This week we ask how LGBTQ advocates should respond when universal human rights claims are dismissed as Western colonial impositions.
In parts of the Global South, political elites have framed LGBTQ rights as a foreign, colonial agenda. So should advocates abandon universal rights language in favour of arguments rooted in local traditions and anti-colonial sentiment?
A new study tests exactly this question using survey evidence from Zimbabwe — and finds clear support for the local approach.
Host Alan Renwick is joined by the study's authors, Phillip Ayoub and Adam Harris, both Professors in the UCL Department of Political Science.
Mentioned in this episode:
[00:00:04] Alan Renwick: Hello, this is UCL Uncovering Politics, and this week we are looking at campaigning for LGBTQ rights in the Global South. How should advocates respond when claims about universal human rights are treated as Western colonial impositions?
Hello, my name is Alan Renwick, and welcome to UCL Uncovering Politics, the podcast of the School of Public Policy and Department of Political Science at University College London. Anti-LGBTQ attitudes remain widespread in many countries. Activists have traditionally sought to counter such attitudes by promoting ideas about universal human rights.
In some countries in the Global South, however, such arguments have increasingly faced counterblast from political elites arguing that those who promote LGBTQ rights are advancing an alien Western colonial agenda. Zimbabwe's Vice-President, Constantino Chiwenga for example, has described LGBTQ initiatives in his country as anti-Zimbabwean and un-African.
So how should local LGBTQ advocates respond? Well, a new study examines the idea that the best approach is to shift away from universal rights claims and to focus instead on local traditions and on local support for liberation from Western dominance. Using survey evidence from Zimbabwe, it examines the impact of different kinds of messaging on public attitudes, and it finds clear support for this proposed approach.
Well, the authors of that study are two of my esteemed colleagues here in the UCL Department of Political Science. Philip Ayoub is Professor of International Relations while Adam Harris is Professor of Development Politics, and I'm delighted that both join me now to discuss their work. Philip and Adam, welcome back, both of you to UCL Uncovering Politics.
I think you've both been on before, but never together. So it's, uh, great to bring you together in the studio today. And let's maybe start with the motivation for this work. So I've said a little bit about the background to the work in the introduction there, but it would be great to have this in your own words. Adam, do you want to start off? What was it that prompted you to conduct this study?
[00:02:25] Adam Harris: Yeah. Well, thanks so much for having us. Yeah, so for me, it actually came from quite a personal space. I had in my late-thirties, in 2022, accepted myself as queer, but was not yet out and was trying to find a way to kind of connect to, reach out to the community that I was now a part of in a way that I knew how and I turned to my research.
I then came across a paper from Kim Dionne and Boniface Dulani that kind of describes the rates of anti- homosexual anti-LGBTQ attitudes across the African continent. Having spent a number of years, myself, across a number of countries in Eastern Southern Africa, had seen those sentiments and was interested in trying to understand how to combat them because they're quite strong and deeply rooted.
And then knowing Philip's work in this space, I approached him saying, look, I've got this idea. Do you think it's useful? Is it gonna make a contribution? You know the literature better than I. And then he was like, yeah, this rings true with a lot of what we're seeing in other places. And so that's where at least my motivation came from.
[00:03:40] Alan Renwick: Philip?
[00:03:41] Philip Ayoub: Yeah. I mean my motivation was related in that activists in many places are facing a really challenging context of dealing with how to talk about LGBT rights when you have these counter frames around them being foreign imposition or , you know, there's laws in Russia that deem LGBT people as foreign agents or extremists. Even in countries that, you know, are on very different continents, you have this kind of an argument.
And so I also had a practical motivation in that I was curious in how LGBT people talk about rights in this very challenging moment for human rights generally when we have a lot of populist and nationalist discourse travelling around. And then also I had a theoretical motivation and my colleague Agnes Chetaille and I had long ago worked on this concept of rooting frames.
