Transnational Arena Research Articles

Mobilising tensions: transnational union network formation in the Asia-Pacific region

Trade unions are an important actor in the social regulation of the transnational corporation. How and why trade unions engage with the continued rise of global corporate social responsibility (CSR) initiatives remains largely under-researched, particularly in transnational arenas beyond Europe. Transnational trade union networks are a concerted development intended to advance collective worker voice and influence, especially in contexts without a history of strong social dialogue. Our qualitative fieldwork centres on a transnational trade union network comprised of global, national, and local union representatives from different countries in the Asia-Pacific representing workers from one Germany-headquartered multinational corporation in the chemical sector. We examine how labour actors involved in the network engage with global CSR initiatives to advance worker voice and influence in the Asia-Pacific region. Our micro-sociological and relational approach focused on the practices, relations, and affective dimensions of building and sustaining a transnational network. What emerged is the centrality of tensions and how actors creatively utilise and shape those tensions into resources for building the network. We analyse the nature of the tensions and their effects and discuss how key actors work generatively with tensions.

Comparing priority received by global health issues: a measurement framework applied to tuberculosis, malaria, diarrhoeal diseases and dengue fever

IntroductionThe relative priority received by issues in global health agendas is subjected to impressionistic claims in the absence of objective methods of assessment of priority. To build an approach for...

Civil Society and Municipal Activism Around Migration in the EU: A Multi-Scalar Alliance-Making

ABSTRACT Civil society and municipal actors – and the interaction between one another – have become increasingly relevant in EU migration governance. Moving from this understanding, this article explores instances of migration activism in connection with the proactive and contentious role of cities. It does so through the in-depth analysis of the dual EU-wide network From the Sea to the City/International Alliance of Safe Harbours, which gathers numerous civil society initiatives and municipalities and aims to achieve a radical change in EU migration policies. Based on extensive empirical research, my contribution illustrates why the emergence of a multi-scalar alliance between civil society and municipal actors around migration is the result of the interaction between the political agency of these actors and the changing institutional opportunities and constraints at different governance levels. In doing so, it explores different spatial and political dimensions, from cities to transnational arenas, reflecting on their significance in the construction of an EU-wide contentious politics of migration.

Vulnerability, Relationality, Fragmentation and Networking in Linda Grant’s A Stranger City (2019)

Set during the immediate months before and after Brexit, Linda Grant’s novel A Stranger City turns London into a microcosm where the misfortunes linked to migration, racism, violence, terrorism, capitalism and individualism make a group of dissimilar characters’ lives intersect around the mysterious death of an ‘unidentified’ migrant woman. Grant’s literary works tend to represent female characters’ journeys in search of personhood. However, this time, she addresses more transnational and present-day issues to the extent that it has been considered as illustrative of hybrid literature produced during the post-2016 era. By relying on close-reading tools, one of the main aims of my study is to demonstrate that A Stranger City displays some specific narrative devices which feature those fictional modes that have been defined as translit (Legget 2016), networked novels (Edwards 2019) and fragmented narratives (Gioia 2013). Further, I will claim that women writers like Grant are resorting to new narrative forms to denounce the fact that the global crisis of values affects women more intensely. Moreover, I will link the notions of home and exile problematized in this novel to the modern construction of Jewish identity and, finally, conclude that this relational narrative proves that twenty-first-century Jewish women are embracing the transnational arena to redefine themselves in our global world.

