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Winner, 2025 ISA LGBTQA Caucus Book Prize
Winner, 2025 Sage/CQ Press Award, given by the American Political Science Association
Winner, 2025 Donald Haider-Markel Best Book Award, given by the APSA Sexuality and Politics Section
Winner, 2025 Best Book Award, given by the APSA Human Rights Section
Silver Medal, 2025 Independent Publisher Book Awards: LGBTQ+ Non-Fiction
An in-depth look at the global movement to curtail LGBTI rights—and how the LGBTI movement responds to it
In the past three decades, remarkable progress has been made in numerous countries for the rights of individuals marginalized due to their sexual orientation and gender identity. The advancements in LGBTI rights can largely be attributed to the tireless efforts of the transnational LGBTI-rights movement, forward-thinking governments in pioneering nations, and the evolving human rights frameworks of international organizations. However, this journey towards equality has been met with formidable opposition. An increasingly interconnected and globally networked resistance, backed by religious-nationalist elements and conservative governments, has emerged to challenge LGBTI and women's rights, even seeking to reinterpret and co-opt international human rights law.
In The Global Fight Against LGBTI Rights, authors Phillip M. Ayoub and Kristina Stoeckl investigate this complex landscape, drawing from over a decade of in-depth fieldwork and over 240 interviews with LGBTI activists, anti-LGBTI proponents, and various state and international organization actors. The authors explore the mechanisms and strategies employed by the conservative transnational movement, seeking to understand its composition and the construction of its agenda.
With a wealth of empirical evidence and insightful analysis, this book is a valuable resource for scholars, policymakers, activists, and anyone interested in understanding the ongoing global battle for LGBTI rights.
"This important book stands as one of the finest contributions to the ever-growing research on neoconservative anti-gender opposition to equality politics. Based on extensive empirical work, Phillip M. Ayoub and Kristina Stoeckl guide us through an eye-opening exploration of the rapidly expanding and increasingly effective transnational moral conservative movements. It is a must-read for anyone seeking to grasp the complex dynamics of contemporary resistance to what seemed like an unstoppable march towards full equality."
"This important book draws upon a decade of fieldwork to offer a sober assessment of the impact that transnational movements for and against LGBTQI rights have had in making gender, sexuality, and gender identity central to world politics. The authors provide compelling evidence that the movement’s targets and campaigns–whether over reproductive rights, women’s roles, sexual orientation, same-sex marriage, or drag performances–are almost always intertwined with panic around the destabilization of masculinity and femininity and challenges to patriarchy."
"The Global Fight Against LGBTI Rights contains a great many valuable firsthand observations of competing political and religious groups, and of the power of conservatives in both the U.S. and Europe to incite hostility towards our communities... As authoritarianism and intolerance seem to be on the rise globally, its insights may be of value to LGBT activists everywhere."
"The Global Fight Against LGBTI Rights delivers a compelling and comprehensive analysis of the global contestation surrounding LGBTI rights, illuminating the intricate interplay between advocacy networks and their conservative opponents."
Phillip M. Ayoub is Professor of International Relations in the Department of Political Science at University College London. He is the award-winning author of When States Come Out: Europe’s Sexual Minorities and the Politics of Visibility and co-editor of LGBT Activism and the Making of Europe: A Rainbow Europe?
Kristina Stoeckl (Author)
Kristina Stoeckl is Professor of Sociology in the Department of Political Science at LUISS, Rome. She is the author of several books, including The Russian Orthodox Church and Human Rights, and The Moralist International: Russia in the Global Culture Wars, co-authored with Dmitry Uzlaner.