This week we ask: Is the link between LGBTQ rights and democracy as strong as is often thought?
A special episode coinciding with this week’s International Day Against Homophobia, Biphobia and Transphobia.
It’s easy to assume that LGBTQ rights are more likely to advance in democracies than in non-democracies. Democracies are generally more open to diversity, and the countries with the strongest LGBTQ rights protection are democracies.
But new work by Dr Samer Anabtawi, Lecturer in Comparative Politics here in the UCL Department of Political Science, suggests that we shouldn’t be so sure. Through detailed research in Lebanon and Tunisia, this work finds that democracy is neither a sufficient condition for rights advancement, nor – perhaps more surprisingly – a necessary one.
Mentioned in this episode:
SUMMARY KEYWORDS
democracy, lgbtq, lebanon, lgbtq rights, activists, tunisia, laws, work, state, region, mobilisation, cases, civil society, change, strategy, legal, movement, people, discourses, great
SPEAKERS
Alan Renwick, Samer Anabtawi
Alan Renwick 00:06
Hello. This is UCL Uncovering Politics. And this week we ask: is the link between LGBTQ rights and democracy as strong as is often thought?
Hello. My name is Alan Renwick. And welcome to UCL Uncovering Politics – the podcast of the School of Public Policy and Department of Political Science at University College London.
It's easy to assume that LGBTQ rights are more likely to advance in democracies than in non-democracies. Democracies are generally more open to diversity, and the countries with the strongest LGBTQ rights protection are democracies.
But new work by one of my colleagues here in the UCL Department of Political Science suggests that we shouldn't be quite so fast. Through detailed research in Lebanon and Tunisia, this work finds that democracy is neither a sufficient condition for rights advancement, nor – perhaps more surprisingly – a necessary one.
Well that colleague is Dr Samer Anabtawi, Lecturer in Comparative Politics. And, in a special episode coinciding with this week's International Day Against Homophobia, Biphobia and Transphobia, I'm delighted that Samer joins me here now.
Samer, welcome to UCL Uncovering Politics. And before we get into your empirical research, let's just think a little bit about what's going on here. Why is it that democracy and LGBTQ rights generally are seen as being linked with each other?
Samer Anabtawi 01:41
Thank you, Alan, for having me.
That's a great question. There are theoretical and empirical reasons for us to believe that those two things go hand in hand.
From a theoretical perspective, we have to talk about what democracy actually means to people. So when we talk about democracy, political scientists sometimes think electoral democracy – systems that have free and fair elections or systems in which parties lose elections.
But most people don't think that way. Most people when they talk about democracy, they think about liberal democracy. And they specifically think from a normative standpoint, right? So they did associate democracy with democratic values and principles like equality or the rule of law. People also associate democracy with a number of institutions, so constitutions, legislatures, the presence of the freedom of expression and association, the presence of non-discrimination laws, there are laws against hate crimes, and so forth.
And so that all provides LGBTQ individuals with greater ability to mobilise, but also some kind of legal and political cover and social protection, so to speak. And so it is also fair to think that these things are often lacking – and they're severely so – in non-democratic states as well. So having these kinds of institutions and principles should lead us to believe that democracy is a better environment for the advancing of LGBTQ rights and protections.
And this is somewhat true, right? Empirically, there is evidence for this, right. We know that countries that are usually more democratic tend to also be more protective of LGBTQ rights or tend to be in places that LGBTQ people have a better chance of pushing for their own rights and protections.
But what I try to say here – and caution people – is to not think of that association necessarily as a causal relationship. And certainly not to think of democracy as a necessary nor a sufficient condition. And there are reasons for why that is that I can get into. But ultimately I think it is important to kind of focus on at least the true part of that relationship, right: that there are institutions that make LGBTQ rights more likely to be realised and there's also a civil society that is almost guaranteed, right, in a democracy, and the presence of a civil society – a robust civil society – is typically the most important vehicle for driving LGBTQ rights. And so because democracies guarantee that, people always or sometimes assume that the presence of democracy is a sufficient condition. And that's something I try to push back against.
Alan Renwick 04:23
So I'm intrigued by this because as I was kind of hinting in the introduction there, that democracy isn't a sufficient condition for LGBTQ rights protection, that I guess kind of makes sense given that we've, you know, had decades of democracies. So the old democracies clearly existed before there was any kind of LGBTQ rights protection in a serious way. So that part of it maybe makes sense and maybe is intuitive, but the idea that democracy isn't a necessary condition either, I guess, is perhaps a bit more surprising.
