Contribution short abstract:

This paper reflects on the lessons learned and challenges provided by queer women living in and negotiating fragile contexts to faith actors engaged in peace and security programming.

Contribution long abstract:

Institution building works well when there is a process of institution dismantling, and if the agendas imposed on such a process are not from an external source, but are responsive, flexible and adaptable to the specific context. Working from this premise, and engaging with the Colombian context, where women’s and LGBTQ rights were rejected in the Peace Agreement process, this paper examines the ‘rule taking’ role that actors made to be subordinate to the institution play in challenging hegemonies of raced and gendered power. The paper presents findings from a British Academy funded project that used a collaborative, dialogic workshopping method that brought together LGBTQ activists , local academics and researchers to discuss the National Action Plan process in Colombia. Looking at this intersection of struggle and creativity, this paper reflects on the reckonings suggested by activists and local researchers to faith actors engaging in peace and security programming. What do faith actors need to do, what spaces must be provided in order to expand and strengthen queer engagement in peace and security?

Contribution short abstract:

My contribution to the workshop would be a reflection on Christian Aid's work around LGBTQ+ as part of the organisation's UN Peacebuilding Fund work, the process around it, and how the approach has carried on from there in the organisation's work.

Contribution long abstract:

My contribution to the workshop would be a reflection on Christian Aid's work around LGBTQ+ as part of the organisation's UN Peacebuilding Fund work, the process around it, and how the approach has carried on from there in the organisation's work.

Contribution short abstract:

Uganda's HIV development aid is deeply entangled with notions of morality and faith, exhibited by Uganda’s anti-homosexuality movement and abstinence-only campaigns. This paper will analyze the role of faith in the work of "key population" HIV activists.

Contribution long abstract:

Using disease to gain a seat at the table of state agencies that previously ignored their struggles, a national network of community-based organizations serving “key populations” engages in high-level technical meetings with the Ugandan Ministry of Health, Uganda AIDS Commission, and officials of development aid agencies where they advocate for access to therapies, but also accountability of funding and investment in the “full financing” of HIV. Drawing on long term ethnographic fieldwork from Kampala, Uganda (2015-2022) with “key population” HIV activists and workers of NGOs and state aid agencies, this paper traces the way HIV exceptionalism, in its second decade, has transformed social relations in Uganda’s social movements for liberation. HIV exceptionalism, in which HIV is positioned as an exceptional disease requiring a unique health and socio-legal response, has garnered funding that has saved millions of lives and sustained grassroots community-based organizations working to end transmission of HIV, and in the process, transformed communities, their politics, and their social relations. The ethnography highlights the weeks before, during, and after a “Community Led Monitoring” workshop (2022) where for the first time criminalized “key population” HIV activists assembled and presented publicly their accounting on where multi-million-dollar HIV funds targeting “key populations” in the country were invested. This paper will focus on the role that faith played in these discussions with government leaders and what this reveals about the way HIV development aid is transforming Ugandan gender and sexuality liberation movements more broadly.

Contribution short abstract:

In this paper, we suggest that we need to think beyond the postcolonial critiques of international LGBTIQ rights, using the queer movement in Bangladesh as our example.

Contribution long abstract:

In this paper, we suggest that we need to think beyond the postcolonial critiques of international LGBTIQ rights, using the queer movement in Bangladesh as our example. In this case, the praxis of anti-oppression requires the development of solidarities with heteronormative Muslim and nationalist communities, who overwhelmingly deny local queer traditions. On the other side, the queer movement relies upon solidarities with non-Muslim, non-national LGBTIQ politics, which are overwhelmingly framed and supported by western governments, both in country and internationally. Thus, while the postcolonial critique of LGBTIQ rights promotion remains accurate – in that it prioritizes western versions of SOGIE and politics in a homocolonialist dynamic – we must also attend to the other dimension of homocolonialism. Non-western governments and populations share in the logic of homocolonialism by ceding LGBTIQ to western civilization and thus denying the existence of their own cultural sexual diversities in order to justify resisting LGBTIQ rights as a demonstration of their postcolonial cultural autonomy. Constructing a politics that can navigate these two dimensions of homocolonialism requires something more than a postcolonial agenda focused on the west and its embedded hierarchies of racialization and Islamophobia. . We provide a brief sketch of what dimensions a decolonial strategy for capacity building looks like in the case of Bangladesh, and what it implies for our western-centric frameworks of postcolonial analysis.

Key words: Bangladesh; decolonial; homocolonialism; postcolonial; queer.