And that came out of a more ethnographic study, an archival study in Poland where we looked at 20 years of framing from 1990 to 2010, and we learned, one, that Polish activists change their frames all the time because of new challenges that come their way. As we know from social movement literature, it's quite common to have framing and counter framing that leads to adaptation.
[00:04:47] Alan Renwick: And we should just, many of our listeners will be familiar with the language of framing, but I'm some, some will not. So, so by, by framing we're talking about how people talk about issues essentially.
[00:04:55] Philip Ayoub: Exactly. How movements, can present their claims to different audiences in a way that they resonate.
And so framing is really to centre on points in movement language that you can hopefully win over folks for the broader cause. And this idea of rooted framing came out of this work And yes, in that Polish activists, when they were attacked as being so-called Ebola from Brussels or Western imposition from the EU, they responded in part by also repackaging LGBT rights with more indigenous language.
So they scrapped some of the EU flags and replaced them sometimes with Polish flags, which was an interesting symbolic shift at the events. They often used religious language, like a Bible verse to start a Pride parade in order to make it resonant in kind of a Catholic discourse.
They tried to focus on admired statespeople or indigenous terms, instead of LGBT in part to indigenize the work. And that came part with this idea of rooting, which is similar to vernacularization, that you're not just throwing out human rights, you diversify, you keep those human rights claims as universal, but you also diversify them by pulling them down into the local context and giving them a very local and national narrative in part to help make them palatable to a wider general audience.
And so for me, this theoretical motivation was something present in a lot of my work. And then of course having a wonderful colleague like Adam, who's an expert on African politics and Zimbabwe was a great invitation to think about some of these dynamics in a new context where I had much less experience, but had some experience around the puzzles in theory.
[00:06:29] Alan Renwick: So how did you think about translating those theoretical insights? You mentioned there deriving those from the Polish case in particular, how did you think about the translation from the Polish case to the Zimbabwean case?
[00:06:42] Philip Ayoub: Well, I mean, one, what was very special for me in this project is that it ended up being a journey of two years of reading scholarship by queer African colleagues. Not all of it in political science, interestingly there was a lot of literature from the humanities and anthropology and sociology that really talked about issues that were quite resonant to me from other parts of the world.
We had a study in Iraq recently with other colleagues and Latin America and so it's not the first foray into the Global South, but this, the resonance of foreignness and LGBT rights, it's something that we've seen a lot of places and that's in part because gender and sexuality because they're quite fluid concepts they're easy to present as destabilising to the imagined fixity of issues like nation or religious tradition.
So, if you have an imagined past that everything was more simple and it's rooted in this kind of language around sovereignty and nationalism. Something destabilising comes into that and, well, I don't really believe it's destabilising, but it's presented that way. It's then easily presented as coming from the outside.
So you know, just like in Poland, it was said that LGBT rights are often attached to like German influence, which is seen as negative from past German occupations of Poland. Interestingly also sometimes have been attached to Russia, which makes less sense for LGBT rights, but in the imagination of LGBT being foreign and external threat, that has worked.
That's the same in many other cases . And then in Africa, it's often connected to this idea of neocolonialism, which is a huge fallacy because LGBT rights, you know, it was actually homophobia that was introduced by colonialism, which came with these anti-sodomy provisions in many states around the world but they nonetheless use this similar external threat language of un-African in Africa and it could be un-Arab or un-Eastern European in other cases.
[00:08:31] Alan Renwick: And Adam, you were bringing your Southern Africa expertise to bear upon this analysis. Do you want to add anything to what Philip has said there?
[00:08:40] Adam Harris: Yeah, no, just to say that like what Philip was just saying in the quote you opened with from the Zimbabwean Vice-President. These narratives dominate a lot of discussions around LGBTQ lives about them being un-African, that LGBTQ lives and lifestyles or however they're characterised are foreign and they're not African.
