Transnational Activist Networks Research Articles

Travelling Barricades: Transnational Networks, Diffusion and the Dynamics of 1980s Squatter Conflicts in Western Europe

This paper reconstructs and compares four squatter conflicts in Amsterdam, Nijmegen, Copenhagen and Hamburg during the 1980s in which squatters defended themselves from eviction from occupied houses by barricading entire streets. Remarkable similarities can be observed in how these conflicts developed. Was this the result of international contacts between the squatters, of similarities between the cities, or did the construction of barricades set in motion more general dynamics that influenced protest dynamics? This paper warns against overestimating the influence of transnational activist networks. Although the conflicts unfolded in similar ways while squatters fostered international contacts, the latter alone do not suffice to explain the former. Instead, this paper highlights the ‘social function’ of the barricade and the inherent conflict dynamics that barricade building set in motion.

The Political Economy of Learning in Agrarian Contention

Abstract This article explains how an interracial alliance that promotes a radical restructuring of agriculture, featuring African American small-scale producers, farmers of Euro-American descent, Latino farmworkers, and Indigenous people, has come into existence. As I argue, this coalition formed due to changes in international political economy and within transnational activist networks. Specifically, the implementation of neoliberal international trade deals beginning in the 1970s disrupted farmers’ livelihoods in the Global North and South. It drove migrants from countries such as Mexico and Guatemala to the United States with their experiences of agrarian reform, and it saw US farmers simultaneously begin to engage farmers of color in new and important ways. The transnational activist networks that facilitated visits and meetings subsequently provided opportunities for activists to learn from one another and have new experiences, which, as I explore, led people from diverse backgrounds to agree on various principles and forge a common vision.

Transnational uncivil society networks: kleptocracy’s global fightback against liberal activism

What is the global social context for the insertion of kleptocratic elites into the putatively liberal international order? Drawing on cases from our work on Eurasia and Africa, we sketch a concept of ‘transnational uncivil society’, which we contrast to ‘transnational activist networks’. While the latter denotes the liberalizing practices of global civil society, the former suggests a specific series of clientelistic relations across borders, which open space for uncivil elites. This distinction animates a growing line of conflict in global politics. These kleptocrats eject liberal activists from their own territories and create new spaces to whitewash their own reputations and build their own transnational networks. To do so, they hire political consultants and reputation managers, engage in public philanthropy and forge new relationships with major global institutions. We show how these strategies of reputation-laundering are neither illicit nor marginal, but very much a product of the actors, institutions and markets generated by the liberal international order. We compare and contrast the scope and purpose of civil and uncivil society networks, we explore the increasing globalization of Eurasian and African elites as a concerted strategy to distance themselves from associations with their political oppression and kleptocracy in their home countries, and recast themselves as productive and respected cosmopolitans.

‘On the Border, I Learned How to Advocate’: Borderlands as Political Spaces for Burmese Women’s Activism

Abstract This article explores the political space of the border through the experiences of women activists from Myanmar, for whom the borderlands in Thailand have provided refuge as well as a conducive environment for political mobilization. At the same time, the border renders refugee activists insecure and precarious. Drawing on life history interviews, our analysis expands conceptualizations of the border as a dynamic political space by illustrating its dual capacity to both facilitate and constrain the political agency of refugee women from Myanmar. In particular, the spatial and temporal fluidity and in-betweenness of the border is shown to foster both repression and resistance. Exploring the character and salience of the border as a space for activism over time, we demonstrate how the political space of the border is relational, constituted in interaction with other political spaces, such as politics and governance in Myanmar, transnational activist networks, and the politics of international aid.

