UK’s leading social movement organization on LGBTI issues internationally, and its
engagement with the Commonwealth – particularly through forming The Commonwealth
Equality Network, comprising national LGBTI NGOs. A contribution is made to
sociological and critical analysis of transnational LGBTI movements, through argument
for a new analytical framework combining the sociology of human rights with
a decolonizing, intersectional approach – beyond the division between optimistic
theories extending Western LGBTI progressive politics, or pessimistic postcolonial
queer analyses. To investigate organizations’ strategies leading to the Malta 2015
Commonwealth Heads of Government Meeting, the research utilizes sources of
data including event observation and website sources, initiating analysis of online
environments. The analysis deploys social movement theory to examine how and
why Kaleidoscope selected the Commonwealth as a political opportunity structure
to engage through strategies of framing and articulation of human rights. Invention
of The Commonwealth Equality Network, shaped online and offline by imperial relations
between core and periphery, is analysed via transnational public sphere and
critical theories and argued to indicate a significant restructuring of global queer politics.
It is contended that a consistently decolonizing and intersectional articulation
of human rights is needed.