And this is something that you've run into that's echoed from the chambers of power to kind of daily life. And that's how people are seen and treated in their daily lives. And, so I guess, I was supplementing my kind of on the ground experience of seeing people's lived experiences in the context that we were studying, where Philip came with his knowledge of a vast number of other contexts, as well as the deep theoretical handle of the literature and contribution to it himself.
[00:09:30] Alan Renwick: So to what extent did you come into this research with kind of specific theory, specific hypotheses that you wanted to test and to that extent what were they?
[00:09:39] Adam Harris: Yeah. So the part that got me was this un-African narrative, right? And given what Philip was saying is that it's actually this irony that British colonialism, if we're talking about Zimbabwe, the case of interest here, brought in homophobia and anti-LGBTQ sentiments, rather than, homosexuality as is the language on the ground in this context, or LGBTQ lives, that you see this blaming of the outward imposition of a different lifestyle.
But actually, and what I was interested in trying to do was use history to correct history into people's minds so they can understand that LGBTQ lives have always been a part of Zimbabwean society, as with any society. Queer people have existed and largely been erased, and so we want to un-erase them or bring them back into the story and give them their proper place. And so correcting the misunderstanding of the role of colonisation in promoting or discouraging or actively denigrating LGBTQ lives as well as trying to give queer lives their proper place in history.
And so if we can then present those narratives to people, how does that change their attitude of their neighbour that is gay, lesbian, trans, or whatever it might be. And does that actually change their attitude? So does it make them say, oh, actually you're not as un-African as I've been told that you are.
[00:11:07] Alan Renwick: Yeah. So the basic idea here then is that you are looking at different frames that might be used by LGBTQ activists in a country such as Zimbabwe. Do alternative frames work? And the idea here, I guess, is that frames that are rooted in local reality may be expected to work in a way that potentially frames that don't have that routing might not work. So fundamentally, that's what you're trying to test.
[00:11:29] Philip Ayoub: Yes, that's right. And to build on what Adam said, there's a lot of examples of queer people existing in a variety of societies. So in Zimbabwe there are these fascinating cave paintings that depict queer life.
There's also liberation narratives around civil rights and human rights that exist in the national imagination that might be easy to connect to LGBT rights. And we have this in a variety of countries. There's queer art in Egypt and Thailand going back a very, very long time, certainly before colonialism. So we did expect, also before we talked to the activists themselves, we thought that this might be a way to counter these foreignness arguments, in part because activists in many different countries do that already.
They're trying to respond to these arguments by diversifying their frames and also signalling their indigeneity. Motivation was also other research and also just empirical data that universal human rights framing was being challenged to some degree. So for example, there was a piece by Nicholas Lyon, which is a great piece looking at following the example of other countries not resonating as much on LGBT rights in this current moment in Uganda .
We have anecdotes from the real world like President Obama going to Africa to talk about LGBT rights, which somewhat backfired under this, you know, we should have this because we have it in other countries and we're making these strides and that not working as well as anticipated. So the idea was in part that, okay, we know the activists are doing these kind of other frames as well, so let's test them because we don't want the lesson from that other research to be do nothing on LGBT rights.
There might be a way even to be supportive internationally on LGBT rights in a different way by, for example, supporting local groups to frame and package in new ways rather than having an embassy plant a British flag somewhere in a Pride parade in Zimbabwe . And so the, this was part of the impetus.
We feel like there's evidence around this qualitatively and also in the sense from activists themselves, but it would be useful to add into the discourse an empirical study that tried to carefully isolate some of those different kind of frames, which were often not studied.
[00:13:32] Alan Renwick: Yes, so that leads us into the methodology, which we always like talking about on this podcast. And so fundamentally you use the methodology of a survey experiment, which again, we've talked about various survey experiments on the podcast. So fundamentally, you're asking respondents to read a text and different respondents see a different text that reflect different kinds of frames that might be used in order to talk about LGBTQ rights and then you see what impact that has when you ask people questions about their attitudes.
