Transnational Advocacy Networks Research Articles

Inclusion of gender and labour standards in preferential trade agreements: evidence from North American and Canada-Chile agreements

ABSTRACT This article analyses the causes of the incorporation of gender provisions into preferential trade agreements (PTAs), based an analysis of the reasons for the inclusion of both labour and gender provisions in the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) and the United States-Mexico-Canada Agreement (USMCA), and in the Canada-Chile Free Trade Agreement (CCFTA). Drawing upon feminist and constructivist analysis, it argues for the importance of ideational factors such as policy emulation, social learning, the formation of transnational advocacy networks (TANs), as well as the role of Global South actors. Gender provisions often contain neoliberal elements that promote female entrepreneurship rather than more transformational approaches. The comparison of the USMCA and the CCFTA shows that the inclusion of stronger gender provisions in labour chapters (as in the USMCA) may be a more effective way to promote the interests of vulnerable workers than the inclusion of a gender chapter.

Walhi's Strategy to Fight for Justice in Environmental Permit Cancellation: Case Study of Construction of PLTU Tanjung Jati A Cirebon

The issue of environmental permits for PLTU Tanjung Jati A is a serious problem because the publication does not include an analysis of the release of CO2 emissions which have an impact on environmental damage and climate change. This research aims to describe Walhi West Java's strategy in its efforts to cancel the environmental permit for PLTU Tanjung Jati A through its international and national networks. In line with this aim, this research uses a case study approach with data collection carried out through in-depth interviews and analysis of related documents. The theory used by the Transnational Advocacy Network (TAN) theory as an analytical tool was put forward by Margaret E. Keck and Kathryn Sikkink. The results of this research, Walhi West Java has implemented four TAN strategies, namely Information Politics by disseminating information and findings, Symbolic Politics by carrying out campaign actions with symbols, Leverage Politics by collaborating with stronger actors, and Accountability Politics by supervising actors who advocated to walk with the commitments that have been set. Based on these four strategies, Walhi West Java is very optimal in carrying out Information Politics and Leverage Politics strategies. The weakness is that the Political Accountability strategy has not been fully successful because the Tanjung Jati A PLTU project is still in the policy documents and RUPTL. Walhi West Java's TAN implementation strategy succeeded in bringing victory over the Head of DPMTSP regarding the cancellation of environmental permits.

THE SHIFTING FROM THE MALE GAZE TO THE FEMALE GAZE IN K-POP GIRL GROUPS AS THE IMPACT OF #METOO MOVEMENT IN SOUTH KOREA

This research analyses the shift from the male gaze to the female gaze in K-pop girl groups impacted by the #MeToo movement in South Korea. The shift is marked by the thriving of women empowerment ideas by girl groups. This research uses the Transnational Advocacy Network (TAN) and postfeminism, examined using qualitative research methodology with secondary and textual analysis. This research finds that the shifting from the male gaze to the female gaze in K-pop girl groups occurred through the shift from objectification to subjectification of women, focusing on individualism, choice, and empowerment, as well as showing irony and knowingness. Therefore, the #MeToo movement has impacted the K-pop industry because the gaze has shifted, and Korean society has started to accept idols supporting women's empowerment and gender equality

Implementasi Transnational Advocacy Networks Gerakan Earth Hour dalam Merespon Isu Perubahan Iklim di Indonesia

Today the issue of climate change is a problem that needs to be responded collectively. Various movements emerged to respond this problem, among the most known movements is Earth Hour which influence is now became more relevant in Indonesia. This research aims to analyze and find out how Earth Hour has been implemented in Indonesia since 2009 in overcoming climate change using the Transnational Advocacy Networks (TAN) concept. Using qualitative method, researchers will describe the correlation between the data obtained and the TAN concept to explain Earth Hour in its efforts to overcome climate change in Indonesia. In using the TAN concept, researchers found that Earth Hour together with WWF Indonesia carries out all four TAN advocacy network strategies, namely, information politics, symbolic politics, leverage politics and accountability politics.

