Transnational Actors Research Articles

Space Security and the Transatlantic Relationship

Since the end of World War II, outer space has been an arena in which both high and low politics have played out, and both the US and Europe have been heavily invested. This article examines the case study of space exploration as a window into the evolving nature of the transatlantic relationship. With the US government regularly deprioritizing Europe in its foreign policy and at times taking the transatlantic relationship for granted, the author argues that transnational and non-state actors have played an important role in maintaining the stability of the alliance. In terms of space, this means that the space community—space agencies, private actors, space enthusiasts, engineers, and scientists, among others—often enable transatlantic cooperation despite initial conflictual rhetoric stemming from political leaders. Importantly, while these transnational or non-state actors tend to view space as a peaceful domain for all of humankind, governments and militaries often treat space as the next battlefield. To support this argument, the article considers two major transatlantic space developments: the US’s Space Force, which reflects a US desire to be dominant in space, and Europe’s Galileo satellite system, which reflects a European goal to have strategic autonomy from the US. The author argues that the idea that space should be a peaceful domain for all of humankind is more strongly reflected in outcomes, despite the presence of conflictual, militaristic rhetoric.

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.

‘Global Russians’: A Case Study of Transnational Actors in World Politics

Transnational actors with Russian origins have recently appeared on the global stage and become influential in world politics. In this article we revisit the theoretical debate about subgroups within the Russian diaspora such as ‘Russian compatriots’, representatives of the ‘Russian world’ (Russkii mir) and so-called ‘Global Russians’. Filling a gap in the scholarly analysis, we define Global Russians as individuals who self-identify with Russian civilisation and actively engage in Russian political, social or cultural affairs while living abroad and contributing to business, academic and cultural life at a global level.

Nigeria and Ethiopian Diaspora remittances; engagement, policy reforms and poverty reduction

ABSTRACT Diasporas are transnational actors that could be involved in playing a key role to amplify sustainable development in developing countries like Nigeria and Ethiopia. The present study was conducted to explore the potential role of the Nigerian and Ethiopian Diasporas in the process of fostering ongoing economic development in their countries of origin. The article is attempted to highlight: 1) the potential engagements of Nigerian and Ethiopian diasporas contribution to the economic progress and poverty reduction and the significant role of their remittances to accelerate economic growth, (2) the major initiatives taken by the Ethiopian government to attract and engage its diasporas, (3) the government’s policy reforms to attract diaspora and (4) the circumstances hampering diasporas potential involvement. The current study opted mixed methodology and data collected through secondary sources and questionnaire to evaluate Diasporas roles and their remittances’ impacts on Nigerian and Ethiopian economies. Moreover, the study concludes that, institutional and structural weakness of both countries and diaspora identity politics tended to play a great role in hindering the potential engagement of their diaspora to their countries’ development. The study suggests some policy recommendations for the Nigerian and Ethiopian government.

Billionaires in world politics: donors, governors, authorities

ABSTRACT Hägel’s book is timely. As economic inequality has been on the rise, the increasing number of billionaires and their political activities have come under public scrutiny. The book contributes to such scrutiny and allows to ask questions about responsibility, accountability, and legitimacy. It also adds to scholarship on individuals in world politics. Our comment provides a critical discussion of two specific aspects of Hägel’s analysis. First, we clarify that most of the book focuses on billionaires as transnational actors while few billionaires seem to exert influence on broader structures or processes of global governance. This clarification helps to understand the character of billionaires’ activities in world politics. Second, we reverse the perspective from which Hägel looks at billionaires. We point out that, while Hägel tends to look over the shoulders of the billionaires and mainly observes how they exercise influence in world politics, we argue that the other actors matter, too. More specifically, we maintain that billionaires’ roles in global governance are shaped through their specific recognition by international society (state actors) and/or by world society (non-state actors). This change in perspective sheds additional light on the conditions that affect the role(s) billionaires can play in world politics.

