SUNY series, Studies in Human Rights

How LGBTI Rights Became a Pillar of American and Swedish Foreign Policy

Elise Carlson Rainer

• Publisher: SUNY Press
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781438485805
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Human Rights
• Index: Politics & International Relations

From Pariah to Priority gives a unique, insider perspective that explains the unexpected incorporation of LGBTI rights into the United States and Swedish foreign policies. From original data, case study analysis, and interviews with high-level officials within the State Department, Swedish Foreign Ministry and international institutions, former diplomat Elise Carlson Rainer provides insights from leaders responsible for shaping emerging global LGBTI policies. The research findings highlight the advocacy process of reforming US and Swedish foreign policy priorities to include LGBTI rights, shedding light on how normative values evolve in foreign affairs. The book examines Sweden as the first country to implement a feminist foreign policy and commence formal LGBTI diplomacy. Through this lens, Rainer contextualizes the diplomatic precedent of revamping foreign assistance to Uganda when lawmakers there proposed a death penalty law for homosexuality. Scrutinizing effective tactics for advocacy to influence foreign policy, From Pariah to Priority explores not only current debates in the area of gender and sexuality in foreign affairs, but also offers pragmatic policy recommendations for civil society organizations, foreign policy leaders, and human rights practitioners.

Chapter 1

Introduction

The Genesis of LGBTI Diplomacy
and Reshaping International Relations

At Stockholm Pride in Stockholm, Sweden, July 2019, a young Ugandan woman explained to the audience that her Ugandan father knew that she was a lesbian before she did. In reaction, “he came home one night and tried to light me on fire … he told me I was going to hell and tried to kill me… I fled my country that night and cannot return home.”1 Another Nigerian man at Stockholm Pride in a public forum shared how “a mob broke into my home and killed my partner before my eyes… I fled my house out the back door, and barely escaped with my life; I had to leave my country after that day.”2 Uganda and Nigeria are two of more than seventy countries globally that outlaw same-sex relations.3 The Ugandan President Yoweri Museveni decries homosexuality as “disgusting,”4 and Ugandan lawmakers proposed the death penalty for homosexual acts again in October 2019.5 In response to Uganda and other countries with official violence and discrimination against LGBTI people, many other liberal democracies began to raise LGBTI issues in diplomatic engagements.6 Some governments grant asylum to LGBTI persons persecuted in their home countries, threaten to condition foreign assistance funding, or even go so far as severing bilateral relations with a country based on their human rights record. Conditioning foreign assistance based on LGBTI rights abuses, granting asylum based on LGBTI human rights abuses, and raising LGBTI rights in formal diplomatic engagements constitute relatively new issues of concern in international affairs. Lydia Malmedie observes that only since the early 2000s have LGBTI rights issues been considered topics that should be of concern in diplomatic relations and part of European Union (EU) foreign policy.7 Historically, governments have not addressed domestic human rights practices in other nations. Thus, understood as an infringement on sovereignty, human rights concerns are a relatively new focus of foreign policy.8 While LGBTI people have been killed, tortured, and stoned to death for centuries in numerous countries throughout the world, leaders in countries such as the United States, Sweden, and other liberal democracies remained silent on domestic affairs related to LGBTI people.

When I worked within the US Department of State, Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights and Labor (DRL) from 2005 to 2016, there were constant internal battles among interagency stakeholders regarding if and when—if at all—to raise human rights abuses with foreign leaders. Raising concerns regarding foreign leaders torturing political dissidents and condemning ethnic or religious violence was taken into consideration with other foreign policy interests, namely security and economic ties to the country. LGBTI persons in Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, Jamaica, and other countries have been beheaded, subjected to corrective rape, and victims of sanctioned mob killings for decades.9 Yet these specific human rights abuses against the LGBTI community were not part of any diplomatic agenda. After a great diplomatic battle in the United Nations (UN),10 in 2010 the UN General Assembly’s Third Committee approved including the LGBTI populations as a specific marginalized group subjected to global patterns of violence.11 By including LGBTI populations in UN documentation and other countries’ foreign policy agendas, relations between countries can now become predicated on how a country treats this minority group. Conceptualizing LGBTI populations as a specific marginalized group now includes this population in the multibillion-dollar international foreign aid industry. Despite contestation of LGBTI rights, as of 2021 in contemporary foreign relations, governments will now end trade agreements and withdraw foreign assistance to punish foreign governments where societies allow for official and societal violence against LGBTI populations.