So do you want just to fill in the picture on the sufficient side first? And then perhaps we should spend a little longer on the necessary side of this.
Samer Anabtawi 05:05
The argument about whether democracy is sufficient or not, I think, is a slightly easier one to take apart. And in part because we all know right now that there is a rampant level of discrimination throughout a number of democracies around the world. And in a number of democracies around the world, progress for LGBTQ rights remains fairly slow. And so the examples that would come to mind, for instance, would be India or South Korea, among others.
And even in established liberal democracies that have had robust LGBTQ protections, at least in the legal sphere, we're also seeing backsliding. So when we think about places like the United States, for instance, or the UK, we're noticing – at least in the US – that there is quite a bit of backlash. There's a lot of pushback against LGBTQ rights. And so even in a democratic setting, the same institutions that are often used to advance LGBTQ rights have been hijacked by anti-democratic forces.
And similarly there's this issue of the rise of political homophobia and political transphobia. In the United States, those who are trying to push back against democracy and against democratic institutions, they've decided to make transgender people now – and LGBTQ people more broadly – the primary target of their speech, of their attempts to ban books, ban certain types of expression, even certain arguments. They don't want certain words to appear in textbooks. So we're seeing how risky things are even in established liberal democracies.
And so the LGBTQ community in the US or in any other democracy is rightfully wary of kind of taking this democracy claim as a sufficient way to protect themselves. They don't think that democracy is the end all and be all, and for the right reasons.
Now let's jump to the second part of your question: is democracy a necessary condition? I strongly argue that that is not the case.
Early on in my research, when I wanted to look at LGBTQ politics in the Arab world, a lot of the texts I was reading would say things like: because authoritarianism is still rampant throughout the Middle East and North Africa, it is unlikely that we should expect progress on LGBTQ rights or any significant degree of mobilisation for LGBTQ rights anytime soon.
And I kept encountering the same claim over and over and I realised that is not true. Based on my own engagement with social movements in the Arab region, based on my knowledge of cases like Palestine, Lebanon, Tunisia and others, I could simply say this is incorrect – that's a claim that is not true, right. And it is derived from this assumption that democracy is good for gay rights and, hence, anything that is not a democracy is bad. That's not true.
Earlier, I said that a robust civil society is the core mechanism or the vehicle that drives LGBTQ rights. There's a significant overlap between some democracies and also some autocracies in the presence of an active civil society. Whether it is to the same extent, that's not necessarily the case, right. But even a vibrant and viable civil society, even under an autocracy, can actually get us the resources and the knowledge and the know-how and build the alliances that are needed to lobby for LGBTQ rights and protections, whether that is lobbying in the domestic arena, lobbying the state for policy change, or lobbying society for a change in sort of attitudes; or whether that is lobbying international organisations and institutions to put pressure on the state to get concessions.
And so the presence of civil society is not sort of exclusive to democracies, right? There is a number of autocracies that have civil societies that have been used as vehicles for LGBTQ rights promotion, successfully so in many instances. And that is what I've documented in this paper, at least in the case of Lebanon.
Alan Renwick 09:14
So you've talked there about civil society. And I was quite struck – I mean, we'll get into the empirical material in a moment – but I was struck that in terms of the sort of theorising of these phenomena that you have at the start of the paper, you also talk about the important role of judiciaries-
Samer Anabtawi 09:29
Mm-hm.
Alan Renwick 09:29
-And you point out that states aren't necessarily monolithic, that the judiciary can be at least somewhat separate from the political parts of the state, even in authoritarian settings.
Samer Anabtawi 09:43
That is very true. And when I talk about the importance of how we define and understand democracy, it is equally important to talk about how we understand authoritarianism. So in recent decades, scholars have decided to understand authoritarianism as a residual category of all political systems that are simply non-democracies, right? And that's fine theoretically speaking.
The problem is sometimes people make this jump where they start assuming that there is this kind of monolithic experience under autocracies. There's a great degree of variation, especially in things like judicial independence as well as the degree to which the authoritarian regime itself penetrates the state and state institutions like the judiciary, the legislature and so on, right.
And because there is great variation within authoritarian systems themselves, this is where I say: hold on, let's not make generalisable claims about authoritarianism or LGBTQ mobilisation, and let's actually look at that variety and unpack the differences between authoritarian regimes. In some authoritarian regimes, there's even variation over time in how and when judiciaries can actually deviate from the interests or the explicit expressed desires of the regime on policy issues. That is obvious in many, many authoritarian contexts that I study.