Philanthropic Foundations and Transnational Activist Networks: Ford and the Inter-American Institute of Human Rights

AbstractFoundations provide key funds for nongovernmental organizations. We know little about what they do for transnational activism or the mechanisms via which they seek/achieve influence. We carve a middle ground between those who see donors as supporting actors in transnational advocacy networks (TANs) and those who think they distort activism through impersonal market forces. Our negotiation-oriented approach looks at the micro-dynamics of donor–grantee relations. We argue that influence is a function of donors’ organizational characteristics. Only some, especially foundations, have the vision/means to shape grantees. However, internal complexity can cause coordination problems, complicating influence. Additionally, if many donors exist, recipients’ leverage increases. It does so too if their expertise is in short supply. Using archival evidence, we reconstruct how Ford tried to shape the Inter-American Human Rights Institute, a pillar of the region's human rights regime, and the factors conditioning success. For Ford, the Institute could play a role in a fledging TAN, but only if it downplayed its emphasis on research and directly engaged activists. Coupled with analyses of USAID’s relationship with the Institute and Ford's relationship with Americas Watch, we shed light on the activities of an important class of donor and illuminate foundations’ role in the development of TANs.

From the streets to the town halls: Municipalist platforms in the post-Yugoslav space

In the last decade, urban social movements that emerged in the Yugoslav successor states decided to form political platforms to enter the institutional arena, often after years of mobilisation for the right to the city. Their aim was to seize power at the local level, trying to provide an answer to the crisis of representative democracy and to oppose the process of centralisation of power. These platforms ran for elections in Zagreb (Croatia) and Belgrade (Serbia), to reclaim local autonomy on societal, environmental, economic and political matters. Based on ethnographic work, document analysis and a series of in-depth interviews with activists, this article explores the trajectories of two platforms, ‘Zagreb Is Ours’ ( Zagreb je naš) in Zagreb, Croatia, and ‘We Won’t Let Belgrade D(r)own’ ( Ne davimo Beograd) in Belgrade, Serbia. It analyses the factors accounting for the choice of urban activists to embrace new municipalist ideas as strategic ideological and political positioning of their electoral platforms, arguing that the reasons are twofold: the embeddedness into regional and transnational activist networks, which facilitated the process of diffusion of new municipalist ideas across Europe and locally, and the resonance of new municipalism with socialist Yugoslavia’s decentralised system of self-management and direct democracy, an historical experience that the platforms’ initiators partially reappraised.

Governing regional migration from the ‘bottom-up’: a nodal approach to the role of transnational activist networks in Asia

ABSTRACT This paper investigates the emerging regional governance of migration from the perspective of migrant rights activists and their strategies in advancing a rights-based framework in contrast to the ‘management’ (i.e. control-centred) approach typically championed by states. The key objective is to use the study of civil society activism, through its nodes and networks, to develop a ‘bottom-up’ approach as an alternative to the dominant perspective taken on multilateral migration governance thus far. Drawing on Regulatory Theory, we conceive migration policy as a dynamic process that occurs at multiple levels involving a broad spectrum of institutional actors. In stressing the importance of the increasingly networked form that policy and political interventions are taking, our paper proposes a nodal account of migration governance which is applied specifically to civil society organisations’ attempts to influence governance. Our empirical focus is the case of one key protagonist in the sphere of migrant rights advocacy, the Migrant Forum in Asia (MFA), which constitutes the largest network of migrant rights organisations spanning countries of origin and destination across most of Asia. Its central role, as we argue, is that of an interlocutor between intersecting and interacting organisational networks. In this sense, it takes on a ‘nodal’ function.

Dispossession and dissent: migrant activism against mortgages in Madrid

ABSTRACT The Spanish right to housing movement has become a reference for housing struggles across the globe. Yet the movement’s marked diversity, particularly in a moment of rising xenophobia in Europe, has largely escaped notice. In this article, I reveal how Andean activists impelled the housing movement in Madrid, articulating lines of protest and methods of action that would then prove integral to the movement’s arsenal of resistance. In untangling the migrant history of the housing movement, I argue differential experiences with inequality and discrimination on the one hand, and alternative modes of habitation, cooperation, and social justice on the other mean migrants can serve as key catalysts in social mobilizations. In considering diverse social movements, meanwhile, I probe not only previous engagement in activist struggles, but also migrant lifeworlds that influenced later dissent. Again accounts that privilege extant transnational activist networks and/or local struggles over collective consumption, this methodological orientation demonstrates how to trace the role of modest transnational flows and subaltern geographies within contemporary social movement struggles.

