Dr Jess Gifkins1, Dr Dean Cooper-Cunningham
1University Of Technology Sydney, Australia
Biography:
Dr Jess Gifkins is Senior Lecturer in International Relations at UTS. She is interested in how international relations are enacted on a day-to-day basis. Her research centres around two different themes. Her first theme is on decision-making within the United Nations, focused on the UN Security Council and the UN Secretariat. Within this strand she has published research on legitimation practices, penholding, agenda setting, peacekeeping, the relationship with the International Criminal Court, and early warning mechanisms. Her second theme is on the implementation of the ‘responsibility to protect’ (or ‘R2P’, as it is known) where she has researched language, case studies on conflicts in Darfur, Libya, and Syria, and the relationship between persecution of LGBTQI+ people, hate crimes, and atrocity crimes.
Abstract:
Research on the responsibility to protect has become increasingly intersectional with over two decades of research, however, there remains a blind spot on the persecution of queer people. This is surprising given that queer people have been persecuted in atrocity crimes as far back as the Holocaust. While Genocide Studies has recently begun to engage with this area, we frame queer persecution more broadly around the four R2P crimes. In this paper we set out the rationale and urgency for including a queer lens in the prevention of atrocity crimes. This is not only about a focus on LGBTQI+ people; we argue for a queer politics and ethics that ceaselessly interrogates all relations of power. We outline the scale of the gap in academic research, policy, and state understandings of R2P. Since R2P is often framed as a foreign policy matter by Western states, with the Global South as the object of R2P, we include two case studies on escalating persecution against LGBTI+ people in Europe: The United Kingdom and Hungary. We argue that the R2P research and policy communities should remove what we call the ‘cishetronormative blindfold’ and engage more broadly with intersectional approaches to atrocity prevention.