Breiding

Hansen

I combine normative political theory with empirical research to explore polarisation over sexual and gender diversity in global politics, particularly in the European Union’s internal/external relations and at the United Nations. I use and develop agonistic political theory to understand contestation dynamics and identify ways to depolarise global sexual and gender diversity politics. 

My central research areas are: 

• International norm polarisation
• Global and European Union LGBTIQ+ politics
• Agonistic political theory
• Anti-gender politics
• Queer International Relations
• Challenges to the liberal international order and the emerging multiplex world order.

My doctoral dissertation, 'European Sexual Dis/Integration: An Agonistic Paradox of Legitimacy in a Contested Union', examined the EU’s role in fostering polarisation over LGBTIQ+ equality and its agonistic implications for EU legitimacy. The dissertation won the 2026 Kenneth Armstrong UACES (University Association for Contemporary European Studies) Best PhD Thesis Prize and the 2026 Oscar II's Stipend as the best PhD thesis at the Faculty of Social Sciences, Lund University.

My current research explores how contemporary challenges to the liberal international order—such as the contestation and dismantling of human rights—affect the nature of polarisation in global politics and its implications for the European Union’s external action. 

In particular, the project identifies how the EU can promote human rights for sexual and gender minorities in a world where support for and resistance to LGBTIQ+ equality exist both within and beyond the ‘West’; a world in which polarisation evidently does not follow a geopolitical divide between an LGBTIQ+-friendly ‘West’ and an LGBTIQ+-resistant ‘Rest’.

Polarisation is understood as unfolding within an emerging multiplex world order, characterised by the presence of multiple and competing modernities both within and beyond the West. Hence, the EU faces the challenge of navigating internal disagreement and opposition among Western allies while engaging with a divided world consisting of both potential supporters and opponents of LGBTIQ+ equality.

Using LGBTIQ+ equality as an empirical focus, the project has three interrelated and multidisciplinary aims:
•    Conceptualise polarisation in a multiplex world order as ‘multiplex polarisation’.
•    Explore the implications of multiplex polarisation for the EU’s global role as a promoter of contested norms.
•    Formulate a normative perspective, drawing on agonistic political theory, to assess how the EU ought to promote contested norms under conditions of multiplex polarisation.