This day-long conference is co-sponsored by the Duke Human Rights Center at the Kenan Institute for Ethics, the Center for International and Comparative Law at Duke Law School, Women's and Sexuality Studies, and the Center for LGBT Life. Recent efforts to combat violence and discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation and gender identity have made remarkable progress internationally. But these efforts have also been met with resistance and backlashes in some countries. The rapid changes in the legal, political, social and cultural landscapes for LGBT individuals raise fundamental questions about the strategies that activists, lawyers and NGOs deploy to promote LGBT equality. The symposium will bring together a small group of leading scholars, activists and attorneys whose work focuses on LGBT issues in different parts of the world to share insights and experiences across the disciplinary and academic-practitioner divides.