In the Eastern neighbourhood, LGBT+ rights seem to have become a geopolitical issue in the past decade.
Mainstream western media, as well as (pro-)European policy-makers and liberal human rights advocates from inside and outside the region, increasingly tend to represent LGBT+ rights as “victims of geopolitics”. This is done by depicting the EU as a staunch supporter of LGBT+ equality in opposition to Russia - the main source of anti-LGBT sentiments.
The Eastern neighbourhood is often described as either “shared” or “contested” between the European Union and Russia. But the value-based dichotomy associated with EU and Russian influence on LGBT+ issues in their “neighbourhood” is misleading and has highly problematic consequences. Notably, this representation depoliticises LGBT+ struggles by silencing a series of critical issues in the fight for equality which liberal human rights discourse fails to address.