Jaringan Advokasi Transnasional dalam Upaya Pelestarian Kawasan Arktik Dari Eksplorasi Minyak di Norwegia Tahun 2016 - 2018

Climate change is a global commons problem. Its causes man-made greenhouse gas emissions and impacts are distributed and felt across the earth, transcending traditional boundaries and jurisdictions of the states of the international system. In the case of Norway, the country has been a vocal pioneer for climate action in international forums and has made specific policy progress in that areas. Yet there is significant cognitive dissonance as the country fails to address the impact of its oil and gas extraction, instead facilitating new exploration that is incompatible with global carbon budgets, and indeed undermines global efforts to reduce emissions. For a country so dedicated to its environmental goals, Norway must also decide whether oil and gas investment makes climate sense. Greenpeace Nordic and Nature & Youth (Natur og Ungdom) together with its networks were creating a global movement The People vs. Arctic Oil unites against the state of Norway with the purpose of keeping the world within its environmental boundaries in order to safeguard all life on Earth and to secure a peaceful and sustainable future for the Arctic due to government’s plan to opening new oil excavations in the Arctic breaches in 2016. The idea of communication revolution we find ourselves in may also be changing the power itself, shifting the balance way of view and into the hands of many. This advocacy networks has the ability to create truly transnational movements that has the potential to affect change. This research aims to describing in more depth the concept of Transnational Advocacy Networks by Keck and Sikkink through the case study of strategies that has been used by this advocacy networks in order to reach their goals in advocating the issue regarding their attempt to preserve the Arctic from Norway’s plan to do an Arctic oil exploration.

Super-Networks Shaping International Agreements: Comparing the Climate Change and Nuclear Weapons Arenas

Abstract While research on transnational advocacy networks (TANs) is well established in international relations, knowledge gaps remain concerning TAN collaboration across policy fields. To address this gap, this article highlights how super-networks (networks above individual TANs) emerge across issue areas and explores the tactics utilized to achieve their objectives and shape international agreements. We develop an analytical framework that emphasizes the important interplay between political opportunity structures, mobilizing structures, and tactics in understanding how super-networks operate. We apply this framework via a comparative case study approach, analyzing the Inter-Constituency Alliance, whose advocacy brought about the inclusion of human rights language in the 2015 Paris Climate Agreement, and the International Campaign for the Abolition of Nuclear Weapons, whose activities based on humanitarian principles resulted in the 2017 Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons. Contributing new knowledge to TANs research, we identify that super-networks utilize multilevel advocacy activities that draw upon a package approach tactic. Via the package approach, super-networks synthesize multiple voices from different issue areas into one key message grounded in humanitarian framing, thereby enhancing their moral leverage and legitimacy, making it more difficult for states to neglect their concerns.

Displays of Statehood

Drawing on a qualitative analysis of primary sources and interviews with members of representative offices, this article shows how five post-Soviet de facto states—Transnistria, South Ossetia, Abkhazia, the so-called Donetsk People’s Republic (“DPR”), and Luhansk People’s Republic (“LPR”)—engage in activities of international representation by borrowing from diverse repertoires of diplomatic practices, generating hybrid practices of their own. On the one hand, they are attentive to looking like bona fide states and to displaying material and symbolic attributes of statehood through mimicking state-led diplomacy. On the other, they resort to creativity and innovation to partially compensate for the constraints intrinsic to their ambivalent status and complete their repertoire with practices similar to those of transnational advocacy networks, especially regarding information politics and public diplomacy. Overall, the article aims to contribute to the field of contested statehood, as well as to the study of the international engagement of non-state actors in situations of liminality in the international system.

Me Too as Transnational Advocacy Networks: The Case of Anti-Sexual Violence Movement in Indonesia

The research discusses the anti-sexual movement in Indonesia as a part of the global movement of Me Too and transnational advocacy networks. It aims to answer how the transnational advocacy movement explains the movement against sexual violence in Indonesia. The argument of the research is offered in three parts. First, it argues that the anti-sexual violence movement in Indonesia is a part of transnational advocacy networks. The analysis is provided by explaining the process of boomerang patterns, political entrepreneurs, and international contacts. Second, as part of a transnational advocacy network, the anti-sexual violence movement in Indonesia uses four tactics: information politics, symbolic politics, leverage politics, and accountability politics. The research argues that the anti-sexual violence movement uses all four of the tactics to achieve its goals. Lastly, the third part of the argument discusses the five stages of transnational advocacy networks that the movement has achieved with regard to their goals, and the research argues that it has reached all the stages except for the last one, which is influenced by state behavior.

