International LGBTQ+ politics today: moving beyond ‘crises’?

While the discipline of IR has expanded its inquiry into LGBTQ+ politics, it is still missing an analysis of LGBTQ+ issues in the globalized ‘risk society’ in which crises are not exceptional but increasingly normalized and performatively manipulated. The various risks, threats and crises for LGBTQ+ people are embedded in a globally networked, accelerated interdependence characterized by neoliberal modernity, which produces differential challenges for LGBTQ+ rights promotion in the Global South and the Global North. This introduction to the special issue fills this knowledge gap by offering a novel conceptualization of the political risks and threats as well as the activist and governance responses to real and imagined crises in diverse domestic, regional and transnational settings. The introduction sets the stage for various contributions that draw on differing IR conceptualizations of crisis to investigate how the apparent (new) ‘normal’ of political, economic, environmental, health and other crises over past years have impacted LGBTQ+ politics. We show how LGBTQ+ advocacy politics responded to such challenges, highlighting how LGBTQ+ activists have become skillful norm entrepreneurs in domestic settings and mediators in rights promotion efforts between the Global North and South.