It's related.

Leader election generally[1] requires consensus among distributed processes, and global locks generally[1] require consensus as well. The benefit of this is that both problems can be solved on top of a common consensus implementation which is what http://atomix.io does.

1: I say generally because you can do fancy things with fancy clocks to avoid running operations through a quorum under certain circumstances, but these carry caveats that preclude them from being reliable enough to use in many use cases.