And so in those places where the regime and the state are not fully fused together, those are the kinds of autocracies that are more likely to witness the rise of LGBTQ mobilisation within their civil societies.
Alan Renwick 11:18
Fantastic. So you've given us a really helpful conceptual roadmap there. Let's dive into the empirical material now.
And I guess before we get into the details, it might be helpful to give a bit of an overview here. So we're going to be talking about LGBTQ rights protection and rights activism in parts of the Middle East and North Africa. Do you want to give us a bit of a kind of background first of all? What's the state of affairs in this part of the world with regard to LGBTQ rights?
Samer Anabtawi 11:49
This is a great question, and one that inspires both optimism and pessimism at the same time.
I'll start with the pessimistic aspect of this answer. And that is, we see a lot of repression throughout the region: we see the presence of laws that criminalise LGBTQ people, whether it is criminalising sexual intercourse that goes against the order of nature. That's the language that we see in some laws, Lebanon and Tunisia for instance: they have Article 230 and Article 534 in their penal codes that criminalise sexual intercourse against the order of nature. In other countries, there is no law necessarily that criminalises homosexual acts or intercourse, but they actually do have anti-debauchery laws or public morality laws that are kind of vague in the way that they're worded, but they're used as instruments specifically to target LGBTQ people. So on the legal front, whether you have a law explicitly banning same-sex relationships or whether you have public morality laws or anti-debauchery laws, the effect is the same – is that LGBTQ people remain the target of repressive policies.
There's a great degree of variation within the region itself in terms of when and how states kind of mobilise homophobia as a tool for either boosting their own legitimacy or sometimes even presenting themselves as liberal states, right, by choosing not to repress or not repress openly. And so the degree to which we see a lot of repression is sometimes an active and strategic decision by state.
And unfortunately, because there are a lot of authoritarian regimes in the region, many of them are now facing a legitimacy crisis and resorting to creating a scapegoat out of LGBTQ people. So law and authoritarianism go hand in hand here in basically the scapegoating and the targeting of LGBTQ people, making a lot of the states hostile environments.
In a number of countries in the Middle East and North Africa, homosexuality is punishable by death, right. And so that is a very severe punishment. In other places, the punishment is typically a fine plus two to three years in prison. In some other states that somewhere in between these two kinds of ends of the spectrum.
Nonetheless, there are legal consequences, but there's also a great deal of social conservativism throughout the region. These conservative values are probably products of attitudes on gender roles, attitudes towards, you know, issues of masculinity, but also the consequences of stigma that has been created over decades. In particular, because a lot of the laws that I've mentioned earlier, these are laws that were introduced in penal codes by colonial powers, by the French and the British in the early 20th century. And even though we've seen decolonisation, right, we haven't seen the complete repeal of the institutional remnants of that colonial era, right. And so the presence of a law that criminalises a certain identity or a group of people over a period of time is going to designate that category of people as criminals and deviants, or people who are kind of transgressing against society. And so there's a lot of stigma here that we have to, kind of, the activists have to deal with when it comes to figuring out how to build alliances and to change hearts and minds in society.
So in terms of public opinions things are pretty bad: rejection of LGBTQ people stands at a rate of anywhere between 87-96% of society throughout most of the regions. So there's a lot of work that has to be done there.
Nonetheless, having said all of this, there is reason for optimism. This is a region in which we're seeing kind of the LGBTQ movement itself growing at a very, very, very fast pace. And at a rapid pace that does not make sense when you compare it with, kind of, the legal structures around it and the political structures around it. And so that inspires optimism: to see a movement that is able to remain vibrant and active and capable of building community and alliances, not just within states, but also throughout the Arab region – this is almost a miracle, right, to have a community that is able to survive in such precarious conditions. And that's a puzzle that really motivated a lot of my research.
Alan Renwick 16:30
You use the term LGBTQ throughout the paper. Obviously there are five letters there. I'm guessing there's probably quite a lot of variation across the different parts of that LGBTQ spectrum as well.
Samer Anabtawi 16:42
Yes. And that's a product of how visible one is and whether the rest of society or the majority can tell whether one belongs to the LGBTQ category or not. So much of that has to do with gender expression.
The targeting of transgender people is at a much more severe – is happening at a much more severe pace – than the targeting of gays and lesbians.