This book analyzes how governments advance human rights in diplomacy, specifically concerning LGBTI rights. It examines how and why LGBTI rights became a fundamental doctrine of human rights to be promoted abroad. Specifically, it examines Sweden and the United States as two central players in global LGBTI diplomacy. Sweden’s policy adoption of LGBTI rights into its foreign policy was first in the world in 2005. Sweden remains a significant international aid donor. The United States followed suit in 2011 and is the largest player in the sector of human rights and humanitarian aid. Domestically, Sweden exhibits high acceptance rates of LGBTI equality norms.12 On the contrary, LGBTI acceptance remains a relatively contested issue in the United States. Despite these differences, Sweden and the United States both promote LGBTI rights as part of their broader human rights foreign policy agendas. This book examines the catalysts in each country for institutionalizing the rights of LGBTI populations into their respective foreign policies. The policies of these two countries matter globally; the actions of these two governments, specific policies and programs to support global LGBTI organizations, have been replicated in the EU and UN and impact normative foreign policy around the world.

Through primary and secondary source evidence, From Pariah to Priority identifies the central factors for emerging LGBTI foreign policy agendas as nongovernmental organizations (NGO) advocacy; insider government-allied leadership; national interest; transnational activists; and sensitizing international events, namely Uganda’s law implementing the death penalty for homosexual acts in 2009. The role of NGO advocacy and social movements in shaping governments’ agendas is a focus of this study. Similarly, building coalitions with insider-allies and promoting movement goals toward equality inside the government is also central to this analysis.

As of 2021, approximately sixteen countries incorporate LGBTI rights as a formal aspect of their respective foreign policy.13 An illustration of this policy is when countries such as Brunei proposed death by stoning for homosexual acts, many leaders within this small group of nations made public statements of condemnation against Brunei officials.14 These countries also funded urgent assistance to local human rights groups in Southeast Asia. Similarly, at times governments withdraw parts of their foreign assistance in response to another nation’s official persecution of LGBTI citizens. In 2017, Egyptian security forces rounded up, harassed, beat, and arrested numerous people presumed to be LGBTI.15 In response, US Secretary of State Rex Tillerson withdrew “$95.7 million in foreign assistance and withheld a further $190 million in military assistance directly addressing the crackdown on LGBT Egyptians.”16 LGBTI rights diplomacy impacts a host of bilateral agreements, including economic relations. An example in the European context was seen when human rights advocates from countries such as Sri Lanka pressured EU countries and the United States to use the EU trade negotiation process to influence their own country to reform and decriminalize homosexuality in Sri Lankan law.17

Promoting LGBTI rights in foreign policy introduces a new set of principles and moral standards that regulate international relations according to emerging human rights norms. LGBTI rights in foreign policy represent the evolution of a principle in human rights that formerly did not impact international affairs. Relationships that were once tenable and acceptable were reevaluated according to the new standards, such as the United States’ and Sweden’s bilateral relationship with Uganda. Thus, understanding the genesis and reasons for countries to implement a policy is of critical importance to foreign relations.

Evidence in this research is derived from numerous primary sources and academic literature. It is also underpinned by my professional experience working in the US Department of State’s Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights, and Labor. For years in this role, I drafted statements from the State Department against human rights abuses across the Middle East, mainly in North Africa and Gulf countries. I worked to craft policy and programs in response to events, such as a nation beheading human rights activists, hanging LGBTI citizens, or stoning women. I conducted diplomatic meetings in Jordan and across North Africa, discussing labor rights, honor killings, torture, and larger human rights concerns. From 2011 to 2016, I served as the senior editor of numerous State Department human rights reports in the Middle East.18 I also served as a contributing editor to the International Religious Freedom reports and Tracking in Persons reports during this time.19 This practitioner experience provides the basis for detailed knowledge in this study of how governments document human rights abuses and later respond to state violence through human rights diplomacy.

