Constructing Global Feminism: Transnational Advocacy Networks and Russian Women's Activism

Abstract

ecent scholarship on social change emphasizes the importance of transnational advocacy networks and a globalizing civil society, in which borders between states become permeable to international political activism (Keck and Sikkink 1998; Della Porta, Kriesi, and Rucht 1999; Tarrow 1999). Such transnational organizing has blossomed within the women's movement, as elsewhere, and has affected the types of resources and discourses available to activists. Efforts to produce change in gender relations can now rely heavily on elite and expert social networks, in which women's organizing has become increasingly professionalized and NGO-ized (Alvarez 1997; Ray 1999; Silliman 1999). Local feminist activists now participate self-consciously in international forums, share a common discourse, and construct a women's movement understood as being both local and global (Bystydzienski and Sekhon 1999). This change in political activity has occurred at the same time as a global decline in women's mass mobilization and in the use of contentious forms of public protest (Freeman and Johnson 1999). In this article, we examine the nature and meaning of the transnational mobilization of women's movements, using as a specific case study a set of seminars sponsored by U.S. women activists and intended to support women's political activism in Russia. Our main argument is that transnational organizing is not a unidirectional process. At the point of intersection between the local and the global, where these seminars take place, resources and discourses become objects of struggle, which neither the Russian nor the American women's movement activists unilaterally control. Moreover, reciprocal benefits accrue to both local and extralocal