Transnational abortion pill flows and the political geography of abortion in Ireland

ABSTRACT The growing availability of abortion pills has transformed the safety and accessibility of abortion worldwide, especially in countries with very restrictive abortion laws. The public health implications of this abortion technology have been widely recognized, but its political and geographical impacts require closer attention. This paper examines the geography of illegal abortion pills in the Republic of Ireland, where abortion pills became widely accessible through transnational activist networks, despite a constitutional abortion ban. It contributes to political geography and international relations conversations about materiality and sovereignty by mapping the flows of abortion pills into Ireland and discussing the varied ways that the institutions of the state conceptualized and responded to these flows. It argues that the state’s response to the influx of illegal abortion pills was predominantly shaped by its understanding of their territorial significance: the state sought to intercept pills at the border and discourage their use at home while advocating abortion travel abroad, eventually legislating for abortion reform that would offer tightly controlled access authorized by doctors. The paper advances the research agendas in reproductive and abortion geographies by bringing them into conversation with broader debates on territory and politics.

Relief and revolution: Russian émigrés’ political remittances and the building of political transnationalism

ABSTRACTThis article examines the transnational networks based in Britain between 1881 and 1914 that aspired to affect Russian politics from abroad. It contends that the emigration of Russian revolutionaries to Britain in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries was only the first in a series of continued political movements across national borders and beyond state structures. Rather than examining the migration of Russian political exiles as a singular flight of movement undertaken in desperation, I argue that these émigrés’ westward migration initiated transnational communities that coalesced around a common conception of fundamental political rights, that could be claimed regardless of nationality, and that these activist cohorts, in turn engaged in public endeavours designed to influence governmental actions and foment political change. For many prominent Russian radicals, emigration to places like Britain was not an enforced exile from interventions in the politics of their homeland, but rather a means to continue anti-tsarist agitation through transnational collaborative activist networks, and the international movement and exchange, rather than unidirectional distribution, of money, communications, propaganda and people; interventions that I define as political remittances.

Weaving Transnational Activist Networks: Balancing International and Bottom-up Capacity-building Strategies for Nonviolent Action in Latin America

Latin America has been a laboratory for innovative strategic nonviolent action to confront oppression, corruption, human rights violations, and authoritarianism. One of the most salient explanations for why some movements achieve greater scale and effectiveness in meeting their objectives is the skills of movement organizers in unifying the population, planning strategic moves, and maintaining nonviolent discipline. The training and education to improve these skills often requires resources, transnational networks, and information sharing from external actors to complement the contextual knowledge, local legitimacy, and embedded institutional networks of local insiders. This essay proposes a model for international support of nonviolent action training and education that avoids the pitfalls of imposed liberal peacebuilding and colonizing hierarchies that could undermine movement legitimacy and expose activists to greater scrutiny and repression. In order to illustrate how the model works in practice, the essay examines the case of the Regional Institute for the Study and Practice of Strategic Nonviolent Action in the Americas.

Leslie James, George Padmore and Decolonisation from Below: Pan-Africanism, the Cold War and the End of Empire

The study of black and African intellectual history, and its location in transnational activist networks, has recently generated insightful studies that take such people’s ideas seriously and locate them in a mid-twentieth century context in which contested notions of decolonization and racial liberation were debated in new media, private and public spaces, in metropoles and across the empires. Leslie James makes a major contribution to these works with her enlightening study of George Padmore’s life and, particularly, his ideas, demonstrating that, perhaps more than any other individual, he shaped a generation of radical Africanist thinkers and the political direction of newly independent Anglophone Africa.