LGBTI Rights in the Context of International Human Rights

Universal human rights were codified into international law in 1948 with the UN’s Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR).20 Yet how human rights—as arms of foreign policy and its implementation—impact bilateral relations, international norms, and sovereignty is an ever evolving process. Human rights scholar Alison Brysk assesses the central purpose of human rights diplomacy and asserts, “principled states build global governance; they reshape the meaning of sovereignty to implant a slowly emerging legitimacy norm—universal human rights.”21 While human rights are an important aspect of contemporary international relations, the very concept of what is considered to be a universal human right is not static.22 Foreign policy engagements include the elevation of women’s, disability, ethnic, and religious minority rights.23 LGBTI rights are the most recent set of human rights to be integrated into foreign affairs discourse. Diplomacy is necessary for the actualization of human rights.24 Diplomats and government actors raising human rights in international affairs institutionalize new norms in government relations.

This books seeks to illuminate the workings of diplomats promoting human rights in foreign countries that are often obscure to the general public. A great deal of diplomatic work is done behind closed doors in what is known as “quiet diplomacy.”25 For example, a country may be enticed to stop discrimination against a minority population through an economic and trade incentive. A group of political prisoners may be released, or widespread arrest of LGBTI advocates may cease as a result of a diplomatic negotiations that include investment for an infrastructure program, for example. Outside observers may not have any idea that seemingly unrelated actions of a government are correlated and that human rights diplomacy has taken place behind closed doors. LGBTI rights is often a politically controversial issue in many regions of the world. At times, quiet diplomacy is the preferred method to gain results while avoiding publicly naming and shaming another nation. Conducting quiet diplomacy may allow foreign government officials to ‘save face’ and subtly reform their nation’s human rights issues while circumventing political and societal opposition in their country. Inherent to the craft of quiet diplomacy is a lack of public documentation, press, or knowledge of results of human rights promotion from efforts behind the scenes. As such, there is not a great deal of press or academic scholarship analyzing quiet diplomacy because outsiders lack access to internal, often classified, workings of foreign ministries. From an insider, practitioner perspective, this book seeks to shed light on the sometimes nebulous process of conducting human rights diplomacy.

The second major gap in academic research on human rights diplomacy is the tension between the state as both a promotor and abuser of global rights. The majority of scholars often focus on governments as one of the central abusers of human rights.26 Cynthia Burack asserts how the “academic critical humanist left” has unexpectedly become deeply critical and skeptical of US government–funded LGBTI rights promotion, whereby observers may believe the left-wing political spectrum of the United States would be the base of supporters for this issue.27 On the right-wing side of the political spectrum in many countries there is open opposition to any progressive government policies on LGBTI rights. Scholars often decry the hypocrisy of governments promoting human rights outside their borders when their own countries’ human rights record is not perfect.28 However, no country has a perfect record on gender equality; therefore, promoting LGBTI rights globally will inherently reveal an element of hypocrisy the world over.

Human rights promotion from governmental foreign policy institutions receives much less attention by scholars and activists. And yet it is a pillar of diplomacy that is a multibillion-dollar industry of the international development aid sector. Millions of people’s lives globally depend on international donor aid. The aid funding is critical for fledgling LGBTI organizations in the Middle East, Africa and other regions; this aid can provide emergency funding to human rights activists in imminent danger. Foreign governments are sometimes the only source of funding and support for local LGBTI activists. External evaluators of the Swedish government’s work documented that in some places the survival of organizat...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Preface
• Chapter 1 Introduction: The Genesis of LGBTI Diplomacy and Reshaping International Relations
• Chapter 2 The Incorporation of LGBTI Rights into US Foreign Policy
• Chapter 3 Sweden’s Pioneering Role in LGBTI Diplomacy
• Chapter 4 Uganda’s “Kill the Gays” Law: A Global Sensitizing Event
• Chapter 5 Theoretical Framework of LGBTI and Human Rights Diplomacy
• Chapter 6 Conclusion: LGBTI Diplomacy and Policy Recommendations
• Appendix 1 Interviews
• Notes
• References
• Index
• Back Cover