The double-helix entanglements of transnational advocacy: Moral conservative resistance to LGBTI rights

AbstractThe rights of people who are marginalised by their sexual orientation and gender identity (LGBTI) have improved in many countries. Largely, these achievements can be traced back to the ‘spiral model’ of factors including transnational mobilisation by the LGBTI rights movement, the actions of a few pioneering governments, and advances in the human rights frameworks of some international organisations (IOs). Yet a rising and increasingly globally connected resistance works against LGBTI rights. It rests predominantly in the hands of a transnational advocacy network (TAN) that attempts to lay claim to international human rights law by reinterpreting it. Drawing on a decade of fieldwork and 240 interviews with LGBTI, anti-LGBTI, and state and IO actors, this article explores how the conservative TAN functions, in terms of who comprises it and how its agenda is constructed. We argue that this TAN has employed many of the same transnational tools that garnered LGBTIQ people their widespread recognition. It also conforms to the spiral model of rights diffusion, but in a process we call a double helix. As the double-helix metaphor suggests, rival TANs have a reciprocal relationship, having to navigate each other’s presence in an interactive space and thus using related strategies and instruments for mutually exclusive ends.

Analisis Aktor Non Negara dan Ketahanan Psikologi: Studi Kasus Kekerasan Berbasis Gender Online (KBGO)

ABSTRACT The research was conducted with the aim of knowing: (1) the strategies implemented by NGOs, especially SAFEnet and INFID in the process of ratifying the TPKS Bill, and (2) explaining the psychological impact of KBGO victims and the role of the family in handling KBGO. The method used is qualitative research through interviews with representatives from SAFEnet and INFID, as well as conducting literature reviews obtained from online mass media, journal articles, books and scientific reports. Afterwards, the data collection method used triangulation using the theory of the Transnational Advocacy Network (TAN) and the theory of psychological resilience. The results showed that the TAN concepts such as information politics, symbolic politics, influence politics, and political accountability, SAFEnet and INFID together with networks both nationally and internationally were able to encourage the ratification of the TPKS Bill to become the TPKS Law in advocating legal protection for victims of sexual violence, especially in digital (online) domain. The impact experienced by victims of KBGO can be minimized, reduced or prevented through family support in educating, building communication, protecting to increase psychological resilience

Resisting Without Violence: KNPB and Transnational Advocacy Network Towards West Papua Referendum

After Indonesia’s authoritarianism collapsed in 1998, the fight for independence in West Papua became diversified, focused on physical resistance and strategic international diplomatic steps. The National Committee for West Papua (Komite Nasional Papua Barat or KNPB) is an organisation that tends to use a non-physical and non-violence approach. The approach garners support from the international community as they fight for the right of self-determination for the people of West Papua. KNPB’s international diplomacy has become a sort of strategic shift in the struggle of the West Papuan people, which initially tended to be instrumental, but eventually became wider by adopting a transnational advocacy network. This study uses the theoretical framework of non-violent resistance from Gene Sharp in explaining KNPB’s movement and the transnational advocacy network from Keck and Sikkink to explain KNPB’s international political relations. This research relies on documentation studies and interviews with key figures in the struggle for Referendum and Papuan independence. KNPB has consistently linked its local actions with independence movements and the global struggle for human rights. KNPB often frames its efforts as a part of their struggle to reject violence against the people of West Papua. The non-violent resistance movements and actions carried out by KNPB are indeed directed to gain public attention, especially from the international public. Their approach aims to show the Referendum’s importance and create an international agenda related to Indonesia’s actions in West Papua.

March for Our Lives Movement Strategy for Gun Control Law Reformation of America in 2018-2019

Gun violence appears to be widespread in American culture. The year 2018 became a momentum for the founders and activists of the March For Our Lives movement, specifically the Stoneman Douglas High School Mass Shooting. This Movement's accomplishments are quite remarkable; the most important thing is that they were able to pass around 60 bills on safer firearms. The purpose of this research is to analyze the advocacy strategies employed by the March For Our Lives Movement. One of their efforts to carry out advocacy activities is the formation of the Transnational Advocacy Network (TAN). The network then employs a variety of strategies, including Information Politics, Symbolic Politics, Leverage Politics, and Accountability Politics. This research employs a qualitative method with a descriptive approach. The literature study was used to collect data from secondary sources.