State Spaces of Resistance: Industrial Tree Plantations and the Struggle for Land in Laos

AbstractLand grabbing has transformed rural environments across the global South, generating resistance or political reactions “from below”. In authoritarian countries like Laos, where resource investments are coercively developed and insulated from political dissent, resistance appears absent at first glance. Yet, it is occurring under the radar, largely outside transnational activist networks. In this article, we examine how resistance can protect access to rural lands in contexts where it is heavily repressed. Resistance here occurs with, rather than against the state by foregrounding the contradictions of land use and ownership within state spaces, such as competing goals of large‐scale industrial plantations versus smallholder agriculture and national forest conservation. Such contradictions are engaged by using historical, place‐based political connections to exploit the scalar frictions of a fragmented state and occupying plantation clearance sites to highlight contested lands in situ. Nonetheless, such strategies remain spatially and socially uneven amongst the Lao peasantry.

Transnational Advocacy and the Politics of Sustainable Development in a Small Island Developing State: An Uncertain Future for the Grenada Dove

This article presents a qualitative case study of a transnational activist network (TAN) to protect the endangered Grenada Dove that achieved measurable success in the 1990s and then reformed in the 2000s when a planned resort complex and new law allowing the privatization of public lands renewed threats to the dove habitat. Unlike many of the success stories of TAN influence, this case questions the long-term efficacy of TANs engaged in political contestation over biodiversity conservation in small, economically dependent democracies. Findings suggest that when TANs participate directly in political contestation over national development policy, they do amplify the voices of local activists but lose influence and cohesion when engaged in domestic-level political contestation against alliances of elected officials and transnational corporations, especially when powerful and popular politicians, responding to exogenous economic shocks, link their “sustainable” development priorities to foreign direct investment and competitiveness in global markets.

Transnational Activist Networks and Rising Powers: Transparency and Environmental Concerns in the Brazilian National Development Bank

This article studies how transnational advocacy networks can influence international development finance. Transnational activists shaped the World Bank's lending by increasing its transparency and limiting its socioenvironmental impacts. Developing countries can now look toward rising powers’ national development banks to finance their infrastructure and energy projects. The national development banks’ weak transparency and socioenvironmental standards pose a new challenge for transnational activism. Can activists leverage strategies used in World Bank reform to influence emerging power national development banks? We argue that whether a target is a supranational or national institution shapes the deployment and effectiveness of the strategies activists can use for influence. A supranational mandate and structure facilitates the deployment and effectiveness of a direct strategy focused on the transnational level, targeting the bank itself, and an indirect strategy focused on the national contexts of the bank's shareholders and borrowers. In contrast, a national mandate and structure encourages activists to deploy influence strategies solely in the context of the lending state. They furthermore make indirect strategies more effective than direct ones. We illustrate our argument by exploiting variation in the success across campaigns of a transnational network created to reform the Brazilian National Development Bank.

Hadden, Jennifer. 2015. Networks in Contention: The Divisive Power of Climate Change. Cambridge, MA: Cambridge University Press.

The 2009 UN Climate Change Conference in Copenhagen was marked by an unprecedented level of contentious action by civil society activists. Conference organizers consequently increased restrictions on all civil society participation. This frustrated activists who favored working within the UN process to influence global climate policy. Jennifer Hadden’s Networks in Contention examines the internal politics of the transnational climate change network, both before and during the Copenhagen conference, to understand why Copenhagen was so contentious, why some organizations adopted contention and others did not, and how changes in the network and members’ tactics influenced climate politics. The book contributes to the ample literature on transnational activist networks by opening the proverbial “black box” of the transnational climate change network and revealing its internal struggles, divisions, and decisionmaking processes. Hadden’s central argument is that the structure of transnational networks (i.e., the relations among network members) influences the way the networks perform, and therefore their ability to influence policy. When it comes to explaining organizational decisions, she argues that “network ties can be more important than [organizational] attributes” (p. 87). Such ties can even mediate the incentives produced by political opportunity structures. This observation does not mean that political opportunity structures and organizational attributes are irrelevant. Hadden credits changing political opportunities with the dramatic increase in the number and diversity of civil society groups working on climate change at the 2009 Copenhagen conference. Particularly important was the addition of organizations from the global justice movement, which had a long history with contentious action. Hadden’s main focus, however, is on how these changes affected the structure of the transnational climate change network and the implications for civil society organizations’ ability to influence global climate policy. One might expect the additional resources and expertise brought by new civil society participants to translate into increased influence. Hadden skillfully uses social network analysis to explain why the increase in network size nevertheless decreased the climate change network’s overall connectivity, and thus members’ ability to impact climate change policy. The cliques that formed rarely