Difusão de política na prática: o caso da regulação brasileira de medicamentos

Abstract The present study seeks to contribute to a better understanding of policy diffusion processes, more specifically, of the diffusion process from a transnational arena that influenced the regulation of Good Manufacturing Practices (GMP) for medicinal products in Brazil in a context surrounded by international authorities. By conducting qualitative research, we analyzed the process of adhesion of the Brazilian Health Regulatory Agency (Anvisa) to the Pharmaceutical Inspection Co-operation Scheme (PIC/S), initiated in 2010 and achieved in 2021. A process influenced by two constellations of diffusion was identified, motivated by the national agency’s interests in maintaining its relevance and by actors that make up the National Sanitary Surveillance System, in which the PIC/S model of regulatory equivalence and convergence proved to be fundamental for the adaptation of the international reference to the national level, keeping the national system functioning. Such a policy diffusion process became even more relevant in the past years due to the expansion of regulatory convergence and potentially making the various health authorities’ GMP assessment of medicinal products more efficient.

On improving the methodology of interaction of the Executive Committee of the Regional Anti-Terrorist Structure of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization with the competent authorities of the member States of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization

According to its potential, the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO, Organization) belongs to the largest regional multilateral associations of states. On June 7, 2002, in St. Petersburg, the SCO heads of State, following up on the Declaration on the Establishment of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization adopted earlier in 2001, signed an Agreement on the Regional Anti-Terrorist Structure (RATS). This Agreement fixed the tasks and functions of the RATS, as a permanent body of the Organization, in the status of a fool, to facilitate coordination and interaction of the competent authorities of the Parties in the fight against terrorism, separatism and extremism. In addition to tasks and functions, the Agreement also defined its structure — in the form of the Council of the SCO RATS, the governing body that makes binding decisions, as well as the Executive Committee of the SCO RATS, a permanent working body that carries out daily work to coordinate interaction. To date, the documents prepared by the RATS on anti-terrorist issues are regularly discussed and highly appreciated and approved by the top leadership of the countries at the Council of Heads of State and the Council of Heads of Government of the SCO member States. As a natural result of the daily, almost twenty years of work, the Regional Anti-Terrorist Structure of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization, having passed a unique path of formation that has no effective analogues, began to play and occupy a special significant place in the transnational arena in the system of international regional bodies responsible for combating terrorism, separatism and extremism. At the same time, the current dynamics of the development of the situation in the world indicates the persistence of existing threats and the emergence of new security challenges. New challenges and threats, including those fueled by third-party geopolitical factors for the region, are not always obvious and obvious, and the search for tools and the development of techniques to fend them off remain labor- and resource-intensive. In these conditions, an asymmetric response is required, which will reduce the time and save energy for a response. The reserve of such optimization, in our opinion, is seen in a certain adjustment of the accepted methodology of interaction (methods of organization and construction of activities) The SCO RATS Executive Committee with the competent authorities of the Organization's member States by assigning it a number of new tasks.

‘불법’ 이주의 생산과 사회문화적 구성 - 경기도 공단 인근 미등록 이주민의 사례를 중심으로 -

This study focuses on the production and construction of ‘illegal’ migration, including the migration process of undocumented migrants, through participant observations and in-depth interviews with migrants from Mongolia, Kazakhstan, Russia and Tajikistan. The production of ''illegal'' migration occurs on two levels. One is Korea’s continuous migrant worker control policy and the other is various illegal residence strategies of migrants using loopholes in the receiving country''s legal residence and human rights guarantee system. Undocumented migrants naturally enter the migrant community through social networks with existing migrants. These spaces can be said to be a transnational arena that transcends the ambiguous boundaries between legal/illegal created by the state. They aspire to a ‘better life’ similar to that of Korean society while adapting to the more structured and efficient Korean system than in their home country. However, at the same time, this trend is contrary to and contradictory to Koreas (im)migration policy, which is constantly trying to control and limit ‘illegal’ (im)migration.