Queer Sinophone Malaysia: Language, Transnational Activism, and the Role of Taiwan

ABSTRACT Unlike the queer formations resulting from racialised organising especially those in the Global North, this paper demonstrates the ways in which language, especially Chinese, is often a more functional identity marker than race or ethnicity in the community lives of LGBT Malaysians. This is evident in how queer advocacy groups are publicised as language-specific entities, calling themselves ‘Chinese-speaking’, ‘English-speaking’, or ‘Malay-speaking’, in urban cities such as Kuala Lumpur. One might see this use of language as a proxy of an existing racial configuration (the state-endorsed categories of Malay, Chinese, Indian, and Other), simply accommodating participants’ linguistic preferences. However, my findings suggest the opposite is true. Drawing on interviews with Chinese-speaking queer Malaysian activists in Malaysia and Taiwan, this paper argues for the significance of Chinese in pushing forward their agendas in the illiberal setting locally and in mobilising LGBT Malaysians across the Chinese-speaking world. In doing so, it works towards an articulation of queer Sinophone Malaysia, highlighting the multiple trajectories of queer development locally as well as Malaysia’s place in the global circuit of queer cultural formations. Methodologically, it overcomes the humanities bias of Sinophone research by demonstrating how qualitative methods can effectively capture the present localisation of Chinese languages.

Aidland in South Asia: humanitarian crisis and the contours of the global aid industry in the long 1970s

ABSTRACT This article uses the experiences of expatriate aid workers in South Asia to examine the contours of the global aid industry in the long 1970s. It begins by outlining the impact of the crisis on the aid sector, before using case studies of non-governmental organizations (NGOs) from three Anglophone states – Britain, Canada (Québec excepted) and Ireland – to examine the spaces of social experience, spaces of knowledge circulation and imagined spaces of belonging and solidarity in which ideas of aid-giving were made. The article is framed through a concept that ethnographers call ‘Aidland’: the mix of volunteers, experts and aid professionals that make up the aid community. Taking this model as its starting point, the article makes three claims about the aid community that emerged in South Asia and what its story tells us about transnational activism in the long 1970s. The first is to see this as a moment of acceleration for the sector, in which its activities radically diversified while simultaneously carrying with them the baggage of what had come before. Second, and related, it argues that gwhile there were certain characteristics that were common to aid workers in every environment, we should be careful not to lose sight of the specific contextual factors and points of reference on which responses to humanitarian crises were based. Understanding that complexity, and its consequences, provides us with the basis for the final claim put forward here. By laying bare the processes through which ‘Aidland’ was constructed in South Asia, we can test how that community imagined and reinforced a particular (paternalistic) role for itself in the Third World.

The spatial contours of transnational activism: conceptual implications and the road forward

ABSTRACT The conclusion to this special issue concentrates on the conceptual and especially the methodological dimensions of the editors’ findings, presenting them in four steps. In doing so, it sketches the ways in which their approach can change the understanding of the spatial transformations associated with ‘transnationalism’, also beyond the history of political activism during Europe’s ‘long’ 1970s. More precisely, the text first assesses the role of space in transnational history by contending that there is great heuristic value in analysing the physical and geographical dimensions of transnational interactions. It then discusses the overlaps and mismatches between the three kinds of transnational spaces they have identified: imagined spaces of solidarity and belonging; spaces of social experience and political action; and spaces of knowledge circulation. Thirdly, it emphasizes the infrastructural underbelly and its impact on the various forms of exchange before, in a fourth and final step, the article discusses how their approach helps with the arrival of a more sophisticated understanding of the significance of transnational connections. All in all, the editors argue that a more elaborate understanding of space has the potential to open up a whole new field of enquiry. It can help to generate fresh insights into the history of activism and social movements, but also to arrive at a better understanding of the very nature of transnational processes.