Islam's Modern Day Ibn Battutas: Gülen Teachers Journeying Towards the Divine

There is a longstanding debate on whether Muslims can be modern. Some argue that they can only be so if they forsake their traditions and embrace rationalism. In this article I argue that the Gülen Movement, a transnational Turkish Muslim educational activist network has found a middle ground by blending religious traditions with modern day realities. Drawing on interviews from the movement's teachers and graduates of its schools, from Turkey, Central Asia, Afghanistan and Pakistan, I explore, through the prism of al-riḥla fī ṭalab al-ʿilm (travel in search of knowledge), their maintenance of the longstanding Islamic ritual of travel as a means of excelling both professionally and religiously. In turn, I demonstrate how the movement, on a number of levels, effectively reconciles the spiritual and the everyday through updating Islamic practices to better integrate themselves and other Muslims into a globalised world.

Seeing Indonesia From Behind Bars: An Interview With Vannessa Hearman

In the aftermath of the 1965 military coup that brought right-wing General Suharto to power in Indonesia, (para)military death squads killed between half and one million alleged communists (especially union members, landless farmers, and intellectuals). Vannessa Hearman completed her doctoral thesis at the University of Melbourne on the 1965–1968 anti-communist killings and violence in East Java, and the New Order regime’s struggle to win acceptance following the killings. She is currently a lecturer at the Department of Indonesian Studies, University of Sydney. In one of her current research projects, she is researching transnational activist and friendship networks born out of letters written by and to political prisoners incarcerated between 1965 and 1985 as part of the anticommunist persecution in Indonesia. In this interview, conducted in Perth, Australia, in July 2014, Vannessa Hearman speaks about political prisoners in Indonesia under the Suharto regime, their exchange of letters with pen friends around the globe, and what can be learned from these letters until today.

South Korea’s Democratization Movement of the 1970s and 80s and Communicative Interaction in Transnational Ecumenical Networks

Transnational network studies in international relations, sociology, and history have grown rapidly since the 1990s. Research often tends to take a top-down (North-South) approach in which developed countries or international non-governmental organizations (INGOs) are assumed to “help” the developing ones. However, this one-way approach cannot fully explain the dynamics of transnational activist networks. The following paper aims to better understand the dynamics of transnational networks by focusing on the ‘communicative interaction’ among various groups supporting the democratization movement in South Korea. It specifically investigates the formation and activities of transnational information exchange networks in Japan and the United States that worked with Korean Christians. In addition, this research examines the meaning and political implications of forming transnational networks with struggling others; transnational networks can work reflexively by problematizing the structural relationships among differently situated actors.

Japanese History Textbook Controversies, 1995-2010: Transnational Activism versus Neo-nationalist Movement

How and to what extent did both transnational activist networks and Japanese conservative forces affect Japanese historical narrative and textbook policy during the period of 1995–2010? Addressing this question, this article first establishes the concepts of Type I and II transnational activism regarding history textbooks. The article argues that starting in the late 1990s, a positive trend of Japanese historical narrative and textbook policy was reversed by a systematic conservative campaign, despite the presence of strong Type I and II transnational activism. Nevertheless, Type I transnational activism – pushing for a perpetrator state to change its policy – played a pivotal role in lowering the adoption rate of Japan's nationalistic history textbooks at the local level, although not reversing the conservative direction of Japan's historical narrative and textbook policy at the state level. In the long run, with vibrant Type I transnational activism it would be necessary to strengthen Type II transnational activism – textbook cooperation and historians' dialogue – in order to resolve the issue of biased Japanese historical textbooks.