Transnational Actors Research Articles

Apartheid Internationalism: Canadian Activism in Defence of White Rule in Southern Africa, 1965–94

From 1965 to 1994, some Canadians participated in transnational activism aimed at supporting or excusing white minority rule in South Africa and Rhodesia. Their ideas, arguments, and interconnections contributed to “apartheid internationalism,” a form of internationalism without central organization yet forged through a common cause and specific (and sometimes covert) political networks. The Canadian fraction of the movement was internally diversified and decentralized. Yet this article shows that ties among activists were considerable. Whether taking pro-apartheid or “anti-anti-apartheid” positions, participants expressed variants of white supremacism, contextualizing and qualifying their views on racial superiority within adjacent right-wing political projects. Not entirely unlike studies of anti-apartheid activism, the examination of the defenders of apartheid demonstrates the importance of race in Canadian international history. It also shows how a range of people beyond politicians and diplomats engaged with transnational issues. Most strikingly, the analysis reveals that liberal internationalism or internationalisms associated with the political left were not the only responses to a decolonizing world. Some Canadians with conservative and authoritarian perspectives refused to accept a decline of white power or found new ways to present their support for white minority governments in southern Africa.

Migranter der blev aktivister: Prodemokratisk mobilisering blandt russiske migranter i Danmark og Norge

Abstract: Migrants turned activists: Pro-democratic mobilisation amongst Russian migrants in Denmark and NorwayThis article explores how emotions and group solidarity influence collective action. Through case study of Russian migrants’ engagement in pro-democratic transnational activism in Denmark and Norway, this article contributes to our understanding of emotions and their role in mobilising and demobilising collective action. The study is based on ethnographic research material consisting of semi-structured individual interviews with Russian activists in Norway (4) and Denmark (7). The analysis show that the role of emotions is two-fold. On the one hand, mobilising emotions, moral shock, and in-group interactions can increase group solidarities and recurring participation. The findings suggest that participation in transnational activism can be considered a strategy that helps the activists cope with sudden and traumatic political developments in their homeland. Interestingly, the study suggests that even emotions usually considered demobilising, such as fear, have the potential to strengthen group solidarity and thereby act as a mobilising factor. On the other hand, demobilising emotions and threats can weaken in-group dynamics and lead to demobilisation.

Prospering the ASEAN Community: How Micro-Region Becomes a Driving Force Prosperity in Indonesia’s Border Area?

Providing space for sub-state actors’ actions at the micro-regional level is a significant trend in advancing regional integration in ASEAN. Transnational activities have contributed to the trade development and optimization of each country’s local production, a strategic goal, and micro-regions have emerged as critical players in this activity. Regional integration will be localized if sub-state actors play a significant role and engage in smaller regionalism activities, such as in border areas. With the goal of encouraging prosperity and reducing development gaps, especially for people in border areas, this research examined the collaboration of sub-state actors across ASEAN countries as an alternative development paradigm. Alternative research hypotheses applicable in various scientific disciplines were included in this research through a qualitative analysis method and a reflective case study approach. This research focused on the roles and activities of sub-state actors in border areas such as the Riau Islands with Malaysia and Singapore, who could work hard together with other sub-state actor entities through the support of a strong leadership network to take quicker and more efficient actions to overcome various issues. This research strengthens the existing literature by discovering that the collaboration of sub-state actors between countries in the border region has played a big role in encouraging the border community to advance and compete in the international arena, and ASEAN has become an institution encouraging and guaranteeing equal development for people in the border areas.

Intersectionality and Fourth-Wave Feminism in Bernardine Evaristo’s Girl, Woman, Other

From the 2010s the feminist movement has gained new impetus through widespread transnational activism, fierce resistance to continuing misogyny and sexual violence as well as by fresh currents in feminist thought. Thus, journalists and scholars characterize the proliferation of both grassroots activism and renewed discourses on women’s rights in the media and in academic, political and public discussions as the emergence of a fourth wave of feminism. As a highly thought-provoking literary manifestation of these renewed discourses, Bernardine Evaristo’s verse novel Girl, Woman, Other (2019) narrates the experiences of twelve (mainly) Black women in all stages of life, from young adulthood to late life. It highlights their concerns with issues of feminism, intersectionality and intergenerational relations and sets them in a historical-comparative perspective. By interweaving the experiences and memories of several generations of women and their repeated encounters with sexual harassment and gender discrimination throughout different times and places, the novel exposes the persistence of misogyny and sexism as a systemic problem. It is especially these intersectional and intergenerational perspectives that draw attention to deep-rooted structural inequalities. Thereby, and in opposition to any post-feminist stances, Evaristo’s writing gives momentum to the present, transnational feminist movement and can be considered one of the foundational literary texts of the fourth wave of feminism.