Commentary: Nationalism and Transnationalism in Anthropological Research

Commentary: Nationalism and Transnationalism in Anthropological Research

Understanding “Sectarianism”: Sunni-Shiʿa Relations in the Modern Arab World

Understanding “Sectarianism”: Sunni-Shiʿa Relations in the Modern Arab World

Campaigning across continents: how Latin American parties link up with migrant associations abroad

Emigrant voting rights have opened new electoral arenas, and many political parties increasingly campaign across borders. Yet relatively little is known about the challenges parties confront when campaigning transnationally and the strategies they have developed in response to these challenges. This paper addresses these shortcomings. First, I investigate the hurdles Latin American parties face in linking up with organized migrant collectives in residency countries for campaigning purposes. Second, I probe into the transnational linkage strategies these parties deploy to tap into migrant associations’ resources and mobilization capacities. This study builds on a comparative research design and draws on almost 40 semi-structured interviews with Bolivian and Ecuadorian party activists as well as association leaders in Barcelona, Spain. Departing from the party interest group literature, I identify three transnational linkage strategies Bolivian and Ecuadorian parties implement: 1) Infiltration, 2) Co-optation, and 3) Cooperation. All parties execute these tactics informally in order to comply with local norms that require associations to remain apolitical. The analysis further demonstrates that differences between home-country electoral systems shape the types of linkage strategies Bolivian and Ecuadorian parties use. This article contributes to the study of migrant politics and political parties in important ways. This study highlights how political parties actively negotiate their entry into the transnational electoral arena, and sheds light on how migrants remain politically connected to their home countries.

The rise and fall of global health issues: an arenas model applied to the COVID-19 pandemic shock

BackgroundThe global health agenda is ill-defined as an analytical construct, complicating attempts by scholars and proponents to make claims about the agenda status of issues. We draw on Kingdon’s definition of the agenda and Hilgartner and Bosk’s public arenas model to conceptualize the global health agenda as those subjects or problems to which collectivities of actors operating nationally and globally are paying serious attention at any given time. We propose an arenas model for global health agenda setting and illustrate its potential utility by assessing priority indicators in five arenas, including international aid, pharmaceutical industry, scientific research, news media and civil society. We then apply the model to illustrate how the status of established (HIV/AIDS), emergent (diabetes) and rising (Alzheimer’s disease) issues might be measured, compared and change in light of a pandemic shock (COVID-19).ResultsCoronavirus priority indicators rose precipitously in all five arenas in 2020, reflecting the kind of punctuation often caused by focusing events. The magnitude of change varied somewhat by arena, with the most pronounced shift in the global news media arena. Priority indicators for the other issues showed decreases of up to 21% and increases of up to 41% between 2019 and 2020, with increases suggesting that the agenda for global health issues expanded in some arenas in 2020— COVID-19 did not consistently displace priority for HIV/AIDS, diabetes or Alzheimer’s disease, though it might have for other issues.ConclusionsWe advance an arenas model as a novel means of addressing conceptual and measurement challenges that often undermine the validity of claims concerning the global health agenda status of problems and contributing causal factors. Our presentation of the model and illustrative analysis lays the groundwork for more systematic investigation of trends in global health agenda setting. Further specification of the model is needed to ensure accurate representation of vital national and transnational arenas and their interactions, applicability to a range of disease-specific, health systems, governance and policy issues, and sensitivity to subtler influences on global health agenda setting than pandemic shocks.

The Global Diffusion of Stewardship Codes

n today's world, the transfer of laws and regulations between different legal systems is commonplace. The global spread of stewardship codes in recent years presents a promising, but yet untested, terrain to explore the diffusion of such norms. This paper aims to fill this gap. Employing the method of content analysis and using information from 41 stewardship codes enacted between 1991 and 2019, we systematically examine the formal diffusion of these stewardship codes. While we find support for the diffusion story of the UK as a stewardship norm exporter, especially in former British colonies in Asia, we also find evidence of diffusion from transnational initiatives, such as the EFAMA and ICGN codes, as well as regional clusters. We also show that the UK Stewardship Code of 2020 now deviates from these current models; thus, it remains to be seen how far a second round of exportation of the revised UK model into the transnational arena will follow.

