Moral Crusades and Losing Battles: The Anti-LGBTQ+ Backlash in Africa, Latin America, and the Caribbean

CURA announces the fall 2025 colloquium schedule. This year-long conversation brings together an interdisciplinary community of scholars of culture, religion, and world affairs. Please register below for the session(s) you plan to attend. The September 19 workshop will feature a paper by Taylor Boas, Professor of Political Science at Boston University.

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Abstract: LGBTQ+ rights have expanded dramatically over the past several decades, including in manyparts of the Global South, but national trends have been notably uneven, thanks in part to a conservative backlash in many countries. Based on a series of case studies, this paper examines the relative success of the backlash against LGBTQ+ rights in Sub-Saharan Africa and Latin America and the Caribbean (LAC). In LAC, grassroots countermovements have mobilized in response to prior or potential advances in LGBTQ+ rights, but their policy successes have been hindered by limited elite uptake of their cause. In Africa, the conservative backlash has been led by politicians rather than civil society, has targeted constructed or anticipated rather than objective threats of progressive reform, and has been more successful. To explain this contrast, we focus on differing elements of the political opportunity structure that tend to make LGBTQ+ rights a valence issue in Africa and a position issue in LAC. These include levels of homophobia—rooted in colonial history, religion and religiosity, and the severity of the AIDS crisis—and the programmatic structuration and ideological polarization of party systems in each region.