A Mighty Cooperative

A Mighty Cooperative

On Transnational and International History

In 2006, the American Historical Review published “AHR Conversation: On Transnational History,” and it remains to date among the journal’s most downloaded articles.1 The conversation featured six established historians discussing the so-called transnational turn in the discipline, offering reflections on both the many possibilities and the challenges of researching and writing history that moved across traditional geographic divisions. Nearly two decades later, this transnational history is no longer novel. Indeed, it has become an established approach in the discipline for scholars in almost every subfield. Flows, circuits, transnational actors, mobilities, and exchanges are seemingly everywhere. Sixteen years on, what should we make of the transnational turn? How has it usefully transformed our historical practice? And what might have gotten lost in the centrality it accorded to flows and movement? This forum brings together a dozen younger and mid-career scholars, most of whom came up in our discipline well after the transnational turn had taken place. They were invited to contribute with an eye toward exploring the broad chronological, thematic and spatial range of histories that have come to be called transnational. There are medievalists in the group along with historians of the early modern and of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. And their own research and writing spans across Asia, Europe, the Middle East, Africa, and the Americas. We asked them to reflect upon the larger meanings of their own work in this field as a way of capturing the challenges and satisfactions in working on a transnational canvas. As you will see, their essays are often deeply personal, and most reflect upon the effect of, perhaps, the greatest global event of our generation—the COVID-19 pandemic—on the lives of scholars and on the field.

Transnational Activism against Genocide Denial: Protesting Peter Handke’s Nobel Prize in Literature

AbstractThis article addresses the protest against the 2019 Nobel Prize in Literature to Peter Handke as an example of transnational memory activism. It analyzes from a transnational mobilization perspective how activists achieved a globally visible protest in Stockholm and what role memory played in the protest mobilization and framing. Genocide survivors and former refugees, human rights activists, journalists, and academics formed a transnational protest coalition. In this way, they drew international attention to their outrage at the honoring of an author who is criticized for denying the Bosnian genocide. The analysis shows that memories of the violent dissolution of Yugoslavia and genocide united the diverse protesters as a “memory community” and shaped their framing. The protesters warned of the potential repercussions of the Nobel Prize to Handke for the internationalization and normalization of genocide denial. They argued that locally, Serb nationalist politicians can find legitimation in it for divisive politics. Moreover, they put the prize in a larger context of globally rising right extremism and islamophobia that find inspiration in the very Serb nationalist ideology and its propagators of the 1990s conflict.

Greening energy governance through agencification in the Global South: Drivers and implications

AbstractThis article offers the first comprehensive analysis of the emergent modes for greening electricity governance through agencification in the Global South by examining the drivers and role of renewable energy agencies (REAs) in various countries in the Middle East and North Africa region. Furthermore, the article illustrates the impact of this form of agencification on the deployment of renewables and the “democratization” of energy governance. We found that the diffusion of REAs is facilitated by the intermediation of international and transnational actors, whereas their role in national energy governance is constrained by the fossil fuels rentier political economy. As an institutional strategy for greening energy governance, agencification has the potential to foster the deployment of renewables: agencies can catalyze external funding overcoming regulatory and policy barriers. However, this strategy can reproduce top‐down approaches to policymaking, hindering the “democratic” potentials of the energy transition.

Issue-adoption and campaign structure in transnational advocacy campaigns: a longitudinal network analysis

Why do transnational actors choose to campaign on specific issues, and why do they launch campaigns when they do? In this article, we theorize the membership, focus, timing and strategies used in transnational advocacy campaigns as a function of long-standing professional networks between NGOs and individual professional campaigners. Unlike previous scholarship that highlights the role of powerful ‘gatekeeper’ organizations whose central position within transnational issue-networks allows them to promote or block specific issues, we draw on recent work in organizational sociology to bring into focus a wider transnational community of individuals and organizations whose competition for professional growth and ‘issue-control’ is crucial in defining the transnational advocacy agenda. In doing so, we qualify existing notions of agenda-setting and gatekeeping in International Relations (IR) scholarship. To illustrate our theory we use a longitudinal network analysis approach, alongside extensive interviews and analysis of primary non-governmental organization (NGO) sources. Our empirical focus is on transnational disarmament advocacy. However, our theoretical analysis has implications for transnational advocacy more broadly.

