The Transnational Activist: An Introduction

Abstract

The identity and association of the ‘transnational activist’ so far have not been the subject of detailed historical scholarship. And although historians lately have begun to explore social movements in a global historical perspective, their descriptions of figures of global activism appear ideologically too narrow to describe all forms of transnationalism connected to social movements. This volume therefore proposes the term ‘transnational activist’ and approaches the history of this actor by examining five central controversies: those of periodisation (is this activist a figure mainly of the twentieth century?); context (what are the historical contexts that nurtured the emergence of transnational social movements?); action (what does the activist do?); form (what ‘types’ of transnational activists are there, and do they differ when considering different periods of globalisation?); and dynamics (examining how reinvented actions may themselves become new objects of diffusion, thereby conceptualising the process as more “continuous” and recursive). When discussing these controversies, this collection deliberately focusses on the Anglo World, seeking to place the ‘transnational activist’ in the context of imperial relationships and movements, and to bring these into dialogue with the more familiar ‘global’ activism of the late-twentieth and early-twenty-first centuries. Thereby, in spite of not being exhaustive, it considers a long time period, and a variety of colonial and post-colonial contexts, as well as of activists from many different movements.