Part 3: “Norm Brokers” and “Norm Visibility,” and How It May Attract Forms of Transnational Homophobia
GEMA PÉREZ-SÁNCHEZ: To follow up on the answer you just gave us, could you then talk a little bit about your notion of the “norm brokers”? Who are they, how do they operate, and what kinds of interventions they make transnationally?
PHILLIP M. AYOUB: Yeah, of course. So, norm brokers is a concept that I’m working within the book, and I think of it a little bit differently, at least in the political science literature – or compared to how [brokerage] is being used in [in political science literature] – or how other notions of brokerage have been used in that by “norm brokerage,” I’m really looking at local activists who are embedded in transnational networks. And of course, this is a specific type of actor as well, but it’s still an actor that knows the local context.
And this is for me in part, because when you think of the diffusion of LGBT-type rights and policies in a norm-diffusion framework, which is used often in IR or PoliSci more generally — the problem with that is that many times we don’t see a simple, non-contentious, top-down type of process. This is a very interactive process.
And norm brokers play a central role in that they take some of the norms that are most visible, which are universal, abstract, detached, and also don’t fit very well in terms of how useful they are for queer people and other contexts. Norm brokers play this mediatory role. They take into account that whether we like it or not, we do have a diffusion of ideas and images around LGBT people. And of course, that’s connected to power of certain representations – or certain people within those groups and certain states and certain Western conceptions. But for norm brokers, their role is to try to work with those conceptions that enter the domestic sphere and keep in mind a local audience. That’s still a very difficult process. It’s not at all easy, but there are certain ways that norm brokers have worked to make universal or abstract norms more resonant.
In the Polish example, when there was a lot of optimism around EU accession, there was a lot of EU frames [used] with this issue, including the transnational activists who came wearing t-shirts that said, “Europe”– “Europa equals tolerancja” and they talked about their activism as part of human rights—European human rights and responsibilities. It was framed as a demonstration, not as a gay pride march. There was really a lot of sensitivity. And I think sometimes when we critique just diffusion of Western norms, we forget about the agency and the really innovative strategies that local activists, that I call “norm brokers,” when they’re connected like this, do to help create resonance.
In Poland that has changed. We—with my colleague, Agnès Chetaille—have been doing work on framing and we see a much more rooted activism more recently in Poland where there’s a lot of references to the nation, to Catholicism, in part because they’ve dealt with a very committed countermovement that has used a common trope against LGBT rights: that they’re external, they’re foreign, they’re imposed, and that they’re here to take away what is Polish, what is connected to Polish identity, and these kind of imaginations. So activists have dealt with this head-on. There’s a more recent campaign just from a few months ago by KPH in collaboration with some other groups, including Catholic LGBT groups, which shows two hands shaking and one has a rosary around it and the other has a rainbow flag and it’s saying, “Let us show each other a kind of a sign of peace,” which is something we associate with saying [in] Mass, but also I think it has some resonance in Poland because Polish bishops wrote a letter to that effect to German bishops 20 years after the Second World War. So, it’s a resonant idea of starting anew. Is that contested? Of course. Many LGBT groups, many queer groups are not ready to make peace with the Catholic Church, but this is one strategy from one group. I’m not trying to advocate any specific form, but it shows how LGBT rights is framed in really new and innovative ways according to the context that norm brokers are working in, yes.
BRENNA MUNRO: So, your examples of visibility so far have all been sort of ones that have worked, that – examples of kind of gay rights norms that have traveled. But what about the sort of ways in which political homophobia is moving across borders or has been over the past decade or so?
PHILLIP M. AYOUB: Yeah, that’s a very important question. The whole second half of the book also deals with resistance and contestation. And what that suggests is that the concept of norm visibility is not intended to belong to “good movements” or “progressive movements.” We see the same kind of dynamics go in many different directions. What’s interesting about visibility is that it often also provokes backlash and resistance as a response. That can be navigated as well, or at least it has been in some countries where, when the issue becomes more salient, it can galvanize movement or it can put new issues onto the debate, as several scholars have also argued. But [with the] norm visibility [of one issue] comes the visibility of other norms that travel as well. We see that a lot now with other issues. While we might talk about pro-gay norms like marriage or, I mean, a series of positive norms, we also have all other kinds of norms that are familiar in many different contexts like traditional values-related-norms, like when we think about the anti-gay – so-called “gay propaganda” laws that have popped up in certain countries like in Russia and Lithuania; or if we think about this global concern with gender and sexuality around opposing gender ideology which we saw [in many countries]. I was just in Colombia a few months ago after the FARC peace deal to talk about this, because there was tucked into that, as well, some pro—what we would call pro-LGBT moves—that galvanized an opposition to vote “no” in that case, as well; were seen as peace is okay, but not if it comes at the expense of dismantling our traditional values.
So, we see that kind of rhetoric diffusing a lot. And a lot of that has to do with multiple, obviously, nodes of this activism. It’s part of my more current research. There’s a team at [The University of] Innsbruck. We’ve been working for a couple years now on trying to study these networks and links. And we see that there’s a very similar pattern to the visibility of norms that we may or may not like, but we see the opposition has the same type of dynamics. There’s certain powerful actors like states, like the Russian state has become very involved since about 2010-2011 in being a stalwart of defending traditional values. And that kind of politics was also diffusing. There are actors from multiple religious groups, be it the Orthodox Church or the Catholic Church, or also sometimes strange bedfellows between multiple religious groups that often don’t agree with each other that agree on this. And so that also involves central activists who work – who we see at different international conferences, many of the ones – even during my research years ago, you saw groups representing ex-gay activists.
We see diffusion, and that’s something the book is explicit on. I hope it’s not misinterpreted in that sense that norm visibility is politically powerful but it can be used to many different ends.
