Making Nairobi ‘open for business’: the economic case for LGBTQ+ rights, speculative governmentality, and corporate investments in the future at the (queer and economic) frontier

Olimpia Burchiellaro

Review of International Political Economy, 2025, vol. 32, issue 6, 2055-2085

Abstract: This article examines the speculative narratives about the future underpinning the economic case for LGBTQ+ rights in Nairobi. Through discursive and ethnographic analysis, I explore the economic case as an imaginative technology—one of several speculative tools that corporations use to frame frontier markets as investible. I argue that corporate investments in LGBTQ+ rights operate as a form of speculative governmentality that attempt to manage risk, attract capital, and harness the productive potential of queerness in an effort to posit the city as ‘LGBTQ-friendly’ and ‘open for business’. The article contributes to queer IPE by highlighting how queerness is entangled in global capital accumulation and the search for new frontiers of (homo)capitalist expansion. In particular, moving beyond pinkwashing critiques, I show how queer sexuality is central to and constitutive of global political economy not simply as moral or political achievement but as a speculative economic strategy. At the same time, the article also moves beyond top-down understandings of governmentality and LGBTQ+ rights as capitalist mechanisms for value extraction by focusing on how the economic case is brokered by activists on the ground. This reveals LGBTQ+ rights as a site of contestation with uneven, negotiated, and ambivalent governmental effects in practice.

Date: 2025
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DOI: 10.1080/09692290.2025.2522895

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