Beyond the Boomerang: From Transnational Advocacy Networks to Transcalar Advocacy in International Politics

<i>Beyond the Boomerang: From Transnational Advocacy Networks to Transcalar Advocacy in International Politics</i>

Foreign Investors of the World, Unite! The International Association for the Promotion and Protection of Private Foreign Investments (APPI) 1958–1968

Abstract This article studies lobbying efforts by the actors that investment treaties protect – namely, foreign investors. It uses a legal-historical approach to analyse the activities of the International Association for the Promotion and Protection of Private Foreign Investments (Association internationale pour la promotion et la protection des investissements privés en territoires étrangers or APPI), a transnational business interest association that lobbied for better protection of private foreign investment under international law. The article considers the role of this group in lobbying for three multilateral investment treaties (an investment code, investor-state arbitration and investment insurance) during the 1950s and 1960s, using unexplored archival sources. The article makes three substantive contributions to the literature. First, it shows that the key actors involved in APPI were a transnational advocacy network of businessmen and lawyers at multinational companies, mainly in the oil and banking sector. Second, it shows how these two types of actors (businessmen and lawyers) acted symbiotically. The businessmen provided access to policy-makers and introduced company lawyers into the policy-making cycle. The company lawyers provided expertise and specific legal texts with which civil servants could work. Third, it argues that, despite the group members’ common goal to improve foreign investment security, competing individual initiatives and institutional competition, next to state preferences, often impeded more effective lobbying.

State versus Market Debate and Shaping of the Gender Empowerment Agenda

This article argues that during the neoliberal and post-Washington consensus era, a broader development debate around state versus market has led to the dominance of instrumental articulation of the gender empowerment agenda. Although scholarship around empowerment has evolved, in the works of the development agencies and broader development discourse, constrained by the overarching debate around state versus market, gender empowerment has been robbed of its transformative potential. The present study frames the empowerment debate around three parameters: (a) narrow versus broad, (b) individual agency versus intersectionality and (c) instrumental versus intrinsic justification for empowerment. Finally, future avenues of research are identified, especially how NGOs, transnational advocacy networks (TANs) and civil society organisations (CSOs) can effectively challenge the current corporate agenda or paradigm.

Human Rights and Justice for All: Demanding Dignity in the United States and Around the World by Carrie Booth Walling

Reviewed by: Human Rights and Justice for All: Demanding Dignity in the United States and Around the World by Carrie Booth Walling Rebecca Sanders (bio) Carrie Booth Walling, Human Rights and Justice for All: Demanding Dignity in the United States and Around the World (Routledge 2022), ISBN 9780367902124, 194 pages. Carrie Booth Walling’s Human Rights and Justice for All: Demanding Dignity in the United States and Around the World provides an accessible and comprehensive introduction to international human rights. Geared primarily towards university students, but also useful for scholars, professionals, and activists seeking to orient themselves, the book offers six thematic chapters and a human rights advocacy toolkit. Walling frames the pursuit of human rights as an active political project and guides readers through major issue areas, highlighting human rights deficits and violations, relevant international legal standards, and activist campaigns for change. Interspersed throughout the text, Walling profiles a diverse range of human rights campaigners, both widely and lesser known (e.g. Yazidi activist Nadia Murad, Indigenous Mexican Otomi-Toltec climate activist Xiye Bastida, and forensic physician Dr. Şebnem Korur Fincancı), as well as several human rights campaigns and initiatives (e.g. the UN’s Free and Equal Campaign for LGBTI rights, the Syrian White Helmets’ humanitarian rescue mission, and the Coalition of Immokalee Workers’ farmworker advocacy in Florida), giving a face to human rights advocacy. This effort to continually link broad human rights principles back to the [End Page 352] people and processes that demand and implement rights, or as Walling frames it, the lived experience of human rights, is one of the major strengths of the book. The thematic chapters introduce readers to inter-related human rights challenges and then provide in depth illustrative case studies from around the world, all of which are well-documented in thorough endnotes. For instance, Chapter 2 on equality and non-discrimination examines systemic anti-Black racism in the US criminal justice system and Chinese repression and forced assimilation of the Muslim Uyghur ethnic minority under the guise of counterterrorism. Chapter 3 on the interdependence of human rights invokes Michael Goodhart’s “negative interdependence” framework to explore the intersections of class, racial, and political deprivations and exclusions that fueled the Flint, Michigan water crisis. Later, the chapter shifts to review the Islamic State’s sexual violence against Yazidi women and girls, examining overlapping vectors of gendered, religious, and ethnic insecurity. International crimes including genocide, crimes against humanity, and war crimes are analyzed in Chapter 4, which covers a range of cases and developments including the Rwandan genocide, the development of the Responsibility to Protect doctrine, RUF atrocities in Sierra Leone, and grotesque war crimes in Syria. Chapter 5 on justice and reconciliation explores a variety of models of transitional justice including trials, truth commissions, apologies, memorialization, and reparations and introduces readers to concepts of retributive and restorative justices. Case studies include post-dictatorship trials in Argentina, the post-apartheid Truth and Reconciliation Commission in South Africa, and less conventionally, the Greensboro Truth and Reconciliation Commission—an unofficial community-led initiative to shed light on the 1979 massacre of anti-racist activists perpetrated by white supremacists in Greensboro, North Carolina. This latter case, along with aforementioned case studies on US criminal justice and the Flint water crisis, make the text especially useful for American students, who often struggle to critically connect domestic politics with international human rights challenges. The final two chapters examine mechanisms of human rights adoption, monitoring, and implementation. Chapter 6 reviews patterns and practices of civil society mobilization and the dynamics of Margaret Keck and Kathryn Sikkink’s “transnational advocacy networks,” interspersed with numerous examples such as the work of the Madres de Plaza de Mayo or Human Rights Watch. The chapter goes on to explain the institutional international human rights machinery including the UN Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights, the Human Rights Council, Special Procedures, and Treaty Bodies. Students can also download a supplemental seven-page file from the Routledge website which includes a list of international and regional treaties and legal instruments, trials, tribunals, and investigative bodies, and a range of human rights non-governmental organizations and journals, many of which include direct hyperlinks...

