Neoliberal governmentality and the (de)politicisation of LGBT rights: The case of the European Union in Turkey

The European Union (EU) praises itself for being a promoter of lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) rights in the world. It supports LGBT organisations abroad with the European Instrument for Democracy and Human Rights (EIDHR). Yet, the EIDHR has come under scrutiny by scholars arguing that it is based on neoliberal rationalities and depoliticises civil society. The literature analyses the EU’s documents but does not study funding in practice. Moreover, it has a narrow understanding of politicisation failing to include insights from feminist and queer literature. To problematize the EU’s policy, we need to analyse it in the sites it intervenes in. It is unclear whether and how the EIDHR depoliticises LGBT organisations and issues. Studying the case of Turkey, I argue that the EU’s support of LGBT organisations had ambiguous effects which are not necessarily the ones intended by the EU nor the ones expected by the governmentality literature. The EU’s funding depoliticised the organisations in the sense that they looked less political and more transparent. Yet, this helped making LGBT rights’ claims more legitimate within Turkey’s political struggles. At the same time, EU funding created conflicts within the LGBT movement about the question of Western external funding and neoliberal co-optation

EU Democracy Promotion and Governmentality: Turkey and Beyond

This volume draws on a Foucauldian understanding of governmentality to explore how EU civil society funding policies depoliticise civil society organisations. It questions whether international civil society funding always depoliticises civil society organisations, as the literature on governmentality and international civil society policies argues. The author examines how the liberal and neo-liberal rationalities of EU funding have both politicising and depoliticising effects on the human rights organisations funded, and demonstrates that whether the effects help or prevent the politicisation of human rights depends on how legitimate or contested the issue is domestically and how the civil society organisations act in this political context. These themes are explored through an in-depth analysis of the case of Turkey and EU funding of organisations working in the fields of women, LGBT and Kurdish rights. Unpacking liberal and neo-liberal governmentality in EU democracy promotion and civil society funding, this insightful contribution to the literature will be of interest to scholars of International Relations, Middle East Studies, European Studies and democracy promotion

Feminist and Queer Perspectives on EU-Middle East Relations

Despite growing literature on women and women’s rights in the Middle East, work on EU–Middle East relations from feminist and queer approaches is rare. This chapter introduces critical feminist and queer perspectives and demonstrates how they can be used to study EU–Middle East relations and to unpack their gendered policies, discourses and effects. First, the chapter begins with a discussion of existing scholarship on EU–Middle East relations that focuses on the EU’s promotion of women’s and partly LGBTQ rights in the Middle East. Second, I discuss how critical feminist and queer International Relations literature centres gender relations and hierarchies as well as dominant understandings of gender, including questions of sexual orientation and gender identity. Thirdly, looking at EU–Middle East Relations from the outlined perspective, the chapter analyses the EU’s approach by problematising its focus on human rights funding while not considering gender, sex and race in a broader and more structural way in its policies. I give the example of the Union for the Mediterranean as well as the EU’s counter-terrorism policy to demonstrate how the EU’s discourses are gendered, racialised and sexed