Exhibiting activism at the Palestinian Museum

ABSTRACT The sovereign nation-state remains the taken-for-granted setting for museums, which are conventionally understood as public institutions that collate and preserve objects, and make collections accessible to visitors. Given these expectations, the Palestinian Museum offers an intriguing case study in a growing body of research on the relationship between museums and international relations. In 2016, the Palestinian Museum opened in the West Bank without a collection and with an admission that, due to the Israeli occupation, many Palestinians would not be able to reach the building. This article proposes that the museum initiative and the experiences it has entailed illustrate activism under occupation, and the challenge this activism makes to Israel’s policies of control and erasure has been visible in three key ways. Firstly, the museum asserts a visible national presence in an environment where the everyday lives of Palestinians and Palestinian ambitions for independence are severely constrained. Secondly, the museum staff have used the lack of a collection to draw international attention to the Israeli occupation and policies of settlement, expropriation, and control. And thirdly, in its programme and stated ambitions, the museum’s designers have given wide scope to their imagined audience and the Palestinian national community, with a view to enhancing a transnational arena for activism.

Neoliberalism at the borders of transnational policy: political exclusion in Australia’s Reconceptualization of trans-Tasman traditions

ABSTRACTThis paper explores the influence of political traditions on policymaking at the interface of national and transnational governance. It uncovers various dimensions of influence on boundary-setting through policy change, derived from a case study examining how Australia reconceptualised longstanding freedom of residential movement and equal treatment for citizens across the Tasman. These policymaking activities spanned boundaries across policy subsystems at the interface of both domestic and transnational arenas, in response to perceived dilemmas. This paper focuses on the enabling role of neoliberal ideations to effect an agenda driven by more covert motives. In context of bilateral economic integration, conflicting traditions created a dilemma for Australia, which sought to maintain the advantages of the free labour-market whilst minimizing the problem of granting access to social security and citizenship to those perceived to be unsuitable. I find that Australia, in resolving this dilemma, allowed neoliberal conceptions of labour as a commodity, thereby enabling traditions of exclusion and border control, to override longstanding trans-Tasman traditions.

