Queer Under Siege reveals that collective repression is not only a global system, but also a moral process that shapes how people tolerate (and even justify) exclusion and oppression. Baris Cayli Messina probes the question of what kind of society sustains its morality by expelling those who are already most vulnerable? and interrogates why societies continually generate the conditions that produce repression, requiring the unyielding struggle of queer people to survive.

Cayli Messina draws on archives, court records, suicide letters, and activist testimony from the around the world to develop a conceptual framework to trace this process through three interlocking forms and mechanisms: moral eviction, which defines moral repression; punitive hypervisibility, which animates political repression; and sanctioned oblivion, which consolidates epistemic repression.

Queer Under Siege shows that the criminalization of queer life is not a misfire, but an intentional and systematic action that makes disparate societies perceive social order as safe. Arguing that survival is a political act across borders and generations, Cayli Messina traces effective methods of queer activism.

Baris Cayli Messina is Associate Professor in the School of Social and Political Sciences at the University of Lincoln, United Kingdom. He is Editor-in-Chief of the International Social Science Journal and the Founding Editor of the series Temple Studies in Criminalization, History, and Society. He is the author of Violence and Militants: From Ottoman Rebellions to Jihadist, A Slow Revolution: The Betrayal of Sicilians and their War on the Mafia, and The Autocrat's Playbook: How Authoritarians Weaponize Morality to Destroy Societies.