The EU and LGBTI activism in the MENA – The case of Lebanon

Abstract

This paper studies the role of the European Union (EU) in supporting lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and intersex (LGBTI) communities in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) by focusing on the case of Lebanon. It seeks to fill the existing gap in the literature regarding the transversal conceptualization of EU practices in support of LGBTI communities in the MENA by focusing on what is happening on the ground. The paper builds on semi-structured interviews and engages with primary and secondary literature on practices in international relations and the EU's transversal democracy promotion to answer three main questions: To what extent do the EU agents engage with local actors to improve transversal minority rights? Who are the agents involved? And what influences the EU approach/practice in this area? The main findings reveal the EU as a subtle actor when it comes to LGBTI rights in the MENA; it tends to treat the matter within a broader human rights aspect and to support initiatives taken by locals. This is due to the sensitivity of the domestic context as well as awareness that it might have a negative effect on the LGBTI groups if the EU became more vocal.

How to Reflexively Decentre EU Foreign Policy: Dissonance and Contrapuntal Reconstruction in Migration, Religious and Neighbourhood Governance

“…Decentring approaches have been used in analyses of the EU's regional engagements, particularly in relations with proximate neighbours in the Middle East, north Africa and eastern Europe (Cebeci, 2012; Huber and Kamel, 2018; Zardo, 2020; Keukeleire et al ., 2021), as well as in Asia (He, 2016; Hoang, 2016), Africa (Staeger, 2016; Ejdus, 2018) and Latin America (Serban and Harutyunyan, 2021). The need to decentre by provincializing European modes of being, doing and engaging has also been affirmed in thematic areas of inquiry like migration (Kutz and Wolff, 2021), bordering (El Qadim et al ., 2021), gender and sexuality (Dandashly, 2021; Wolff, 2021), or the role of historical memory (Aydın‐Düzgit et al ., 2020; Pace and Roccu, 2020). Decentring, as such, is to engage not only with the classical dimensions of EU foreign policy such as politics and economics, but also the social fields which connect societies.…”