Seeking inclusion through redefining expertise: the changing spatial contours of disability activism in the long 1970s

ABSTRACT This article focuses on European transnational activism in the long 1970s. Using the independent living movement as a case study, it illuminates how new spaces of knowledge production, social experience and political activism often emerged from informal contacts. Such initiatives challenged the medical understanding of disability and questioned the expertise of medical and rehabilitation personnel: activists fighting for the elimination of spatial segregation redefined disability into a social condition and asserted that the source of expertise was above all the lived experience. More conventional professional spaces of exchange also intensified and diversified in this period, as the example of two networks representing people with intellectual and developmental disabilities reveals: one fashioned itself as a space of neutral professional exchange, whereas the other also engaged in activism. Yet another instance of diversification is the coming into being of the world’s first cross-disability organization in 1981. The article reveals the ideological tensions and practical obstacles that restricted international exchange and the manifestations of solidarity. In particular, it points to the mismatched expectations between activists from Europe and North America who defined solidarity in terms of identity politics, and those from the Global South who tended to equate it with financial aid.

Explaining and Evaluating Transnational Tortious Actions against Parent Companies: Lessons from Shell and Nigeria

In recent years, some of the most interesting and challenging corporate litigation has involved transnational tortious claims against parent companies. Such transnational cases raise a number of important issues which are downplayed in the literature addressing parental liability in purely ‘domestic’ cases. This article seeks to explore three such issues. The first concerns how we should explain victims' motives for suing the parent in these cases. We argue that transnational actions, unlike ‘domestic’ cases against parents, are less often a means of circumventing the subsidiary's insolvency, and more often about the search for a better forum, inflicting reputational damage on a corporate group, and avoiding doctrinal problems which may afflict the subsidiary action. The second issue is the legitimacy of using parental actions for these reasons. The third issue concerns whose law should govern transnational actions against parents. To illustrate these issues, we use three recent examples of transnational actions against parent companies.

English

This paper examines transnationalism, social networks and identity as part of the experiences of the African Diaspora, in particular, Zimbabwean social workers in the UK. The above terms are closely associated with increasing international skilled migration from Africa in the global south, to the global North where there are better employment opportunities. This paper defines transnationalism, social networks, identity, the notion of ‘home and belonging’ and the creation of the Zimbabwean community in the UK. The above concepts are gaining increased currency and importance in contemporary migration studies. The paper also looks at the link between globalisation and transnational activities by Zimbabwean social workers, as part of the African diaspora community in the UK.   Key words: African, diaspora, migrant, globalisation, transnationalism, social networks, identity  

The Gulf Cooperation Council and counter-terror cooperation in the post-9/11 era: a regional organization in comparative perspective

Following the September 2001 (9/11) Al-Qaeda attacks on the United States the terror threat posed by transnational non-state violent actors rose to the top of the international security agenda. This article examines the evolution of counter-terror cooperation between member states of the Gulf Cooperation Council in the five years that followed the unprecedented 9/11 attacks. In doing so, it will examine the types of counter-terror cooperation available to members of a regional organization (RO), as well as the obstacles that they face in developing effective counter-terror cooperation capabilities. It will then provide an analysis of GCC counter-terror cooperation in the period under study contrasting, where relevant, the GCC’s counter-terror responses with those of two other leading regional organizations in the international system – the EU and ASEAN.

Democracy in the Global South

Given the legacies of colonialism and the inequities of the global capitalist system, consolidated democracies in the Global South were the exception prior to the third wave of democratization in the 1970s. As democratization in the Global South grew, a first generation of work by sociologists challenged mainstream political science's preoccupation with electoral and liberal democracy and brought popular mobilization to the center of the analysis. This literature made key contributions to the debate on democratic transitions and consolidation. A more recent wave of work has focused on the democratization of democracy, examining civil society, movements, participatory democracy, transnational activism, and the wide range of political actors and forms of collective action that have emerged in a democratizing Global South. Variation across and within democracies remains high, but there have been clear cases of democratic deepening. Improving our understanding of the fabric of democratic institutions and practices, including recent cases of regression, calls for more research, especially in subnational and local contexts.

