To browse Academia. The UN often plays a progressive role in challenging oppressive policies and laws globally from a human rights perspective. This introduction provides a brief overview of key political developments in global lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender LGBT organizing and advocacy over the past three decades as well as a summary of recent academic research and debates on these issues in politics, sociology and other disciplines.
It introduces the three questions addressed by the volume's subsequent contributions: 1 How can recent global developments related to LGBT human rights advocacy and organizing be explained by political and sociological theories? The article pays particular attention to the 'human rights turn' of the LGBT movements in the early s and the political successes and failures that have ensued.
Finally, it summarizes the main findings of the volume's contributions and how they relate to the questions raised in this introduction. After decades of neglect, relevant progress has been made due to an effective global LGBT advocacy. This article reviews some key aspects behind the process that extended the principles of equality and non-discrimination enshrined in the UDHR to ensure that people may not be discriminated against in the enjoyment of their fundamental rights on the basis of their sexual orientation or gender identity, and in its conclusion presents the current challenges that global LGBT activism faces.
From the activist, practitioner, or researcher's perspective, I am primarily interested in two matters: the origins of the concept itself, on the one hand, and its limitations when it is put to use in the real world, on the other hand. While drawing attention to the foundational premises and important historical factors, I argue that before invoking and insisting on the universality of the concept of human rights, we should be attentive when the concept per se is built in an oppressive context, through the exclusionary process.
Deducing from the general interrogation into the foundational premises of the concept, I move from the historical consciousness to the practical consciousness, by which I am looking into the usage of the concept in practice and reflecting on its shortcomings when invoked in real world.