That's in very, very broad terms. Adam, do you want to take us through the detail of the methodology a little bit more?
[00:14:06] Adam Harris: Yeah, so to test these narratives, we had two treatments and a control in the language of survey experiments.
One was exactly this kind of Indigeneity prime where a third of our respondents saw this narrative of, hey, there's this debate about the place of LGBTQ lives in our society. Some people say that the British brought, queer livelihoods with them, but actually they brought laws against queer lives.
And in fact, before they arrived, we have evidence that there were these cave paintings, that Philip already mentioned, that depict queer lives. And actually one of the longstanding legacies of colonisation is this inequality that LGBTQ individuals face today.
[00:14:49] Alan Renwick: So you referred to that as the Indigeneity
[00:14:52] Adam Harris: Yes.
[00:14:52] Alan Renwick: Prime. Which is a word that people probably haven't heard before, but it's just the idea that fundamentally, that there is a kind of indigenous history of
[00:14:58] Adam Harris: Yes.
[00:14:59] Alan Renwick: Of queer identities and lives in Zimbabwe.
[00:15:01] Adam Harris: Yeah. And we try and couch that in this colonial legacy to again correct that narrative, but then also bring those lives into their own history.
And the second one we call Liberation, which is maybe a little bit of an easier word . This is where we present the narrative of Zimbabwean liberation from colonial rule and talk about how it's not done yet. Yes, there's independence and progress has been made, but there's still economic hardships there's still inequalities.
Some people don't have equal rights, especially LGBTQ individuals. That they don't have these rights and we're not all free until everyone is equally free under the law. And we try and link this to other modes of exploitation from colonial history to again bridge a kind of a gap that maybe people perceive between themselves and queer individuals.
And then we have a control treatment that the last group of our respondents received that was more just narrating colonial history and its impacts and how liberation is incomplete, but doesn't mention queer lives at all. And so the difference here is when people see these different narratives around queer lives, does that change their attitudes towards queer individuals?
[00:16:08] Alan Renwick: Yeah. And one of the interesting things I find about this study is that you went through quite a detailed process, an extended process of developing these texts. So partly around just identifying these frames that local activists thought it would be particularly worthwhile to explore, but then also working out the exact language that you use in order to describe these texts.
So you use the language there of queer identities and of LGBTQ identities, but you don't use that language exactly in the text themselves. Philip, do you want to say a little bit about the process and the outcome of that?
[00:16:44] Philip Ayoub: Yeah. I'll say about the beginning and I might pass it back to Adam then also given his work with the enumerators, but yeah. First we, I mean we were doing a lot of reading, even the names Indigeneity and Liberation come out of a literature that is really rich and fascinating and that uses those terms and that we tried to build already our own theoretical thinking around them. But then we also wanted to talk to activists on the ground who were doing some of this work.
And so we did some focus groups before just to get a pulse check on what they were, how they were countering it and there were also other frames that are being used, but the ones that really came up quite forcefully were these, mainly these two that we wanted to then centre on and that linked also to other studies, including from archaeologists who talked about the cave paintings and others in this way.
And so we had kind of a feeling like, all right, this intervention is not coming out of the blue from our thinking here at UCL and London but it is also connected to what people are doing in the real world in terms of this activism . Which again, also parallels activism in other countries, which makes sense to us in terms of what we heard in the focus groups. It was really, really helpful to get depth from activists and also to run by how we were planning to talk about these frames to people in the survey and see how they reacted to it.
So that was kind of the first pass. And we thought we had like very reasonable frames. But then in the process of discussing this with the enumerators, and I do want to pass this back to Adam because he did the work with the enumerators.
[00:18:09] Alan Renwick: We should just say the enumerators of the people who actually do the fielding of the survey. So this was a face-to-face survey?
[00:18:14] Philip Ayoub: Exactly.