Feminist Activism Confronts COVID-19

Activist Responses Feminist Studies 46, no. 3. © 2020 by Feminist Studies, Inc. 629 Constanza Tabbush and Elisabeth Jay Friedman Feminist Activism Confronts COVID-19 Even the most committed of feminists may see the current global health crisis as insurmountable.1 The COVID-19 pandemic has laid bare— and exacerbated—deep-seated and interlocking inequalities. Women and gender non-conforming people, particularly those without class and ethno-racial privilege, are affected in gender-specific ways.2 Women are on the frontline of the care response as healthcare workers as well as unpaid community and family caregivers.3 Stay-at-home measures heighten the risks of gender-based violence as they lock women and gender non-conforming people behind closed doors with their potential 1. Helen Lewis, “The Coronavirus Is a Disaster for Feminism,” The Atlantic, March 19, 2020, https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2020 /03/feminism-womens-rights-coronavirus-covid19/608302. 2. Laura Turquet and Sandrine Koissy-Kpein, “COVID-19 and Gender: What Do We Know; What Do We Need to Know?” UN Women, April 13, 2020, https://data.unwomen.org/features/covid-19-and-gender-what-do-we-knowwhat -do-we-need-know; Amie Bishop, “Vulnerability Amplified: The Impact of the COVID-19 Pandemic on LGBTIQ People,” OutRight Action International , 2020, https://outrightinternational.org/sites/default/files/COVIDs ReportDesign_FINAL_LR_0.pdf. 3. Silke Staab, “COVID-19 Sends the Care Economy Deeper into Crisis Mode,” UN Women, April 22, 2020, https://data.unwomen.org/features/covid-19sends -care-economy-deeper-crisis-mode. 630 Constanza Tabbush and Elisabeth Jay Friedman aggressors.4 The economic downturn from halting production and consumption has also hit women harder than men.5 Reproductive and sexual health services have been deemed “inessential” in various countries .6 As troubling as the care and economic crises are, the pandemic response simultaneously threatens exactly what is needed to address them: intersectional feminist activism. For example, in Latin America, social isolation policies have thwarted the mass feminist mobilizations of the last five years. From the Southern Cone to Mexico, hundreds of thousands took to the streets in marches and dramatic street performances demanding government and societal accountability for ending violence against women, protecting reproductive rights, and addressing the gendered harms of neoliberal development.7 The dictates of physical distancing have also derailed gatherings meant to celebrate and stimulate action on the women’s international human rights agenda. The twenty-fifth anniversary of the 1995 UN Fourth World Conference on Women, for instance, promised to be a political opportunity for transnational movement building. Yet, instead of bringing women from different generations together, it became a symbolic day of commemoration.8 Has feminist activism been brought to a halt by COVID-19? Our answer, based on evidence from the Latin American region and transnational arenas, is a definitive “no.” Although pandemic policies 4. Amber Peterman, Alina Potts, Megan O’Donnell, Kelly Thompson, Niyati Shah, Sabine Oertelt-Prigione, and Nicole van Gelder, “Pandemics and Violence Against Women and Children” (Working Paper 528, Center for Global Development, April 2020), https://www.cgdev.org/publication/pandemicsand -violence-against-women-and-children. 5. “Policy Brief: The Impact of COVID-19 on Women,” United Nations, April 9, 2020, https://unsdg.un.org/resources/policy-brief-impact-covid-19-women. 6. Claudia Rivera Amarillo, “Feminism on Lockdown,” NACLA Report on the Americas 52, no. 3 (2020): 274–81. 7. Travis Waldron, “The Coronavirus Outbreak Has Stalled Argentina’s Historic Effort To Legalize Abortion,” Huffington Post, March 26, 2020, https:// www.huffpost.com/entry/argentina-abortion-legalization-coronavirus_n_ 5e7cae9bc5b6cb08a928f364; Laura Carlsen, “Mexico: From Women’s Uprising to COVID-19 Crisis,” The Indypendent, April 13, 2020, https://indypendent.org /2020/04/mexico-from-womens-uprising-to-covid-19-crisis. 8. See the letter of the Chairperson of the 64th Commission on the Status of Women: “Political Declaration on the Occasion of the Twenty-Fifth Anniversary of the Fourth World Conference on Women,” United Nations, March 2020, https://www.unwomen.org/en/csw/csw64-2020. Constanza Tabbush and Elisabeth Jay Friedman 631 have halted the most visible crest of the fourth feminist “wave” and facilitated crackdowns on women and LGBTQI activists, deeply rooted, digitally enhanced networks are driving an unprecedented response to...

A new transnational arena? An analysis of cross-border web traffic towards professional online news sites in the Arab world

In recent years, Arab news industries have been confronted with an unparalleled increase in demand for journalistic offers. In parallel, Internet penetration throughout the Arab world has increased significantly, leading to a shift of consumption away from traditional channels towards the digital realm. This article addresses the impact of those recent developments on a shared transnational communicative arena throughout the Arab world. It includes geographically disaggregated traffic data of 630 inductively collected professional online news sources. Using a network analysis approach, it has been assessed that indeed, cross-border consumption of professional online news is a common and general feature in the region. Traffic flows between the countries are highly diversified without patterns of sub-segmentation. At the same time, the strength of traffic flows reflects the traditional leading role of the media industries in the United Arab Emirates, Egypt, Saudi Arabia and Qatar. Yet, weaker traffic flows between the other Arab countries are common and diverse, leading to a high overall integration of the Arab transnational communicative arena within the digital realm.