There's even greater variety in terms of the experiences of LGBTQ people in the region, right? That is... So I struggle with the term LGBTQ community. And sometimes I accidentally use it and find myself having to correct myself. And the reason for that is LGBTQ is not one singular category or even a community in the Middle Eastern and Northern African context. Even within the same state, things that matter here are access to money, access to power, other types of social and economic privileges that people enjoy. And so when you when you look at Lebanon, for instance, to drive this point home, if you're talking about a Syrian transgender refugee woman and you're talking about a gay male who's from an upper middle class living in West Beirut, even though they probably live 10 minutes away from each other, they have radically different realities: they deal with radically different problems and challenges in their daily life, one has different protections than the other does. And so we can't really think of these two individuals as members of one community in any sense of the word.
And so if we have to look at how LGBTQ people mobilise, we cannot ignore questions of intersectionality, questions of wealth, privilege, status and income as well. And so that variation, and the diversity within LGBTQ people in the region, matters a lot.
And it's also important to think that not everybody in the region also identifies with these identity categories. A lot of people would not sort of ascribe to a label, specifically, given that some of these labels did not originate in this context, right, in the context of, at least, in North Africa. So many in the region have come to adopt them and think of them as mainstream concepts. They have entered the mainstream. However, there are other people who don't necessarily identify with those categories, even though they still remain subject to a lot of the targeting on the same basis, either of their sexual orientation or their gender expression.
Alan Renwick 19:12
Very interesting, very interesting.
Let's get into your research then. So you focus on Lebanon and Tunisia, and you explore the evidence from there relating to the broader theoretical questions that we've been talking about.
And before we get into the findings, it's always nice in this podcast to have a little bit of discussion of methodology. So what kind of research have you done on these two cases?
Samer Anabtawi 19:36
I've done a number of interviews with activists throughout both of these countries. Some of the research that I was doing happened during the COVID period, so I had to do some of these interviews remotely. But I've also travelled to places like Palestine and Tunisia. And I spent a significant amount of time in Tunisia trying to work with activists, understand their environment.
So a lot of that was ethnographic work – I engaged sort of participant observation. I was able to sit in meetings with LGBTQ activists, hear their conversations day to day, their worries, their concerns, and also just, most importantly, try to understand the world from their own perspective.
And that was a crucial piece for me because as a political scientist living here in London – or when I was living in the United States – my understanding of Tunisia, for instance, is very different than the understanding of activists themselves. And how they understand the world is the first place for us to go to if we want to understand how and when they act, right.
And so I was trying to understand the determinants of mobilisation strategies and framing and discursive strategies that they adopt, and why we see such variation within the region. The only way I could answer that is by inserting myself in the field and understanding how do these activists see the world around them and how do they make sense of it.
Alan Renwick 20:57
So there's a huge amount of really rich material in the paper which, alas, we're not going to have time to get into here. But do you want to sum up what you find through this research? What are the key insights that you get from these two cases?
Samer Anabtawi 21:10
A number of findings come from this from this work, but also my broader research on the region.
And then the first one is in terms of strategy, right. So when I was looking at countries like Tunisia and Lebanon, and also kind of looking at the region more broadly, I was able to come up with a number of takeaways about strategies and approaches.
When you read the literature on LGBTQ rights in political science – or in social sciences more broadly, looking at the West in particular – there's a lot of emphasis on visibility politics, on visibility itself: that being visible, coming out, importance of kind of displaying rainbow flags and queer symbols everywhere is crucial to understanding where LGBTQ movements are today.
Turning to the Arab region, I struggled to understand how visibility actually works. On the one hand, activists seem to be eager to be visible in some instances. And in others, they were extremely private, extremely guarded in who they present their work to, where do they appear, and so forth.
And so what I was able to kind of learn from these two experiences is that strategic visibility is what these activists are after. And that's something different than what we see in the West. They want to be visible to specific actors that they're trying to build alliances with. And they want to present themselves not through this lens of identity politics as kind of like one identity group, LGBTQ+; they're actually trying to get to tap into similarities with other groups that are marginalised or excluded or oppressed in their societies.
So in Lebanon, for instance, there was a lot of work done to advance the kind of intersectional activism, and similarly in Tunisia. The idea here is: if you want genuine engagement with the locals to change hearts and minds, you don't want to necessarily just throw symbols or language that is not necessarily legible to the public; you want to make them see your struggle in their own ways.
And so there was a lot of work done, for instance, in 2019 during the protests in Lebanon by LGBTQ activists to be visible at the frontlines of the protests – to have tents where they provide water and support the other protesters. And so they were trying to use their visibility there strategically to show that they're also targets of the same repressive system, but also that they stand at the forefront of the movement.
