How did you come to choose your research topic?
I have worked on queer activism more broadly for a long time, both in academia and in practice. I did my final thesis in law school on the protection of LGBTI+ rights in Latin America, and then during my master’s I went on to research the activism of the Brazilian gay movement, as it was called at the time in the 1980s. So, it has sort of always been a topic of interest, also because I have always myself engaged in queer activism within NGOs in Brazil, and later also international NGOs. In that sense, having already done research on both the Brazilian and Latin American context, when applying for the PhD here in Geneva, I thought it would be the perfect place to expand this research interest to an international level, and start to look at how the forms of activism changed when we were talking about a more transnational type of network. And there is no better place to observe how these dynamics unfold than Geneva, which is the heart of the international human rights system and where the main United Nations human rights mechanisms are based.
Can you describe your thesis questions?
My main research question was very straightforward. I was curious to learn about the process of how certain people come to be perceived as “humans,” both in the legal and the philosophical senses. This is because, despite hearing over and over that “all human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights,” which is the opening of Art. 1 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights — and you can see this very phrase spread across many of the items in the UN gift shop in Geneva as well — despite hearing that, social reality shows us that not everyone is that free and not everyone is that equal. So, I wanted to understand how this transformation into being recognised as a “human” might occur, looking particularly at queer people, sexual and gender diverse people, as a case study. Accordingly, my main question was: How do certain individuals, or groups of individuals with shared characteristics, move from a position of erasure and exclusion to being recognised as legitimate subjects and rights-bearers under international human rights law and within the broader social discourse on human rights?
I also had three sub-questions to help structure how I would approach this rather broad kind of inquiry. I was also particularly interested in the role of civil society in this process, because, historically, queer civil society, in both national and transnational contexts, has been a very strong and resilient actor across different social movements. My sub-questions were:
- How does the interaction with international institutions, such as the varied UN mechanisms, affect and indirectly shape the action of a transnationally organised and internationally focused queer rights movement?
- How have these international human rights bodies been themselves affected, or shaped, by the actions of queer advocates?
- What strategies are mobilised by queer international activism to performatively push for new boundaries in defining the “universality” of human rights, and consequently inscribe themselves as new subject positions within human rights discourse?
What methodology did you use to approach those questions?
To try and answer all of those questions, I combined mainly three different strategies for data collection. In this respect, it’s also important to note that I did an interdisciplinary PhD: while international law was my main discipline, I also did a minor in the Department of Anthropology and Sociology, which influenced a lot the methods I used.
So, first, I did quite a bit of archival research. The main purpose here was to gather the historical evidence of how the queer transnational movement, back then the “gay” movement, first started engaging with the notion of “human rights.” I did this by looking at the work of one specific international civil society organisation, which was the first one of its kind to be founded: the International LGBTI Association (ILGA World), which was founded in 1978 under the name International Gay Association (IGA). To this day, ILGA remains in activity and is actually based in Geneva. So, you see the first more clear connection with the United Nations starting to appear there.
Then I also conducted ethnographic fieldwork, which included both participant observation and interviews. Participant observation is basically a complicated way of saying that I spent a lot of time hanging out with activists and diplomats and following meetings at the Palais des Nations, which is the main headquarters of the UN in Geneva. Then I also conducted 65 interviews with activists, diplomats, and UN officers so that I could learn more about their work and gain the insights into the inner reality of this type of advocacy and diplomacy.
It was the combination of all of these methods that allowed me to answer the questions I had initially posed.
Can you tell us about these answers?
That’s maybe the hardest to summarise. As a lot of my research is based on an ethnographic account of activism, there’s a great deal of it that is about giving a micro-analysis at a very granular level, and then trying to identify how this impacts more macro-level discussions.
But I would say that the major contribution of my work is to shed light on the protagonism of civil society, and particularly queer and feminist civil society, in international affairs and international law-making. And this is true historically, when I demonstrate how civil society activism was the key agent in enabling the contemporary association between gay or queer rights and human rights; but it is also true contemporaneously, meaning that civil society activism on gender and sexuality at the UN occupies a very prominent role, and diplomats are actually dependent on it due, among other factors, to states’ lack of expertise and capacity to work on some of these issues. In other words, my PhD makes visible the centrality of civil society in getting queer people recognised as subjects of international human rights law — a role that is very often obscured by the fact that the states are considered the main entities occupying formal spaces of global governance.
What could be the social and political implications of your thesis?
I think there are many. A first and very important one is to show how issues such as sexual orientation and gender identity, or sexual and gender diversity, were historically excluded from a human rights framework. You had even big progressive NGOs, like Amnesty International, who at the beginning were very sceptical of associating themselves to these topics because they’d see it as potentially harmful to their other human rights initiatives.
Then there is also the importance of unveiling how both rights and subjects who are entitled to those rights are not fixed categories, and how they can actually be crafted or brought to life by strenuous activism work. This is what I demonstrated for the case of queer people, but it also opens up possibilities for what different categories of rights and subjects we can build in the future. This finally connects as well to another central element of my research that was also concerned with identifying the drivers behind this somewhat successful case. So, how can other movements replicate this case to push their agendas within the UN institutional mechanisms, despite the UN still being very much dominated by state actors? And, on the other hand, how can we foresee and identify the points of vulnerability in these types of action and thus prevent that renewed forms of backlash undo decades of hard work that has been able to advance the struggle for sexual and gender diversity worldwide?
What are you doing now?
I am now a Max Weber Postdoctoral Researcher at the European University Institute (EUI), where I’m working on a project on “anti-gender” mobilisation in international legal discourse.
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On 6 October 2025, Rafael Carrano Lelis defended summa cum laude his PhD thesis in International Law, titled “Queer International Activism: Subject-Making in International Human Rights Law”. Professor Janne Nijman presided over the committee, which included Professor Fuad Zarbiyev and Associate Professor Julie Billaud, Thesis Co-Supervisors, Professor Samuel Moyn, Faculty of Law and History, Yale Law School, USA, and Professor Jessica R. Greenberg, Department of Anthropology, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, USA.
Citation of the PhD thesis:
Carrano Lelis, Rafael. “Queer International Activism: Subject-Making in International Human Rights Law.” PhD thesis, Graduate Institute of International and Development Studies, Geneva, 2025.
Access:
An abstract of the PhD thesis is available on this page of the Geneva Graduate Institute’s repository. As the thesis itself is embargoed until October 2028, please contact Dr Carrano Lelis for access.
Banner image: FooTToo / Shutterstock.
Interview by Nathalie Tanner, Research Office.