promote a military exercise, this article contributes novel insights into the ways in which the figure of the NATO soldier and NATO military buildup are produced as appealing, allowing an ambivalent gendered geopolitical imaginary to emerge.