[00:18:14] Alan Renwick: So they're the people who visit people in their houses and administer the survey.
[00:18:19] Philip Ayoub: Yes. And for one, I mean, they were deeply surprised by this history. We were not providing this information. These were historical facts about both about liberation and the cave paintings. But nonetheless, we were surprised that they were so surprised by this information, and they really wanted to work through the primes with us again.
[00:18:38] Adam Harris: Yeah it was really difficult and challenging, interesting. But, we were going through the training with the enumerators of all the different types of questions and I come to this bit of the survey and I put the frame, put the language up, and I read it and I look at their faces and everyone's faces are just like, what? You want me to talk about what? One of the women said, I'm a Christian and I can't possibly read this. It's quite a Christian nation .
But then we talked about it and then, but then the other initial reaction they had was everyone pulled out their phones and started Googling it, trying to find what is this cave painting, what is happening? And they found the image and they're like. Oh my God, what's happening? They were shocked and they were like, but wait, this is actually true.
And then we started having a discussion about what this means, the importance of learning more about history, et cetera. And we had a very meaningful discussion about how to talk about this. And we were trying to balance having these statements that are strong enough to get people to think and maybe rethink what they know but at the same time, we wanted our enumerators to feel comfortable discussing quite a taboo subject.
There's always the risk when you're doing these surveys that enumerators just skip difficult questions and enter and answer themselves. And so we wanted to avoid that obviously so we actually had real data. So we did have a back and forth and we talked about ways to kind of tone down the language. We didn't think the language was particularly evocative or provoking in any way. But again,
[00:20:06] Alan Renwick: So you, you had language in the original version because you have the original version in the materials for the article. So you have language about same-sex acts in the original version, which doesn't make it into the final version.
[00:20:17] Adam Harris: Yes. Yeah. So there were compromises that we had to make. But I think we struck a balance where the enumerators could talk about this. And it wouldn't make them feel uncomfortable or what they would perceive as respondents feeling uncomfortable.
And interestingly enough, over the first few days of like piloting and stuff, we did debriefings and it was actually quite encouraging. The enumerators came back, and we talked about other elements of the survey, because this was only one part of it and they were like, oh, it's really interesting, so and so was like, wait, can you read that again? What's, what did you say? And some people were like taking the time to really think about it before they answered.
Other people did say, no, I don't wanna hear about it. I don't want to answer any questions about this. Move on fine. But it was a wide variety of reactions, but on balance people did again and looking at the first, you know, two dozen responses, that people took the time to think and were willing to think, oh, maybe there's something I don't fully know about my own history. I think that's true for all of us. We all have something we can learn and correct narratives that have been biassed or only presented in part.
And so I think it was quite well received. And yeah, we were very pleased with what we ended up with. But the caveat being that maybe there's stronger versions of this that might have a larger effect or maybe would have more of a backlash effect. We don't know, but I think we settled on something that was possible to actually evaluate.
[00:21:40] Alan Renwick: So each respondent gets one of these texts, and then you ask them a series of questions about whether they see homosexuality as being un-African. About how they would react if one of their neighbours came out as homosexual. I get you're using the language homosexual here because that's the language that would resonate most, I guess. Philip?
[00:22:00] Philip Ayoub: I could just jump in on that.
[00:22:02] Alan Renwick: Yeah, yeah.
[00:22:02] Philip Ayoub: Since you asked about it before and I forgot to react to it, but, on many of the surveys you have to go with a language that is most understood. And even though the groups that we work with do also work on gender identity issues and LGBT issues more broadly, sometimes in terms of making it legible to a wider audience that's taking the survey, by homosexuality and translations of it in local languages is a more common method, unfortunately.
So that was when we're making those decisions, that was why we ended up asking about homosexuality in local languages. In wider global politics around LGBT rights there's also discussion about LGBTQ as a concept in part too because these have very, you know, to talk about rooting, these have very Western kind of tinges to these identity formations which developed in the West and of course there are many other ways to talk about queer people.
