Frictional encounters in postwar human rights: an analysis of LGBTQI movement activism in Lebanon

ABSTRACT

The advancement of LGBTQI rights is now a significant component of many international aid programmes. The successful diffusion of LGBTQI rights is supposed to rest on a successful interaction between international agencies that foster global rights and social movement actors that embed these processes at the local level. Yet, these encounters between global human rights ideas and local practices may not always generate positive dynamics. Drawing on the concept of ‘friction’ – the unstable qualities of interaction between global and local forces – this paper explores the relationship between international actors promoting LGBTQI rights and local social movement activists in post-conflict societies. I argue that the notion of global rights is particularly problematic in the context of post-conflict societies where rights are allocated on the basis of sectarian identity. To empirically illustrate these issues, I look at LGBTQI social movement activism in the divided society of Lebanon. In particular, I examine the emergence and development of Helem – the first recognised LGBTQI rights group in the Middle East and North Africa – which quickly became the poster child for international development and aid agencies in the Global North.

KEYWORDS:

• Human rights
• LGBTQ
• post-conflict

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes on contributor

Dr John Nagle is a Reader in the Department of Sociology at the University of Aberdeen. He conducts research on civil war, peace processes, and social movements.

Notes

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2 Office of the High Commission for Human Rights (OHCHR), ‘Ending Violence and Discrimination Against Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, transgender and Intersex People’. United Nations: Office of the High Commission for Human Rights, 2015, http://www.ohchr.org/Documents/Issues/Discrimination/Joint_LGBTI_Statement_ENG.PDF (accessed May 2017).

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5 Sally Merry, Human Rights and Gender Violence: Translating International Law into Local Justice (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2006).

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7 Annika Björkdahl and Kristine Höglund, ‘Precarious Peacebuilding: Friction in Global–local Encounters’, Peacebuilding 1, no. 3 (2013): 292.

8 Merry, Human Rights and Gender Violence.

9 Tsing, Friction, 4.

10 Björkdahl and Höglund, ‘Precarious Peacebuilding’, 289.

11 John Nagle and Mary-Alice Clancy, ‘Constructing a Shared Public Identity in Ethnonationally Divided Societies: Comparing Consociational and Transformationist Perspectives’, Nations and Nationalism 18, no. 1 (2012): 78–97.

12 Bassel Salloukh, The Politics of Sectarianism in Postwar Lebanon (London: Pluto, 2015).

13 John Nagle, ‘Crafting Radical Opposition or Reproducing Homonormativity? Consociationalism and LGBT Rights Activism in Lebanon’, Journal of Human Rights 17, no. (2018): 75–88.

14 John Nagle, Social Movements in Violently Divided Societies: Constructing Conflict and Peacebuilding (Abingdon: Routledge, 2016).

15 Graeme Reid, ‘The Double Threat for Gay Men in Syria’, The Washington Post, 2014, https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/the-double-threat-for-gay-men-in-syria/2014/04/25/30117ee2-ca3a-11e3-a75e-463587891b57_story.html?utm_term=.b574f88071c7 (accessed June 2017).

16 Virginia M. Bouvier, Gender and the Role of Women in Colombia's Peace Process (New York: UN Women, 2016).

17 Katherine Fobear, ‘Queering Truth Commissions’, Journal of Human Rights Practices 6, no. 1 (2014): 51–68. Bernadette Hayes and John Nagle, ‘Ethnonationalism and Attitudes Towards Gay Rights in Northern Ireland’, Nations and Nationalism 22, no. 1 (2016): 20–41.

18 Elizabeth Picard, Lebanon: A Shattered Country (New York: Holmes and Meir, 2002).

19 International Center for Transitional Justice, ‘Failing to Deal with the Past: What Cost to Lebanon?’ 2014, https://www.ictj.org/sites/default/files/ICTJ-Lebanon-Impunity-Report-2014.pdf (accessed May 2018), 1.

20 Fawwaz Traboulsi, A History of Modern Lebanon (London: Pluto, 2007), 38.

21 John Nagle, ‘Between Entrenchment, Reform and Transformation: Ethnicity and Lebanon’s Consociational Democracy’, Democratization 23, no. 7 (2016): 1144–61.

22 Bassel Salloukh, ‘The Limits of Electoral Engineering in Divided Societies: Elections in Postwar Lebanon’, Canadian Journal of Political Science 39, no. 3 (2006): 637–8.

23 Melani Cammett, Compassionate Communalism: Welfare and Sectarianism in Lebanon (New York: Cornell University Press, 2014), 64.

24 John Nagle, ‘Beyond Ethnic Entrenchment or Amelioration: An Analysis of Non-sectarian Social Movements and Lebanon’s Consociationalism’, Ethnic and Racial Studies 41, no. 7 (2018): 1370–89.

25 Hannes Baumann, ‘Social Protest and the Political Economy of Sectarianism in Lebanon’, Global Discourse 6, no. 4 (2016): 3.

26 Bassel Salloukh, ‘The Architecture of Sectarianization in Lebanon’, in Sectarianization: Mapping the New Politics of the Middle East, ed. N. Hashemi and D. Postel (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017), 225.