GLOBALIZATION AND DOMESTIC POLICY CHANGE: THE CASE OF MANDATORY PALM OIL CERTIFICATION POLICY IN INDONESIA

Indonesia has gained its reputation as the one of the largest oil palm producer. The sustainability of Indonesian palm oil, however, being argued since the expansion often created various impacts. For instance, the draining and burning peatland for palm oil plantation were sent huge amount and carbon emissions which responsible for climate change and global warming. These climate change and global warming, however, deeply linked with the globalization process, which in the end influencing the domestic policy making. This paper aims to improve the understanding on how various transnational actors, institutions, and norms influence domestic policy change. As a case study, we examine the influence of globalization on the initiation of the Indonesian Palm Oil Standard (ISPO) standards policy, which was published by the Indonesian Ministry of Agriculture in 2011. As the theoretical framework. the four paths of globalization and domestic policy change proposed by Bernstein and Cashore (2000) are applied. Our case study suggests that economic globalization, which produces high palm oil demand, is the primary catalyst for this policy change. Secondly, we note the influence of transnational actors, who exert market pressure, on the extant Indonesian palm oil industry policy. The other notable influence triggering ISPO initiation was from international institutions and norms. Our case study, did not, however, find support for transnational actor direct access to the policy process. Nevertheless, following to the ISPO official publication, the four pathways started to evolve again through various constellations.

“Closing the Abyss of Moral Misery”: Poland, the League of Nations and the Fight against the Trafficking of Women and Children

Abstract The study focuses on the emerging Second Polish Republic and its involvement in the international fight against the trafficking of women and children under the auspices of the League of Nations. In conflict with all neighbouring states, Poland was highly dependent on support from the new Western Entente-backed international system and in turn had to adhere closely to existing conventions and newly negotiated international policies. Using the example of the ratification process of the League of the Nations International Convention against the Traffic in Women and Children of 1921, the study shows that internationalism in the interwar period had a significant impact on national policymaking and state-building. Thus, it provides a better understanding of how anti-trafficking efforts in Poland interacted with policies deployed by the League of Nations and how international and transnational activism affected the construction of state institutions.

საზოგადოებრივი ჯანდაცვის განვითარების პირველი ნაბიჯები დამოუკიდებელ საქართველოში

Reorganization of healthcare system in Georgia was based on the development of public health, aiming to activate of preventive medicine and operate efficient tools of epidemiological surveillance. This paper seeks to explore the attitudes and values which underlie public health reform in Georgia, and to investigate the goals of reform and the strategies designed to achieve them. The article is based on a documentary analysis, which included official documents and non-official journal publications. Georgia was the only country (except the Baltic states) to abandon the soviet system of Sanitary-Epidemiological Service, completely reorganizing it and establishing a new public health infrastructure, built on European principles. The reorganization of the Sanitary-Epidemiological Service implied the separation of supervisory (sanitary control) and executive functions, typical of the Soviet system. As a result, the Public Health Department and the Department for Sanitary Supervision and Hygienic Regulation were established. In terms of decentralization, the funds out of four elements of healthcare system (financing, Policy Development, Standard definition, Management and Administration) were distributed at central, regional and municipal levels. The role of public health is especially increasing in the modern globalized world, when the epidemics of infectious diseases have become topical. In globalized world, the public health challenges go beyond national borders and interests, having huge global political and economic consequences. Therefore, modern public healthcare is reviewed in a global context and requires international regulations, transnational actions and solutions based on coordinated cooperation among different countries of the world. Keywords: Public health, health care reforms, prevention, healthy lifestyle. JEL Codes: H51, H75, I18

Transnationalising reactionary conservative activism: A multimodal critical discourse analysis of far-right narratives online

