The map of same-sex partnership rights in 2026 is uneven, contested, and moving in both directions at once. About thirty-seven countries recognize same-sex marriage. Another dozen offer civil unions or registered partnerships without marriage. Roughly seventy criminalize same-sex relationships outright, with penalties ranging from fines to imprisonment to, in twelve jurisdictions, death. Between the legal-marriage zone and the criminalization zone lies a wide middle: countries that neither recognize nor criminalize, that tolerate de facto but offer no legal infrastructure.
The geography is not random. Marriage recognition clusters in Western Europe, the Americas, Australasia, parts of southern Africa, and Taiwan. Civil-union-without-marriage occupies a smaller band including Italy, Czechia, Croatia, Greece (until 2024 marriage), and parts of central Europe. Criminalization concentrates in the Middle East, North Africa, sub-Saharan Africa, and parts of South and Southeast Asia. The middle zone — neither recognized nor criminalized — covers most of East Asia, large parts of Latin America before recent reforms, and historically the post-Soviet states until the recent rollback.
The map is not static. The 2024–2026 period has seen significant additions: Greece, Liechtenstein, Estonia, Thailand. It has also seen significant subtractions: Russia's expanded "LGBT propaganda" laws, Uganda's Anti-Homosexuality Act, Ghana's bill, Hungarian and Polish constitutional amendments, the post-2022 retrenchment across several jurisdictions. The trend line that observers in 2015 read as monotonic — recognition expanding, criminalization receding — has become bidirectional. Some places are moving toward partnership recognition. Some are moving toward criminalization or recriminalization. The global trajectory depends on which line you draw through which subset.
The romantic-lens reading is that legal recognition of same-sex partnership is the structural acknowledgment that the bond two people of the same sex form with each other is the same kind of bond that two people of different sexes form. The legal form — marriage, civil union, registered partnership — matters less than the recognition itself, and the bundle of rights attached. The bundle typically includes: inheritance, taxation, immigration sponsorship, medical decision-making, hospital visitation, parental presumption, joint adoption, pension survivor benefits, joint property, divorce procedure with equitable division. A jurisdiction that grants the form without the bundle has granted little. A jurisdiction that grants the bundle without the form — through statutory accumulation rather than a single relationship status — has granted much.
William Eskridge's analysis of the civil-union era argued that the form matters more than the bundle, because the form carries the social meaning. The marriage-equality movement adopted this view. Nancy Polikoff disagreed, arguing that the bundle could and should be granted to many family forms without marriage as the gate. The historical record sits between them: the form has carried the meaning, but the bundle is what people use, and a recognized partnership without the bundle is a hollow status.
The 2024 retrenchment complicates any simple narrative. Russia's expanded propaganda laws criminalize public expression of same-sex relationship status. Uganda's Anti-Homosexuality Act carries the death penalty for "aggravated homosexuality." Ghana's bill, if enacted, criminalizes identification as LGBTQ. These jurisdictions are not the same kind of legal regime as a jurisdiction that simply does not recognize same-sex marriage; they are actively prosecuting. The map needs to distinguish at least four zones: marriage-recognizing, civil-union-recognizing, non-recognizing-but-tolerating, and criminalizing. The boundaries among these zones are where the political action is.
ILGA-Europe's annual reports track the European subset in granular detail. The European map has been generally improving — Slovenia, Switzerland, Liechtenstein, Estonia, Greece have all added marriage recognition since 2022 — while specific countries have moved against (Hungary's constitutional amendment, Poland's pre-2023 government). Sub-Saharan Africa has been heterogeneous: South Africa has had marriage equality since 2006; Botswana decriminalized in 2019; Uganda recriminalized aggressively in 2023. Latin America has been generally expanding — Chile, Costa Rica, Ecuador, Mexico (state by state then national), Colombia all recognize marriage. East Asia has been slower: Taiwan in 2019, Thailand in 2024, with Japan and South Korea persistently non-recognizing despite high public support in Japan.
Marie-Amélie George's work on the legal-cultural mechanisms of recognition emphasizes that the law-on-paper map is only part of the story. The lived-experience map differs substantially. Countries with same-sex marriage may have hostile religious-conservative subcultures where the legal recognition is operative but socially fragile. Countries without legal recognition may have urban subcultures where same-sex partnership functions normally in daily life. The lived experience is shaped by the interaction of legal status, social attitude, and local enforcement, and varies dramatically within countries.
The collective question for the next decade is whether the bidirectional trajectory will stabilize, with a relatively fixed boundary between recognition and criminalization, or whether one direction will resume dominance. The 2015–2022 period suggested a one-directional trend; the 2022–2026 period has been more turbulent. The map is now politically active in both directions, and the question of where any given country sits five years from now is genuinely open.