A New Era of Sex Worker Activism in the EU? How Intersectional Coalitions Empower the Advocacy of Sex Worker Organizations at EU Level

In this paper we analyse the fundamental role that intersectionality plays in the recent advocacy of sex worker organizations at EU level. In particular, we focus on their formation of an intersectional coalition of sex worker, migrant, anti-racist and LGBTI EU-level civil society organizations, the European Coalition on Sex Workers’ Rights and Inclusion, to advocate against the EU’s most recent expression of the EU’s neo-abolitionist approach to prostitution: the European Parliament’s 2023 resolution on the regulation of prostitution in the EU: its cross-border implications and impact on gender equality and women’s rights. We contend that the creation of such intersectional coalition represents a radical innovation in the historical advocacy of sex worker organisations at EU level, and accounts for its unprecedented success in contesting the hegemony of neo-abolitionism therein, as a key strategy enabling them to overcome the structural barriers that civil society organizations representing intersectional constituencies face at EU level.