Marketing university students as mobile multilingual workers: the emergence of neoliberal lifestylers

ABSTRACTUnder the conditions of the globalized new economy, European universities have become profit-making institutions. They envision students as mobile workers-to-be whose employability chances depend on self-enterprising and on self-responsibilization for foreign-language command, and they now compete in the educational marketplace by targeting them with an increased offer of internationalized English-mediated ‘multilingual’ degrees. This paper explores attitudes towards these marketed/marketable studenthood identities by 30 Catalan/Spanish-speaking students enrolled in four Multilingual Studies degrees in Barcelona. The data include students’ audio-recorded life-narrative interviews and online ‘life-after-graduation’ stories collected during a two-year ethnography (2011–2013). The results show that students engage in institutional neoliberal regimes which train them in the academic/professional, linguistic and personhood profiles required in global employment niches. They inhabit unique ‘multilingualized’ identities, with English as their professional/socialization lingua franca, and they self-attribute open-minded ‘civic-citizenship’ values, with an ‘innate’ capacity to engage with Otherness. They also invest in ‘cosmopolitan’ trajectories which blend ways of being, working and enjoying leisure in the transnational arena. This reveals how students position themselves in the precarious job marketplace, in autobiographic accounts of experience, which contributes to understanding youth identity projections as elite entrepreneurial lifestylers pointing to newer practices of socioeconomic competition, distinction and stratification at university.

Chasing uranium: Securing nuclear fuel on a transnational arena in Sweden 1971–1984

Access to nuclear fuel is a key point for modern nuclear nations. Despite this, the complex processes of the nuclear fuel cycle are seldom discussed in nuclear history. In order to shed light on how actors in the nuclear business have worked to secure access to fuel, this article describes the historical case of uranium import in Sweden, handled by the public-private company SKBF. The risks and challenges brought on by the expansion of the nuclear program in Sweden can be clearly seen in the work of SKBF, and the article gives insight into the complex transnational processes of the nuclear fuel cycle. The article outlines the creation of SKBF as well as its mission and activities during the 1970s, when Sweden tried to navigate the evolving uranium market while dealing with heightening tensions regarding nuclear politics at home. We show how SKBF acted in a constantly shifting national and international arena to secure a rapidly expanding nuclear system and legitimize its actions to the Swedish government. In this process, uranium was perceived in different ways: as national or international, scarce or plentiful, and to varying degrees an economic or political tool.

The European Union in the Transnational Financial Regulatory Arena: The Case of the Basel Committee on Banking Supervision

ABSTRACT Starting from the observation of an increased politicisation of the financial regulatory debate, the article analyses how this might impact the relationship between the European Union (EU) and the Basel Committee on Banking Supervision. The article first describes transnational financial networks after the global crisis and the shift from trust in technocratic autonomy to distrust and politicisation. It then turns to examine the legal bases for the participation of EU institutions in the Basel standard-setting process, discussing the challenges posed under EU law. The last part of the research focusses on the European Parliament’s attempts to become an active player in the transnational financial regulatory arena and on the role it might play to enhance the democratic legitimacy of the Basel process.

Centralizing cohesion policy in times of austerity: evidence from the policy cycle

ABSTRACT European policy-making has been interpreted as a pendulum that swings between the Member States (MSs) and the transnational arena when choices about where to assign policy responsibilities have to be made. As in other policy sectors, the pendulum metaphor has been used to interpret the changes which have occurred in Cohesion Policy supremacy. This article analyses how the attribution of responsibilities between the European Commission (EC), and the MSs has changed in the different phases of the policy cycle since the 1988 reform to the present day, simultaneously with the main stages of the European integration process. The main argument is that the 2008 Global Financial Crisis was a critical juncture within the history of the aforementioned integration process because it opened the way for the pursuit of new paths: it favoured the consolidation of a new governance system that pivots on the EC’s active role, by identifying Cohesion Policy as the main instrument to pursue the Europe 2020 objectives. Accordingly, this article provides interpretative keys with which to explain the changes that have occurred in intergovernmental relations since the 1988 reform, as well as analytical tools with which to understand the ongoing debate on the future of EU policy-making.