Analysing a Transnational Advocacy Network of Internet Data Affordability in Malawi

This paper analysed how advocacy groups and consumers influenced government, telecommunications regulators, and mobile network operators to reduce the cost of internet data. The study used a case of Malawi as an example of a low-income country with high cost of internet. Transnational advocacy network theory was used to analyse secondary data from online databases, websites of regulatory organisations, online news, and social media posts. The findings showed that transnational advocacy network drew members from international, regional and local organisations. Consumers also participated in the transnational advocacy network. Information sharing was crucial in highlighting the high cost of internet data in the country. Local network actors used information, symbolic, leverage, and accountability politics to persuade government agencies, the telecommunications regulators, and mobile network operators to reduce the cost of internet data. The study provides insights into the understanding of issues related to internet data affordability in the context of a developing country.

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 Embedded Autonomy to Counter-Hegemonic Globalization: A 60-Year Adventure in Exploring Comparative Political Economy

I got hooked on sociology as a 20-year-old. Engaging with the world as a sociologist, together with colleagues, comrades, and students, has been immensely rewarding for six decades. My work has centered primarily on what were once called developing countries and now comprise the Global South. This article recounts my sociological adventures, from efforts to understand the world as I found it in the early 1960s to my responses to current reactionary trends. I start with my earlier work— Dependent Development (1979) and Embedded Autonomy (1995)—and then move to more recent efforts to construct paradigms of progressive twenty-first-century possibilities. I discuss, first, how a 21st century developmental state might incorporate deliberation and state-society synergies to expand human capabilities, and second, how an amalgam of global and national labor movements together with transnational advocacy networks might pursue a counter-hegemonic globalization capable of confronting global neoliberal capitalism.

When stigmatization does not work: over-securitization in efforts of the Campaign to Stop Killer Robots

This article reflects on securitization efforts with respect to ‘killer robots’, known more impartially as autonomous weapons systems (AWS). Our contribution focuses, theoretically and empirically, on the Campaign to Stop Killer Robots, a transnational advocacy network vigorously pushing for a pre-emptive ban on AWS. Marking exactly a decade of its activity, there is still no international regime formally banning, or even purposefully regulating, AWS. Our objective is to understand why the Campaign has not been able to advance its disarmament agenda thus far, despite all the resources, means and support at its disposal. For achieving this objective, we challenge the popular assumption that strong stigmatization is the universally best strategy towards humanitarian disarmament. We investigate the consequences of two specifics present in AWS, which set them apart from processes and successes of the campaigns to ban anti-personnel landmines, cluster munitions, and laser-blinding weapons: the complexity of AWS as a distinct weapons category, and the subsequent circumvention of its complexity through the utilization of pop-culture, namely science fiction imagery. We particularly focus on two mechanisms through which such distortion has occurred: hybridization and grafting. These provide the conceptual basis and heuristic tools to unpack the paradox of over-securitization: success in broadening the stakeholder base in relation to the first mechanism and deepening the sense of insecurity in relation to the second one does not necessarily lead to the achievement of the desired prohibitory norm. In conclusion, we ask whether it is not the time for a more epistemically-oriented expert debate with a less ambitious, lowest common denominator strategy as the preferred model of arms control for such a complex weapons category.