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.

Can’t buy me love: billionaire entrepreneurs’ legitimation strategies in transnational climate governance

ABSTRACT Several billionaires have recently emerged as leaders of climate governance. So far, little research has examined how they legitimize their involvement in climate networks. We argue that billionaire governance entrepreneurs have high levels of resources but low procedural legitimacy. They pursue output legitimacy to support their political action, highlighting their effectiveness in managing climate issues. Their main strategies, depoliticization, outgrouping, and technical solutionism, may give them short-term legitimacy but risk undermining their long-term goals of addressing climate change. We analyze the discursive legitimation strategies of a successful billionaire entrepreneur in transnational climate governance, Michael Bloomberg. Our empirical analysis is based on the study of more than 800 statements, speeches, and news releases related to Bloomberg’s climate action from 2010 to 2021. It contributes to the study of entrepreneurship, leadership, philanthropy, and transnational actors in climate governance.

Homeland Run: Israeli Baseball and American Transmigrants.

This paper addresses an aspect of cultural transfer and transformation by immigrants, focusing on the case of Israeli baseball, brought to Israel by Jewish migrants from the USA. As such, it examines cultural transfer as part of the transnational activities of transnational migrants. The analysis is based on interviews with 20 Jewish migrants from the USA to Israel who are engaged In Israeli baseball - as players, coaches, administrators, etc. - as well as five Israeli-born players who are also engaged in the sport. This study contributes to our understanding of transnational migration by drawing attention to the ways in which the experiences of transnational migrants are shaped by recreational activity and how transnational migrants' activities affect their host county. This occurs via transnational cultural diffusion, mediated in this case by a "critical community" of American Jews. Israeli baseball provides Jewish migrants from the USA with a means to identify with Israel as well as a sense of transnational belonging and, counter-intuitively, eases their acculturation to Israeli society.

A Balkan Neofunctional Success Story or the Curious Case of Bosnia’s Central Bank

Bosnians show little faith in their state-level institutions, and with good reason, as the country ranks poorly on measures of corruption, regulatory quality, and government efficacy. However, the Central Bank of Bosnia and Herzegovina (CBBH) is a notable exception. In a country where the state is still often paralyzed by ethnically aligned obstructionism, the Central Bank is widely lauded as an effective state-level institution, and it backstops, and oversees, a stable, trusted, pan-Bosnian banking system. To explain the Bank’s success, we draw on rational choice and institutionalist literature to propose and test a theory of the “CBBH as referee” in its three main functional areas: currency board maintenance, payment system operation, and the coordination of banking supervision. We find evidence for this mechanism in the context of currency board operations, and we also document a Haas-ian neofunctional process, in which the Bank has interacted cyclically with foreign banks to unintentionally de-ethnicize the Bosnian financial sector. Initial Bank reforms facilitated foreign banks’ market entry, and their subsequent lack of interest in hewing to prior ethnic divisions served to cement a unified Bosnian financial space. We substantiate this argument with data drawn from interactive interviews with Bosnian policymakers, financial sector experts, and banking sector participants, and in so doing, also show how the commercial behavior of transnational actors can have unexpected policy impacts.

International transfer of railway infrastructure through the intermediation of aid agencies

This paper proposes a conceptualization of the mechanism of international transfer of infrastructure (as opposed to knowledge, technology, or policy transfer) through the intermediation of development aid organizations (DAOs). DAOs are powerful transnational actors able to provide and mobilize vast resources on behalf of constrained government agencies. They accomplish the transfer first by means of financing, then by assisting in the preparation of the contract packages, and finally in the public procurement process leading to the formation of contractual linkages. Twenty-eight (28) contract packages of seven rail-related projects in the Philippines financed by three DAOs are used as the main dataset, complemented by interview and document data. Through a content analysis of the contracts, the authors derive the mechanism of replication-linkage-flow. The current study has implications for understanding railway infrastructure transfer not only as national development for the recipient country but also as an export for the host country.

Introduction: Assimilation, integration or transnationalism? An overview of theories of migrant incorporation

Introduction: Assimilation, integration or transnationalism? An overview of theories of migrant incorporation

Women’s Empowerment and Fight against Violence in Latin America

Rates of gender-based violence in Latin America are high, but so is the number of women in national parliaments. This article analyzes that apparent paradox, paying attention to feminist and women’s rights mobilization in the region, the role of women in politics, and the development of legislation to address violence against women. Despite a comprehensive reshaping of the legal landscape, there are significant challenges to the implementation of these laws, including violence against women in politics. But feminist transnational activism continues to call for action.

