Samuel Ritholtz

In the wake of recent advancements of LGBTQI rights, one of the world’s most coordinated transnational counter-rights backlash movements against feminist and queer-inclusive state practices has occurred in Latin America. Originally organized around local issues and funded by religious groups, the movement has received political support throughout the region and now operates at the international level. It has brought together a remarkably diverse range of actors—many for the first time under the same umbrella. This chapter explores the process through which anti-right groups have mobilized against queer and gender-inclusive state practices. It looks at the genesis of this movement and considers key inflection points in its history. In exploring this history, it seeks to explain an interesting puzzle: Why has this movement produced such extreme action in response to seemingly benign efforts, such as national anti-bullying and ‘homotolerant’ education campaigns in Brazil, Colombia, Paraguay, and Peru? Building off literatures of political homophobia and anti-rights movements, the chapter argue that queer-inclusive efforts by the government produce unique framing opportunities for anti-rights groups to mobilize a diverse coalition within Latin American societies to advance broader uncivil political goals.

This article explores what queer as a concept brings to peacebuilding, presenting a guiding framework and introduction for a special issue on queer peacebuilding. It offers an initial approach to the topic, which means to center queer and trans perspectives of peace and bring queer epistemologies to bear on how peace is constituted so as to rearticulate the concept both in theory and praxis. In doing so, it addresses an unexamined gap in peacebuilding efforts to achieve gender justice and inclusive security in conflict-affected societies, namely the unique experiences of LGBTQ (lesbian, gay, bisexual, trans and queer) individuals and their collective efforts to achieve social justice in these contexts. The authors approach the topic of queer peacebuilding through three questions: What is queer peacebuilding?, ‘Why is queer peacebuilding important? and What can queer peacebuilding contribute? While the impacts of queer peacebuilding in sites of contentious politics around the globe are visible, it remains an emergent and somewhat elusive concept, still under construction within peace and security scholarship and practice. By presenting a conceptualization of the notion of queer peacebuilding, the authors seek to further academic efforts to construct and analyze queer peace.

This research note argues that political theorists of refuge ought to consider the experiences of refugees after they have received asylum in the Global North. Currently, much of the literature concerning the duties of states toward refugees implicitly adopts a blanket approach, rather than considering how varied identities may affect the remedies available to displaced people. Given the prevalence of racism, xenophobia, and homophobia in the Global North, and the growing norm of dissident persecution in foreign territory, protection is not guaranteed after either territorial or legal admission. This research note considers the case of LGBTQ refugees in order to demonstrate the analytical potential of more inclusive and diverse normative approaches. Taking the origin and extension of harm seriously requires a conceptualization of sanctuary after asylum that accurately reflects the experiences of the displaced. In doing so, questions arise regarding the nature and efficacy of territorial asylum.

The phenomenon of queer-and-trans internal migration from homophobic to "safe" areas in the United States remains under-studied in the literature of refugee and forced migration studies. Rejected from their communities and facing discrimination, queer-and-trans youth leave home and may not find anothercan their experience of homelessness be considered forced migration? In this paper, I employ critical and normative theory to explore the logics that produce cisheteronormative assumptions in refugee studies. I posit that there is an epistemological cisheteronormativity informing the theory of knowledge of the discipline and causing the internal migration of queer-and-trans people in the United States to be overlooked. I use the case study of queer-and-trans youth experiencing homelessness to reveal how epistemological cisheteronormativity prevents us from asking crucial questions about queer-and-trans migrants that would not only render their displacement legible, but also challenge the prevailing, depoliticizing assumptions associated with the liberal queer-and-trans subject.

This article explores the ontology of cruelty in civil war. I argue that taking cruelty as the unit of analysis provides new insights into the dynamics of civil war. A focus on cruelty reveals both the physical and the ontological impacts of violence on civilian populations that cannot currently be identified in the existing literature. Cruelty as an analytical concept bridges debates surrounding the instrumental use of violence and its impacts during civil war. Acknowledging the physical-ontological connection of cruelty produces a new methodological approach that can link different approaches to the study of civil war. To explore the ontology of cruelty and develop an associated analytical approach, I first start by conceptualizing cruelty and then comparing it to related concepts. From there, I review the closest scholarly subfield of civil war studies: research that centers violence against civilians as the unit of analysis. In this article, I argue that although these literatures document acts of cruelty, they fail to accurately consider their variation and impact. After reviewing these literatures, I then return to cruelty and explore its ontological impact on civilians in order to further flesh out its analytical potential. This potential shines in its capacity to highlight the interactions between established analytical variables of war as well as consider more deeply civilian perspectives in order to understand the socially transformative potential of violence. I then operationalize these insights by applying them to the existing analyses of massacres during the Colombian civil war.

In this book, Lee Ann Fujii explores what she calls the ‘logic of violence on display’. She defines the concept as ‘a collective effort to stage violence for people to see, notice, and take in’ (p. 2). To solve the puzzle of violence on display and to explain why people engage in it, Fujii focuses on its staging, or ‘the meaning-making power of embodied action’ (p. 8). Fujii argues that ‘such displays can do “things” that undisplayed violence cannot’ (p. 5): they produce new identities for the participants; they make participation in violence a requirement for in-group inclusion; and they can establish a new political order.

Show time is the brilliant work of a scholar in her prime that almost never came to be published—a bittersweet accomplishment that appeared posthumously, after Fujii's death in 2018. The manuscript for the text had been considered lost until a near-final draft was discovered in a colleague's inbox. It was then edited to completion by Martha Finnemore, with an epilogue provided by Elisabeth Jean Wood. Finnemore brings a light touch to the text: her voice is present only in an excellent preface that tells the origins of the text while also recognizing Fujii's unique genius. In line with Fujii's renown as a leader on interviewing and ethical qualitative research methods, Finnemore remarks on how Fujii used such a strict system to protect the data of her interviewees that no one has been able to verify the identities of her research participants: her coding system was legible only to her, her computer password never unlocked.