So at the United Nations, for example, in the Yogyakarta Principles, you talk about SOGI or SOGIESC people, which are people marginalised on the basis of their sexual orientation, gender identity, gender expression and sex characteristics, for example. And that's a more encompassing and open way to talk about them.
And so these are a big part. I mean, it's a great question because in and of itself how we talk about queer people has to be sensitive to kind of this rooting framing language . And that also was something we learned in the process of the study.
[00:23:23] Alan Renwick: Really interesting to explore the process of researching topics such as this. So you've got these three questions that you ask people after they've heard the text. The one about whether they see homosexuality as un-African. One about how they would react if one of their neighbours came out as homosexual. And one, asking them whether they agree or disagree with the statement that homosexual people deserve human rights laws that protect them just like everyone else.
And so I guess the core hypothesis that you've got is that people who have been exposed to either of the treatments, the Indigeneity treatment or the Liberation treatment will have more positive attitudes towards LGBTQ people or homosexual people, using the language of the questions, than people who only got the control text.
I guess a question that I had when I was reading through is, presumably you chose deliberately not to have a frame in terms of universal human rights. Because one thing that you could potentially be doing here is testing the relative impact of that frame versus the rooted frames that you chose to focus on here . Were there reasons that led you not to choose also a frame in terms of universal rights?
[00:24:39] Philip Ayoub: This is a fantastic question and one that we were asked in the review process and that Adam and I have discussed a lot too, because we like the design a lot, but the design would've been even better, I think to compare the international frames. And indeed, like also for me personally, a lot of my work has been on international norm diffusion and its important role in LGBT rights, so it would've been nice to look at them comparatively.
At the same time, there were some practical issues around budget and our fear about diminishing the power of the primes by having too many. And then we were reacting also to the existing literature that had tested already the international universal human rights frames, and shown that they were no longer producing or might not be able to produce these positive effects . There were null effects around them. So then we thought, let's see if we have more positive effects in the other direction by using rooted frames. So it was kind of seeing this as a first step.
We do actually encourage future research to look at both together. And we would've liked to do that had we had more resources. But we also thought, you know, there's different types of rooted frames. And it was nice that we get to look at two different ones. Like you mentioned, the Indigeneity one, having, it has a specific logic as well, maybe a social proximity one about rooting it in the culture that might lead to more effects in the having a homosexual neighbour category, whereas the Liberation one is very much kind of rights focused, and it did have the greater effect in the rights category, like the LGBT rights.
And so we did have interesting variation there. But the most important thing for us was that we didn't see backlash across any of the primes, which meant that these different kinds of rooted frames didn't have a negative response, which for us was very important. It gives some confidence to the activists using them that there is some degree of safety in using these .
[00:26:28] Alan Renwick: So you might be concerned here that by talking about LGBTQ rights, you might kind of antagonise people and cause people to become more clear about their negative attitudes that they might already have?
[00:26:39] Philip Ayoub: Yes. It's a serious concern, in the literature as well, that talking about queer people can also increase backlash and violence to them. That invisibility is sometimes a tool that is used by activists to protect communities as well .
But, given that we are also in a crisis of queer politics with a lot of retrenchment, it's important to think about ways that we could still maybe sensitively and effectively do this activism. We didn't want the lesson from other recent studies to be that okay, well we're just gonna take a couple decade break from thinking about queer people in these contexts and instead this is a way to kind of, in a very subtle and soft, as Adam explained, maybe open a space for conversations. And, I'll let Adam talk more about, there's many other ideas that we had about how we would love to do these studies in an even bigger way.
[00:27:24] Alan Renwick: Yeah. Well, before we get there, we should talk a little bit more about the results themselves. You've given us some hints there. But Adam, do you want to take us through some of the core results from the analysis?
