In the case of the authoritarian and autocratic states, for example, Russia, it’s pretty clear what is driving the resistance or the fight against LGBTI rights on state level. A country like Russia is still nominally a democracy. So elections still take place. There are also societies where you still have a lot of stereotypical views about homosexuality, especially with the Soviet legacy of homosexuality being criminalized until 1993. So it is actually a very easy topic on which to convince an audience that giving more rights to homosexual people is actually harmful for society. In the absence of a counter discourse, which is now illegal in Russia, many people find that convincing. And in a context where you don’t have open and free elections, but you still ask people for their opinion on the government to push that button to say we are actually protecting you against that, unfortunately seems to a certain extent to work. It’s also about restricting groups that are, by their inclination, probably more open to looking beyond Russia, to have international, transnational connections, to work with NGOs abroad. It’s very much about restricting groups that have progressive views that may actually have democratic demands or probably really surely have democratic demands for equal rights. So it’s also part of a whole program of repression, of free speech, freedom of assembly. And I also think, and this has become very clear in the context of the spiral of repression now in Russia after the full scale war on Ukraine. If you really zoom in on one population that becomes extremely vulnerable and fragile, basically you frighten society as a whole. I mean, if you can do that, if you can signal out people who become the new scapegoats, dividing society up like that becomes an easy tool. So I think from the perspective of autocratic authoritarian states, scapegoating LGBTI groups is unfortunately a way of boosting their authority, their legitimacy to the incentive. It’s also a very easy tool to say what makes us different from the West, because the West is constantly being depicted in a way wrongly so as the great promoter of LGBTI rights, which in a way is not true. I mean, there are many problems still in Western countries. But of course progress has been made and that progress is now being accused of bringing about the end of civilization. So it’s really very much about creating a repressive environment to the outside and marking a distance to the other side.
[Clip] Scapegoating LGBTI groups: boosting authoritarian states
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