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This study tackles the question how state development cooperation can work on issues related to sexual orientation and gender identity (SOGI) in countries where these issues are criminalized and where Lesbians, Gay, Bisexual, Trans and Inter persons (LGBTI) are socially stigmatized. The study starts with an analysis of the human rights obligations relating to sexual orientation and gender identity and how they relate to development cooperation. It then addresses how working on sexual orientation and gender identity furthers the global devel–opment agenda of poverty reduction. A subsequent chapter illustrates how LGBTI activists work and the conditions they face. This includes the way human rights are understood and framed in their respective countries. The study argues that development cooperation has to take this into account in order not to generate negative consequences for LGBTI activism and activists. The study then explores how different aspects of state development cooperation – such as aid cuts, pro–gramme design, modes of aid delivery and internal staff policies – may promote or endanger work on sex–ual orientation and gender identity. Last but not least, the study points to those areas where development cooperation has still not considered or reached LGBTI groups. To close the analysis, interviews with LGBTI activists demonstrate that the Universal Periodic Review and the work of National Human Rights Institutions have potential of promoting SOGI human rights.

Some legal scholars have asserted that rigid notions of homosexual identity shape adjudicators’ approach when evaluating asylum claims based on sexual orientation. Recent ethnographic research at the French Court of Asylum, in charge of reviewing appeals on decisions from the French Office for the Protection of Refugees and Stateless Persons, shows indeed that adjudication is based on particular gender stereotypes. However, my analysis centers on an unexplored but related issue: the relationship between the problems raised by adjudicators when facing what they call “intimacy cases,” specifically regarding the administration of proof and stereotyped performances. Through ethnographic data drawn from encounters with adjudicators and asylum seekers at the French Court of Asylum; through interviews with judges, rapporteurs (reporters), interpreters, and lawyers; and by examining 60 court rulings, I argue that sexual orientation-based cases crystallize the importance of intimacy in the politics of asylum, helping to seize the new shapes of the refugee as well as the growing difficulties for judges in relying on material evidence.

Abkommen über die Rechtsstellung der Flüchtlinge vom 28. Juli 1951 (In Kraft getreten am 22. April 1954)

Protokoll über die Rechtsstellung der Flüchtlinge vom 31. Januar 1967(In Kraft getreten am 4. Oktober 1967)

This article explores the framing of conflicts over public space as they unfold in a climate of neoliberal urban transformation in contemporary Germany. Examining how the alleged concerns of a ‘queer community’ have been pitted against the alleged moral agenda of Muslim immigrants in the country, examples of conflicts over ‘queer’ public leisure spaces in Berlin will give insights into how different cultural minority positions are mobilized against each other in the context of both urban and national citizenship debates that are marked by a neoliberal re-evaluation of diversities and inequalities.

This article explores the challenges of developing queer migrant justice strategies within nation-state contexts. With a focus on the Toronto-based ‘Let Alvaro Stay’ campaign (2011) and Julio Salgado’s collaborative ‘I Am Undocuqueer’ project, I critically examine queer anti-deportation activists’ reliance on methodological nationalisms and visibility politics in making claims hearable to the state. While such tactics risk reinforcing the nation-state as a primary site of identification, thereby contributing to its naturalization as an inevitable horizon of belonging, I argue that they also open space for imagining queer(er) no borders futures.

Stories matter for refugees. Refugees make sense of their past and present experiences, claim identities, interact with each other, and participate in cultural, political, and social conversations through the sharing of their stories. When we record oral histories, we not only capture important narratives about the lived–experiences and lived–histories of refugees, we also see how the narratives themselves “represent the constantly evolving ways in which migrants make their lives through stories.”

As part of an emerging field of films documenting the obstacles faced by sexual minorities fleeing persecution and seeking political asylum, the film Getting Out documents both the persecution of sexual minorities in Uganda and the obstacles individuals face in their attempts to get political asylum in South Africa. Using the film as a springboard, we assess the larger issues of recognition, visibility, hypervisibility, and performativity in encounters between sexual minorities, their advocates, and political asylum officials. The rhetorical power of Getting Out lies in its performative staging of LGBTQI asylum seekers’ navigation of often competing cultural and legal logics on sexuality. The film calls attention to profound contradictions in the political asylum system for sexual minorities and for any others who challenge the normativity of a social group.

The article is based on extended ethnography with people who have claimed asylum in the UK on the grounds of their sexual orientation. This migrant group negotiates their sexual and gender identities across cultural constructions of gender liminality that do not match the repertoires of western sexual identifications. On the one hand I pose the question: How do religious non-heteronormative refugees situate themselves within broader discourses of progress, particularly when confronted with the legal framework? On the other hand I ask: What role do western temporal categories of progress and backwardness play when the migrant seeks to stake a claim to subject-status in the current UK social world?

Canadian media coverage of sexual orientation and gendered identity (SOGI) refugees presents a relatively uniform story of these queer newcomers. While LGBT media have identified problems in some Canadian Immigration and Refugee Board (IRB) decisions, the hegemonic narrative remains one of ‘migration to liberation nation’. In this article I argue that this hegemonic narrative is produced in relation to particular socio-cultural and juridical-legal categories which are themselves historically produced in and through the bureaucratic machinery of the state, human rights organizations, and some legal scholarship. The effect of this model narrative is to reinscribe what Ahmed (2010) calls the ‘happy migrant’, that is, someone who espouses national ideals which are couched in terms of empire, the new twist being that sexual diversity is now held aloft as justification of empire’s liberation from abjection. Based on interviews with SOGI refugee claimants in Toronto.