[00:27:33] Adam Harris: Yeah, so like Phillip mentioned we were able to see that the people that received the Indigeneity prime about the history and correcting those narratives did see on average, were less angry about a potential neighbour coming out as gay. And so we are really pleased with that, and it makes sense that we're kind of humanising that community a bit, um, giving them their proper place in society and that it makes sense that it might translate into interacting with someone who is from the community.
And then the Liberation frame did have an impact where it moved people to be more supportive of, or less in opposition to equal rights for the LGBTQ community. And what's interesting here is, again, given this is a context where based on the year and the estimate from which we have data and kind of national representative samples, you know, around 80% of people hold anti-LGBTQ attitudes.
Moving people in a positive direction is great. But also we're seeing that while we can't know exactly how we're moving people, the evidence suggests that given the type of data we have, the evidence suggests that most people are being moved from being anti to being more indifferent or not bothered in a way by LGBTQ lives and LGBTQ individuals having equal rights, which we see as a massive positive.
I mean, we're gonna make this progress. There was a handful of people that we can understand were moved to be actually supportive of. But again, we're moving people in the right direction and in a way that again, opens up further space for, further discussions, further interactions. And, you know, next time they encounter someone, there might be a little less of animosity toward that individual.
[00:29:21] Alan Renwick: And can you give us a bit of a sense of the scale of these effects?
[00:29:25] Philip Ayoub: Yes. The main finding around the Indigeneity prime was kind of an 8% move towards tolerance. And so the folks who got the prime, were 8% more positive in the neighbour coming out question than the control.
[00:29:39] Alan Renwick: That's eight percentage points.
[00:29:40] Philip Ayoub: Eight percentage points.
[00:29:41] Alan Renwick: Yeah.
[00:29:41] Philip Ayoub: Yes. And then the Liberation frame, which this was a more modest and marginally significant finding. But there we saw a six percentage point difference compared to the control when it comes to the rights question. And across all of the primes, we, and on all of the rights or all the tolerance related questions, whether the neighbour or the rights, we saw positive movement, even when they were not statistically significant findings .
And so this was, you know, we celebrated these findings. This is a hard, and I know some people will, would want more, in terms of bigger findings, but we have to really, as Adam said, keep in mind the context. We're working in a context where there's very little visibility around queer people so people haven't even had a chance to really unpack some of the negative rhetoric that they hear from their own political elites and around the context.
And so there's not, you know, role models or examples to really develop strong opinions in another direction around this. And so the fact that from a very negative baseline we can see some movement, which we think is quite substantial, given that baseline, is impressive.
And it's also in line with other studies. Including some of my research in other countries, but also many wonderful colleagues in political science who, uh, you know, these are big effects for a country with such little preexisting visibility around queer life in the public sphere.
[00:31:01] Alan Renwick: So clear effects here and statistically significant effects, but also substantively important effects that we should care about. I guess we should just ask, should we have any concern about whether these effects are real or not? Is there potentially a danger that the enumerator is reading out this text and people kind of feel, okay, the enumerator has this view and I want to be nice to this nice person who's visited me and therefore that the express a view that perhaps isn't necessarily their real one?
[00:31:28] Adam Harris: Yeah, I mean there is some research that suggests that, I mean our treatment was not like a conversation, but there's some work in attitudes towards trans individuals in the US that does more in depth conversations and those seem to matter more. And yes, having a person in front of you rather than a screen reading something might have a different effect.
But we felt that as kind of the first systematic test of this, we wanted to control as much as possible and get as clean effect as we could, you know, get the information across, see how people react to it and then the hope is that moving forward ourselves, other researchers can think about ways to make this potentially a little bit more real to people's daily lives.
You know, thinking about ways to translate these short few sentences into a poster or something that can be put on a bus stop or whatever else, right? That can be easily digested, communicate the same information, but in a way that is more like what activists might do in a campaign.