ABSTRACT By conducting a qualitative content analysis of 400 far-right posts collected from two UK-based websites – British First and Politicalite, and two Australia-based websites – The Unshackled and XYZ, this article identifies their transnational correspondences in terms of thematic focuses, philosophical foundations, and racial frames. It discusses not only topical issues and events that drive transnational far-right activism, but also its philosophical traditions – from Maurice Barrès’ fin-de-siècle nationalism to Alain de Benoist’s Nouvelle Droite (ND – New Right) thinking and birth-cultural nationalism – and its use of racial frames, such as white guilt, ‘anti-white’ racism and ‘white genocide’. A multimodal critical discourse analysis of selected posts further adds to an understanding of a reactionary backlash against the perceived dominance of liberalism and ‘political correctness’ in contemporary Western democracies.

Rehashed Liberalism, the Accusation of Radical Purity, and the Alibi of the “Personal”

Rehashed Liberalism, the Accusation of Radical Purity, and the Alibi of the “Personal”

Extending mixed embeddedness to a multi-dimensional concept of transnational entrepreneurship

Migrant entrepreneurship in times of transnational migration go beyond locally serving markets and increasingly operate transnationally. The mixed embeddedness by Kloosterman and Rath has become the main concept to analyze such migrants’ entrepreneurship as it accounts for the multiple embeddedness of entrepreneurs in the variety of social and institutional contexts at multiple levels. This concept, however, does not yet accommodate the transnational dimensions of migrant entrepreneurship, which is still rather nascent in entrepreneurship research. Transnationalism is multi-dimensional in its nature as pointed out by migration researchers as Vertovec, and transnational migrants’ embeddedness appears to go beyond the notion of being simply dually embedded in two locations but rather should be conceived as being in one larger transnational field—though such aspects are not conceptually accounted in the mixed embeddedness approach. Taking this as a starting point, we propose to analyze the conditions that allow migrant entrepreneurs to engage in transnational activities. Our proposed framework bases on empirical research with 36 Polish entrepreneurs in the EU labor market, by drawing their opportunities from different levels and contexts of transnationalism. Following the research question on which levels and dimensions of embeddedness in the transnational field contribute to transnational entrepreneurship, we develop a novel refined framework of mixed embeddedness to analyze transnational entrepreneurship. It clarifies the entrepreneurial context by analytically and systematically subdividing components across dimensions (political, social and economic), and rearranging institutional elements and structures in each dimension according to respective levels (macro, meso, and micro). Emphasizing the role of conditions at the meso-level, the novel analytical framework better incorporates the multi-dimensionality and multi-levelling of transnational entrepreneurial activities of migrants. This model can be used as a tool for future comparative analyses of migrant entrepreneurship in different transnational contexts, it also contributes to the concretization of the transnational nature of transnational migrant entrepreneurship.

The fetish economy of sex and gender activism: transnational appropriation and allyship

This article examines what happens when local gender rights activism is taken up by international allies and appropriators, using case studies of activism in Saudi Arabia and India. The relationship between local and transnational activists is shaped by histories of Euro-Americans writing about the gendered organisation of Eastern societies. In an economic system where nongovernmental activist groups compete for donor support, political causes are commodities with value, and value is generated through representations (e.g. of patriarchal oppression). These representations of the sexuality and gender organisation of other societies are fetishes in the Marxian sense, essential to the commodity-cause that generates value in circulation. These representations gain value through the accretion of cultural images and texts that adhere to the cause, e.g. the stereotype of the violent brown man and oppressed woman. Such images in the cultural repository allow transnational consumers to make sense of issues they are called to support. But such images also reify stereotypes that activists seek to undermine, even at the same time that these representations generate an international audience. We analyse this process and identify strategies for how transnational allies can show solidarity without overshadowing or devaluing the voices of local activists, with primary focus on the case of activism against male guardianship laws in Saudi Arabia.