Something's wrong here: transnational dissent and the unimagined community

Abstract

Based on ethnographic research in 2011–2012 this paper explores the production of a transnational community through various dissenting practices in Israel–Palestine. In a critique of instrumental and structural approaches to transnational dissent, from micro-level framing processes to the macro-level concepts like Global Civil Society (GCS) and networks, it builds understandings of the affective dimensions of protest and proposes that a transnational community is being produced through a shared feeling of wrongness. Drawing upon recent reassessments of community conceptualisations [Amit, V., & Rapport, N. (2002). The trouble with community: Anthropological reflections on movement, identity and collectivity. London: Pluto; Djelic, M.-L., & Quack, S. (Eds.). (2010a). Transnational communities: Shaping global governance. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press; Rapport, N., & Amit, V. (2012a). Community, cosmopolitanism and the problem of human commonality (anthropology, culture and society) (Kindle.). London: Pluto Press], this paper asks why the moral actors from GCS limit their imagined community in spatial terms. In a world of movement, where the everyday practice of community is as likely to be defined through shared worldviews as it is though shared place, the challenge is to ask how we may engage in recognising and re-imagining transnational activism as not merely an episodic and instrumental gesellschaft but as a praxis of fluid, interconnected and self-reproducing gemeinschaften.