And so I think there's ways to think about, while this might be one or maybe two steps removed from daily life and quote unquote reality, I think there was real movement in attitudes. It's real reactions to real information. Now what that means for broader public opinion is another question, and I think future research can do. It's wide open to think about ways to test this further and make it more realistic in terms of a campaign.
[00:32:51] Alan Renwick: And is there more for you on this? Are you doing more or intending to do more in this area?
[00:32:55] Philip Ayoub: Yeah, I mean, if we can get the funding to do it, we'd be more than happy to do so.
[00:33:00] Alan Renwick: Funders, potential funders who are listening should get in touch. What would you do next? What would be your next priority if you did get funding?
[00:33:07] Philip Ayoub: Oh, I think Adam and I also have other ongoing research separately that's still interested in these questions in different ways.
Like, one project that I wrapped up last year was working on empathetic mechanisms in Iraq where people who had experienced violence by a perpetrator were more supportive of LGBT rights. In that case it was ISIS because the study was in Mosul when they learned that they had also hurt LGBT people then, and that was a familiar perpetrator.
You know, then people were maybe not surprisingly actually, people were quite happy to talk about LGBT people in that study and Iraq has somewhat lower levels of homophobia than Zimbabwe. But people were really wanting to protect LGBT people. So that was kind of an interesting framing when they like of. Pointing out, uh, perpetrator that's familiar to them, made them want to protect LGBT people . Um, and so there's so much important research.
I mean, uh, there's other research around kind of the global link of these anti-LGBT messages, which I think is a bit of an irony in this sovereignty framing and nationalism framing is that, and Alan, you and I have talked about this on previous podcasts, related to other research in the field that anti-LGBT groups are often very transnational themselves.
And so a lot of these laws that are, and a lot of this language that politicians in the Global South and also in the Global North increasingly are used to vilify LGBT people for their own political game comes from scripts that are also coordinated by transnational conservative movements. And often those come from the Global North and a lot of funding is propelled from the United States and also from Europe to countries in Africa and elsewhere to help them campaign against LGBT people.
So for me it's a big oxymoron that we're talking about LGBT people as neo-colonial imposition when there is a lot of foreign influence actually . And so there's a lot, for better or worse, there's a lot of fascinating research questions. I think LGBT people teach us a lot about politics at large in that they're dealing with really immediate crises on the ground in many places that they constantly have to navigate and innovate in new ways.
And in this case we do think, well, queer people are showing us ways to talk about human rights and interesting ways. You know, in Hungary last summer, they taught us new ways to talk about democracy. And I, based on other research that's ongoing, we do show that like the Budapest Pride in last summer also helped to lower evaluations of Victor Orban that might've helped open a turning point for the election that happened in Hungary last week after 16 years. It was queer people that organised the biggest demonstration against Victor Orban's rule. So we should look at these questions, I think in LGBT politics in lots of different angles.
[00:35:44] Alan Renwick: So there's lots more research still to come. Lots of important questions. We will have to have you both back on again when that further research comes out.
But thank you both so much for a fascinating discussion today. Really great article. Great to hear about it, the process of generating it and the origin story for the research as well. It's lovely to hear that too, so thank you both.
We have been discussing the article Rooting Equality: Testing the Effectiveness of Activist Frames Combating Homophobia in Zimbabwe by Philip M. Ayoub and Adam S. Harris which was published recently in the British Journal of Political Science. And as ever, we will put the details in the show notes for this episode.
We'll be back next week when we'll be looking at business opposition to action on climate change.
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I'm Alan Renwick, and this is the first episode in almost four years that I have not concluded by saying that it was produced by Eleanor Kingwell-Banham. Eleanor is still at UCL, but has moved on to higher and even greater things. So thank you, Eleanor, for all your fantastic work, building the podcast, and so many other things over this time. This episode was in fact produced by Matthieu Dinh. Our theme music, as ever is written and performed by John Mann.
This has been UCL Uncovering Politics. Thank you for listening.