In Palestine, similarly, we see that LGBTQ activists are picking up a very specific language, using the words of national liberation kind of at the core of what they do. And they equate national liberation and queer liberation. And they avoid language about human rights and so forth because they want the rest of the Palestinian society to see them as credible agents in the story of liberation, and to start thinking of queer liberation not as a foreign concept but a concept that is embedded to their very resistance movement against foreign occupation.
So you move over to Tunisia, you see the different set of discourses.
And so the discourses are varying, but there's a great emphasis on intersectionality and less emphasis on just visibility for the sake of visibility. And that's one of the core findings that I observe in this paper.
The second finding I observe is that in less democratic settings activists don't have the illusion that things are easily changed. And so rather than going for wholesale legal change and kind of repeal campaigns, they've pivoted a little bit towards legal mobilisation – trying to deploy insider tactics. So rather than confronting the state openly or on the street necessarily, they're trying to use legal mechanisms to extract some kinds of concessions, but perhaps not even concessions, but maybe reinterpretations of repressive laws.
And they have done so successfully in the case of Lebanon. But in the case of Tunisia, we saw the opposite: they avoided going through the courts route. And instead, they thought of democracy... So their own perception of the structure that they're embedded in made them believe that the state is going to be susceptible to pressures from the outside, that having to go through this course that had been established in the previous era might not be the most fruitful or fast route. However, if you get to jump on the bandwagon of change that has started with the Arab Spring and the new liberal constitution, perhaps you could get much, much further.
And so the differences in strategies between these two countries had to do with activists' expectations of what might work and what might not. So there's a lot of trial and error here.
But in the case of Lebanon, they started with the attempt to kind of repeal Article 534. They realised it's not likely to change policy; the parliament's not going to be on board with it; the public is not on board with it. So there's really no way to kind of use the legislative channel. And instead, they thought: okay, maybe we can make incremental progress by making sure that the law that exists on paper, that we can't repeal, at least becomes a law that doesn't have teeth, that cannot bite, that cannot cause harm. And so how can we get one precedent after the other. And so they've developed model cases, they've developed all sorts of ways to kind of defend LGBTQ people before courts.
Whereas in Tunisia, the approach was: let's not worry about courts right now; we're going to build our community, but also document as many violations as possible from the state, name and shame the abuses that they experience, and then get international organisations and international mechanisms to force the state to basically change course. There was some progress made to that end – quite a bit of progress. However, again, Tunisia ended up backsliding into authoritarianism over the last couple of years. And so really whether that strategy has worked is coming into question. And now there is a tendency to take less confrontational, active tactics and perhaps more guarded ones, more subtle ways of pushing against state repression that is not necessarily calling out the state for its abuses.
Alan Renwick 26:46
So if I can try to sort of sum that up: we've got two countries here, Tunisia and Lebanon; for at least a lot of the period that you're looking at Tunisia is the more democratic of the two, though it has slid back from democracy; but actually greater progress with LGBTQ rights has been made during this period in Lebanon. And you're suggesting that's partly because of differences in tactics and self-understandings in the LGBTQ rights movements. And it's also because the Lebanese judiciary was perhaps more willing than we might have expected from the outside to push forward on LGBTQ rights issues.
Is that a kind of fair summary of the situation?
Samer Anabtawi 28:29
That is, yes. in the period that I'm studying, right – so I was looking at the period of 2011 onward, the research on the paper ended before [inaudible] ended up taking more authoritarian measures to stall the democratisation process in Tunisia.
But what I will say here is that it's not that the Lebanese judiciary itself is more amenable or more open, right. It's not just about the structure itself. The judiciary was not open, was not friendly to LGBTQ people. The court system was very hostile to LGBTQ people in the past and, in many respects, it continues to be.
However, the same judges that may have ruled negatively in the past on LGBTQ issues are now changing the way they rule or interpret the law. And a lot of that is a product of the activism, in the mobilisation, and the work that LGBTQ activists in Lebanon have done since the early 2000s.
There's the importance of time as well. Lebanon is probably the one of the very few cases in the Arab world that had kind of some visible degree of LGBTQ organisation by the early 2000s. Lebanon – and even Palestine, to some extent – because there was also a degree of a vibrant civil society in Lebanon, so it's not the kind of authoritarian context that is totalitarian by any by any measure, right. So even the categorisation of Lebanon is a democracy or not – whether it's an electoral democracy or an autocracy – that continues to be debated.
