In 2010, a discipline-wide survey found that more than 20% of international relations (IR) scholars believed that LGBT topics were not appropriate for study within their subfield (Novkov and Barclay Reference Novkov and Barclay2010). In When States Come Out, which examines the mechanisms of diffusion of LGBT rights norms across Europe, Phillip M. Ayoub demonstrates that attention to LGBT rights in an IR framework is not only appropriate, but that it can yield valuable insight into the transnational diffusion of human rights. At once a work on IR; comparative politics; social movements; human rights; and gender, sexuality, and politics, When States Come Out is a rich empirical account of “how the politics of visibility impacts relations among states and the political power of marginalized people within them” (4). Ayoub seeks to answer a long-standing question: how do international human rights norms spread, and why do societies and states adopt human rights norms in some contexts but not others? The book focuses this question on the European Union (EU), which has recently seen important LGBT rights advances in some member states, but not in others. Conventional theories fail to account for the differences in rights diffusion across Europe, as more religious and less democratic states, in some contexts, have embraced LGBT rights.
Ayoub seeks to redress this failure through a multimethod approach that encompasses large-n statistical models to test correlations between predictors of diffusion within EU member states, participant observation, archival research, and semistructured interviews conducted with nearly 90 politicians and LGBT rights advocates and opponents. These then are the basis—and indeed the experiences of LGBT rights advocates themselves are a sort of driver—for the three-part theory that Ayoub develops to explain how human rights norms are transmitted through a “politics of visibility,” understood as “the relative ability of publics and governments to see and interact with the ideas and images that define standards of appropriate behavior” (11). First, the more open a state is to international organizations and information flows, the more social and political channels create a context that enables visibility, which in turn increases the likelihood that a state will adopt LGBT rights. Second, the more embedded domestic actors (i.e., LGBT advocates and supportive politicians) are in transnational advocacy networks, the more likely a state is to embrace LGBT rights. Transnational actors mediate between domestic and international norms, providing a framework for articulating LGBT rights in domestic contexts and the resources necessary to push back against hostile domestic forces. Third, religious nationalism moderates whether international LGBT rights norms resonate in domestic settings. A politicized nationalism that is linked to religious-based homophobia can spur mobilization against LGBT rights in domestic states, making the adoption of LGBT rights norms difficult. However, this countermobilization can activate and galvanize LGBT movement actors at the grassroots and thus enhance the visibility and salience of LGBT rights.
Through an analysis of an impressive data collection, Ayoub develops an understanding of how the interplay between international, domestic, and transnational LGBT rights movement actors organize to advance mainstream movement issues. Chapter 2 describes the intricacies of Ayoub's theory of the politics of visibility, including how what Ayoub calls transnational, political, social, and movement channels of visibility lead to compliance with LGBT rights norms across the EU. Chapter 3 delineates how norm entrepreneurs (i.e., advocates and organizations that move across borders to advance international human rights norms) mobilize to spread LGBT rights both through the adoption of international laws and infrastructure at the domestic level and through the free movement of resources and actors across transnational and domestic advocacy networks. Chapters 4 and 5 present Ayoub's cross-national empirical findings, which explain why there are differences in the diffusion of EU legislation and attitudinal shifts across the EU through causal models.
Ayoub's study is especially notable for its inclusion of domestic and international actors involved in LGBT rights countermobilization in Chapter 6. It is in this chapter that Ayoub makes the most use of his rich interview data, which is sometimes overshadowed in the previous chapters. Many social movement scholars argue that movement building is codependent on opponent advocacy, but few studies of rights movements successfully delineate how proponents and opponents of rights norms operate in an interconnected manner. Ayoub enhances this argument by explaining through comparative analysis of Poland and Slovenia the role that religious nationalism plays in mobilizing opponents against the adoption of international human rights norms. Slovenia has passed a variety of LGBT-friendly laws in recent history, while Poland has been reticent and hostile towards LGBT rights norms. Ayoub explains that the role that religion plays in the construction of national identity partially explains the difference in LGBT rights diffusion between each state. In Poland, where the Catholic Church is constructed as a source of resistance to decades of outside invaders, religious tradition is linked to narratives about the popular nation-state. Thus, opposition to LGBT rights norms is constructed as simultaneously a religious and national imperative. To be opposed to LGBT rights is to be Polish. In Slovenia, by contrast, after WWII the state successfully associated the church with the invading Nazi regime; this decoupled religion and nationalism, enabling a state context more open to the realization of LGBT rights. Ayoub's analysis of the relationship between religion and nationalism is particularly valuable now for thinking through the implications for LGBT rights in the context of the rise of authoritarianism and nationalism around the globe.
Perhaps the book's greatest shortcoming is its focus on the development of LGBT rights norms within a mainstream movement context that largely does not engage with LGBT community struggles over difference. Although Ayoub raises important questions about the exclusion of intersectionally marginalized LGBT people in international rights norms, like trans and gender nonconforming people and members of the queer migrant community, he mostly leaves the study of these communities and the role they play within the LGBT movement for future scholarship. It is also unclear how generalizable his overarching theory is in non-European contexts, particularly in countries whose contemporary politics are more deeply embedded in European colonialist and imperialist legacies. His book ends with a powerful call for future scholars to examine the invisible, those individuals and groups who are left out of liberal rights advocacy and to move beyond “rigid typologies” that exclude minority groups, particularly the intersectionally marginalized. When States Come Out will be of great interest to those who wish to gain a better understanding of the complex relationship between transnational, domestic, and opposition forces in the mobilization of international movements.