Contesting Digital Technology through New Forms of Transnational Activism

While the tech giants are using privatisation to present themselves as providers of solutions to global problems, digitalisation is creating new forms of transnational activism. Global unions are emerging as players in this contest, helping to build counter power at both the local and global level. Through a comparison of the use of digital technology in two case studies in Africa involving two different global unions the article demonstrates how global unions can, through their intermediary coordinating role at the supranational level, deepen worker power. KEYWORDS: Global unions; digital technology; informal work; power resources; union revitalisation

A Virus That Knew Borders. COVID-19 Patients Zero Worldwide and the Strength of Transnationalism

In less than 3 months in 2020, COVID-19 spread to more than 200 countries and turned into a global pandemic that affected all world regions. Far from being a “post-Westphalian” virus that knew no borders, COVID-19 remained embedded in unequal patterns of international mobilities. To substantiate this claim, I devised an original methodology inspired by “thing-following studies”. A dataset was created on all patients zero worldwide (n = 287) in the 206 countries where they were identified. Empirically, my findings dismantle some myth about the international spread of COVID-19. First, the data put Europe – rather than China – at the core of the pandemic: four Western European countries exported half of all patients zero to entire regions like South America or Africa, reflecting postcolonial legacies. Second, twothirds were in fact nationals who brought back the virus to their own country. Third, a majority were involved in cross-border activities relating to business, family, religion or education, rather than tourism – most of them middle-aged men. Theoretically, this demonstrates the strength of transnational activities among international mobilities. Transnationalism appears as a crucial – though deeply unequal – infrastructure of our current globalization.

Towards harmonisation of public health master education based on WHO-ASPHER Competency Framework for Public Health Workforce in the Euro-pean Region

The absence of harmonisation in public health curricula between Schools of Public Health is a possible root cause of the ability to effectively address future public health problems in the European Region. Increased cross-border mobility enables public health higher education institutions to become transnational actors in the direction of competency-based education. Four Public Health Master’s programmes were compared: Management of Public Health in Lithuanian University of Health Sciences (LUHS), Governance and Leadership in European Public Health in Maastricht University (UM), Public Health in National (Portuguese) School of Public Health (ENSP) and Public Health in The University of Sheffield (SH). The WHO-ASPHER Competency Framework was used to compare the four public health master programmes. Inconsistencies were found among these masters. Content and Context which includes core public health disciplines appears to be the most consistent element. Relations and Interactions focus appeared diminished in the four schools examined. Performance and Achievement varied within the evaluated curricula. (1) The WHO-ASPHER Competency Framework served as a reference to assess the core programme elements for the partial harmonisation of public health masters in relation to the competency, values covered and inter-professional orientation. Recommendations: Increase competency-based education Introduce leadership and communication skills in the public health curricula; Increase the network of Schools of Public Health in the European Region; Use a competency framework towards partial harmonisation of public health programmes.

Activism and International Thought: The Women's International League of Peace and Freedom and the Problem of Statelessness in the Interwar Period

AbstractThis article examines the Women's International League for Peace and Freedom (WILPF) as an important site of women's international theorizing on the normative problem of statelessness in the League of Nations era. The problem of statelessness covered several issues connected with the loss of nationality, a new condition of human vulnerability associated with the dissolution of four empires after World War I. It opened up a series of questions about the Versailles system, where the ethical value of sovereignty was assumed, rather than examined for its consequences for individuals. WILPF developed programs of political and epistemic activity on global and local fronts that explored what it might mean to approach the statelessness question in terms of a transnational public interest, as opposed to the state interest privileged by the Versailles order. The article argues that WILPF's international thought is distinctive for the symbiotic relationship that exists between WILPF women's transnational activism and their theoretical conceptualization of the international. This is illustrated through an analysis of Jane Addams's thought, which provides a crucial link between late-nineteenth-century American pragmatism and the early twentieth-century progressive internationalism exemplified by WILPF. WILPF's interwar advocacy on the statelessness question shows how knowledge production and theory building were done in ways that are quite different to the mainstream neo-positivist idea of theory today, and which need to be included as part of our historical understanding of the origins of the twentieth-century field of international relations.