27 John Nagle and Tamirace Fakhoury, ‘Between Co-option and Radical Opposition: A Comparative Analysis of the Consequences of Liberal and Corporate Power-sharing on Gender and LGBT Movements in Northern Ireland and Lebanon’, Nationalism and Ethnic Politics 18, no. 1 (2018): 82–99.

28 Nadine Naber and Zeina Zataari, ‘Reframing the War on Terror: Feminist and Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, and Queer (LGBTQ) Activism in the Context of the 2006 Israeli Invasion of Lebanon’, Cultural Dynamics 26, no. 1 (2014): 91–111.

29 Nagle and Fakhoury, ‘Between Co-option and Radical Opposition’.

30 ‘Helem’ is the Arabic word for ‘dream’.

31 Helem, ‘A Case Study of the First Legal, Above-ground LGBT Organization in the MENA Region’, https://www.moph.gov.lb/userfiles/files/Prevention/NationalAIDSControlProgram/Helem.pdf (accessed June 2018), 4.

32 Interview, June 2015.

33 Makarem Ghassan, ‘The story of Helem’, Journal of Middle East Women's Studies 7, no. 3 (2011): 100.

34 Gender and Sexuality Resource Center, Lebanese Attitudes Towards Sexualities and Gender Identities (Beirut: Arab Foundation for Freedoms and Equality, 2015), 7.

35 Aidan McGarry and James Jasper, The Identity Dilemma: Social Movements and Collective Identity (Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press, 2015).

36 Susan Hekman, ‘Beyond Identity: Feminism, Identity and Identity Politics’, Feminist Theory 1, no. 3 (2000): 289–308.

37 Interview, July 2014.

38 Sofian Merabet, Queer Beirut (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2014), 113.

39 Interview, July 2014.

40 Interview, July 2014.

41 Peter M. Nardi, ‘The Globalization of the Gay and Lesbian Socio-political Movement’, Sociological Perspectives 41, no. 3 (1998): 571.

42 Dennis Altman, Global Sex (Chicago, IL: Chicago University Press, 1994), 86–7.

43 John Nagle, ‘Sites of Social Centrality and Segregation: Lefebvre in Belfast, a “Divided City”’, Antipode 41, no. 2 (2009): 326–47.

44 Phillip M. Ayoub, ‘Contested Norms in New-adopter States: International Determinants of LGBT Rights Legislation’, European Journal of International Relations 21, no. 2 (2015): 293–322.

45 Interview, October 2017.

46 Interview, June 2015.

47 Interview, June 2015.

48 Interview, October 2017.

49 Interview, October 2017.

50 Joseph Massad, ‘The West and the Orientalism of Sexuality’, 2009, http://www.resetdoc.org/story/1530/translate/English (accessed June 2018).

51 Interview, October 2017.

52 Interview, October 2017.

53 Interview, June 2015.

54 Interview, June 2015.

55 Meem, Arab Queer Women and Transgenders Confronting Diverse Religious Fundamentalisms: The Case of Meem in Lebanon (Meem: Beirut, 2010), 17.

56 Interview, June 2015.

57 Interview, June 2015.

58 Interview, June 2015.

59 Interview, June 2015.

60 Meem, Arab Queer Women, 17.

61 Interview, October 2017.

62 Interview July 2014.

63 Interview, July 2014.

64 Interview, June 2015.

65 Interview, October 2017.

66 Interview, July 2014.

67 Interview, July 2014.

68 Interview, June 2015.

69 Interview, October 2017.

70 Interview, October 2017.

71 Nadine Naber and Zeina Zataari, ‘Reframing the War on Terror: Feminist and Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, and Queer (LGBTQ) Activism in the Context of the 2006 Israeli Invasion of Lebanon’, Cultural Dynamics 26, no. 1 (2014): 91–111.

72 Ghassan Makarem, ‘The LGBT Struggle in Lebanon’, Socialistworker, 2011, http://socialistworker.org/2011/02/02/lgbt-struggle-in-lebanon (accessed March 2015).

73 Meem, Arab Queer Women, 17.

74 Makarem, ‘The Story of Helem’, 100–101.

75 Naber and Zataari, ‘Reframing the War on Terror, 103.

76 Interview, October 2017.

77 Interview, October 2017.

78 Ghassan, ‘The story of Helem’, 105.

79 Sarah Hamdan, ‘Becoming-Queer-Arab-activist: The case of Meem’, Kohl: A Journal for Body and Gender Research 1, no. 2 (2015): 72.

80 Meem, Arab Queer Women, 29.

81 Seidman, ‘The Politics of Cosmopolitan Beirut’, 22.

82 Hamdan, ‘Becoming-Queer-Arab-activist’.

83 Meem, Arab Queer Women, 9.

84 Ibid.

85 Naber and Zataari, ‘Reframing the War on Terror’, 101.

86 Tsing, Friction, 1.

87 Merry, Human Rights and Gender Violence, 1.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by Leverhulme Trust [2017-616].