But what's more important here to think about is what activists themselves did to the courts, right; what they were able to do to change judges' minds and to change how judges would rule on cases where somebody accused of sodomy is appearing before a judge. So it's not just the structure itself being more amenable, it's the activists decided to pry that legal structure open one step at a time, whereas in Tunisia, they have really not had the resources to do so, and when they had resources, they invested them in a different strategy.
Alan Renwick 30:38
Can we generalise from these findings? Is that something that we should even be trying to do in this kind of work?
Samer Anabtawi 30:44
In some respects we can generalise. We can generalise in terms of how do people behave or act when they want to push back against the state under authoritarianism, right. So there is the desire to avoid... Given the precarious conditions of nascent LGBTQ movements, it is very common... So anywhere I look around the LGBTQ movement realm, right, in any authoritarian context, there's the desire to avoid overt confrontation with the regime or with the state, right, because given the precarious nature. So that's something that we can agree on in a generalisable sense
What we cannot generalise from is kind of imputing the strategy of the movement from the structure that it is embedded in, meaning we can't just look at the legal structure or the political opportunity structure or how things are in a particular context and say: 'okay, given these conditions, activists have chosen to pursue strategy x; hence, when we see similar conditions, we can also make similar conclusions'. That would be really wrong, right, not only because we don't have a sufficient number of cases to study yet, but more importantly, because of the importance of the perceptions, right?
Legal and political opportunities or realities are not static, they're dynamic. And they're also perceived differently by different people. And so the same objective reality that we're looking at might look differently to different people.
And so just because the legal opportunity structure looked bleak in Lebanon, we can't assume that that was a reason for the activists to then pursue other channels like naming and shaming or, you know, a boomerang approach that leverages foreign pressure. They didn't do that. They actually perceived that they may have an opportunity, even though, objectively speaking, none really presented themselves. Before they have just decided to take the risk and pursue trial and error. They've looked at cases in the West, they've looked at cases in other parts of the world and thought: we might try this as well – the previous strategy didn't work. And they succeeded.
And so in other authoritarian contexts, you might see the same legal and political structure that you saw in Lebanon. But maybe activists in that setting may not perceive an opportunity the way the Lebanese ones did. So be cautious here to kind of generalise about how and when activists behave in the way that they do.
Alan Renwick 33:16
So a final very quick question I'm afraid. We've been talking a lot about one fascinating paper. Where are you going next in your research?
Samer Anabtawi 33:25
So I'm currently working on a book on LGBTQ activism in the Middle East and North Africa. The specific focus of what I'm working on right now is understanding homophobic and queer phobic discourses, where they originate in the region, who's behind them, the different actors behind them; what are the instruments used for political gain by political actors, whether these are state actors or even counter movements; and when is queer phobia and homophobia just a manifestation of whatever cultural attitudinal stock that you might encounter in any country. And so I'm trying to parse that out.
I'm trying to understand also the transnational nature of manufacturing homophobia and transphobia because a lot of what we're seeing in the Arab world is a new discourse, right: in the Middle East and North Africa, discussions about sexuality and sexual orientation, these are new discussions relatively speaking. This is a society that thought about sexuality as a taboo for the longest time. And now the cat's out of the bag, there's a lot of conversation about this.
And there are political actors invested in steering the discourse in a particular direction. I'm looking at Aljazeera for instance, I'm looking at Russia today in Arabic, and how they frame – and how they're like almost obsessing over – any story that deals with LGBTQ issues, whether that is in Russia, whether that is in the Arab world, whether that's in Qatar. So there's quite a bit of emphasis happening from the outside, also sharing content in Arabic. And so I'm trying to understand the role of state, the role of external actors, and the role of also transnational forces in shaping homophobia and queer phobia, because what is experienced locally is not always manufactured locally. And so that's kind of the direction that my research is taking at the moment.
Alan Renwick 35:15
Wow. Well you must tell us when that's coming out because we'll definitely want to have you back on the podcast in order to hear about that.
Thank you so much, Samer. This has been a really, really great conversation. I've learnt a great deal from it.
We've been looking at Samer Anabtawi's article Snatching Legal Victory: LGBTQ Rights Activism and Contestation in the Arab World, published last year in the Arab Law Quarterly. As ever, you will find full details in the show notes for this episode.
Next week, we'll be casting an eye back over the Brexit referendum of almost seven years ago and considering the role of referendums in Britain's constitutional system.
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I'm Alan Renwick. This episode was produced by Alice Hart and Eleanor Kingwell-Banham. Our theme music is written and performed by John Mann.
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