Transnational Forces Research Articles

National Origins of International Solidarity Movements: Nationalism and International Solidarity for East Timor in Post-Cold War Southeast Asia

Abstract The international solidarity movement for the East Timorese was developed in Southeast Asian nations during the 1990s as ‘the issue of East Timor’ became a primary concern for the ASEAN countries’ civil society. Proponents of liberal democracy have assumed that international solidarity movements for human rights and democracy during the 1990s resulted from the powerful momentum of liberal democracy that universally linked foreign people. However, Michael Hardt, Antonio Negri and their marxist followers have explained these transnational movements as a transnational network that overcomes national borders against the capitalist Empire. Nevertheless, the political history of transnational solidarity movements from East Timor to Southeast Asia in the post-Cold War 1990s makes clear that nationalism has continued to be an ideological driver to link people from different nations. Focusing on the international solidarity for the East Timorese independence struggle, this paper demonstrates a transnational function of nationalism through which international solidarity movements are created, resonate and function. The East Timor international solidarity struggle successfully created a transnational platform through the APCET conferences held in the Philippines, Malaysia and Thailand in the 1990s. Socio-historical analysis of APCET reveals that nationalists in Southeast Asia shared collective memories of national struggles beyond their spaces and times to create a transnational force to support self-determination for the East Timorese. Through its analysis, this article extends the theoretical framework of nationalism that has explained nationalist movements to serve as a more powerful tool to explain international solidarity in the age of globalisation. (247 words)

The Transnational Turn: How Women Writers are Engaging with Global Flows in the 21st Century

In a world characterized by unprecedented global flows, women writers have emerged as powerful voices navigating the complexities of the "transnational turn." This research delves into how contemporary women writers engage with issues of migration, economic inequities, cultural transformation, and transnational solidarity, weaving narratives that illuminate the human cost and creative potential of this interconnected world. The contemporary narratives showcase the emotional weight of diaspora, the complexities of navigating cultural expectations across borders, and the persistent questioning of identity within a transnationalized world. The article explores how women writers engage with global flows, specifically focusing on their nuanced portrayals of the shifting sands of cultural practices and the multifaceted construction of identities in a world interwoven with transnational forces. With its intricate web of transnational forces, women writers have emerged as the cartographers of the 21st century’s interconnected yet dislocated world. The ever-evolving construction of identity amidst a chorus of societal expectations across borders in these narratives is no less than a literary expedition across borders offering insights into the complexities and creative possibilities of the interconnected world.

Exploring the Neo-Colonial Influence of Chinese FDI and Western Power on the Evolution of Labor Market Policies in a Developing Country

AbstractDespite the influx of Chinese FDI at the dawn of the 21st century and decades of neo-liberal, market-oriented economic policies in Africa, the pervasive nature of institutional voids (particularly in the labor market) has been constantly flagged as an impediment to socio-economic development in the continent. This has prompted calls for more research into the ability of independent African states to pursue viable labor market policy options, from a business system perspective. While institutional theory (specifically the notion of institutional voids) suggests the use of market-supporting and contract-enforcement structures and processes to enable the efficient functioning of the economy, it does not address the effect of strong external ‘powers’ on weak local institutions in developing countries. This study qualitatively explores how the shifting geopolitical landscape (power) from Western to Chinese sources of FDI shaped the nature and evolution of labor market institutions in Cameroon. The findings show that an entrenched parochial and crony Cameroonian institutional context was at the mercy of transnational forces playing a pivotal role, rather than coherent national socio-economic policy options, in shaping labor market institutions in the country. In an act of political complicity, the dynamics that flowed from Chinese FDI have engendered a regressive turn toward the failed nationalistic labor market policies pursued by Cameroon after independence. This article contributes to revealing the debilitating role of Chinese and Western FDI, and the ensuing dynamics, in the creation and sustenance of labor market institutions in a parochial developing economic context characterized by regulative institutional voids.

Vulnerability in contemporary Northern Irish literature: from climate change to troubles tourism

ABSTRACT Much contemporary Northern Irish literature appears to be firmly localist. However, this writing is always already in the process of ‘worlding,’ registering the imprints of transnational forces. For example, authors’ attentions to the local symptoms of climate change are necessarily means of diagnosing global disorder. Seamus Heaney’s poetry, often touted as a triumph of regional specificity, develops a ‘sense that … threats to the planet are intuited in the local place’ (District and Circle bookjacket). Likewise, texts that treat the post-conflict ‘neutralisation’ of Belfast’s city centre signal broader forms of resistance to global neoliberalism. As writers like Leontia Flynn and Glenn Patterson suggest, efforts to entice tourists to the North by reinventing Belfast as a global ‘anycity’ are forms of what Rob Nixon calls ‘slow violence’: erasing the conflict for the sake of visitor dollars does sociopolitical violence to historical memory, and turning the city centre into a glass-and-concrete playground for upwardly mobile elites does material violence to working-class communities. Moreover, such writing activates a politics of vulnerability: disclosing one’s own wounds can also be, as Judith Butler notes, a way to ‘furnish … a sense of [broader] … community’ (22), and local susceptibilities can thus be transmuted into forms of cross-border empathy and coalition-building.

The challenges and complexities of anti-fascist politics in colonial Puerto Rico, 1935–1945

ABSTRACT This article explores how and why the anti-fascist politics of the Partido Nacionalista de Puerto Rico (Puerto Rican Nationalist Party, PNPR), the Partido Popular Demócrata (Popular Democratic Party, PPD) and the Partido Comunista de Puerto Rico (Communist Party of Puerto Rican, PCPR) coincided with and differed from each other. It argues that each party’s understanding of anti-fascism corresponded to its political vision, goals, and program and its relation to other domestic and transnational forces. The colonial context and the disproportionate power the United States exercised over the archipelago greatly influenced how these parties understood and expressed anti-fascism, just as their formulation of anti-fascism reflected their positions on and relationships to the US government.

When Do Religious Organizations Resort to Violence? How Local Conditions Shape the Effects of Transnational Ideology

Under what conditions do non-state actors with religious agendas resort to violence? Studies tackling this question typically examine global or local factors in isolation, while those advancing integrated arguments lack the data required for systematic tests across time and countries. We advance and test a theoretical framework combining transnational forces, domestic context, and actor-specific attributes. We argue that by 1979 a new transnational zeitgeist reached maturation, creating fertile ground for religion’s violence-endorsing side. Yet, the effect of this transnational ideological shift depends on its identity linkage with religious organizations and on domestic levels of corruption and religious repression. To test our argument, we leverage a new dataset on ethno-political organizations that provides yearly codings of organizations’ claims and use of violence, spanning all world regions in the years 1946-2013. The statistical analysis corroborates our hypotheses. Overall, ethno-political organizations making religious claims have been significantly more violence-prone after 1979 compared to before. Yet, this post-1979 effect of religious claims depends on local conditions. Specifically, their identity linkage with a particularly salient manifestation of the new zeitgeist – the Iranian Revolution – has made religious organizations from Muslim ethnic groups particularly prone to violence, whereas before 1979 they had been less violent than those without a religious agenda. Moreover, regardless of religious identity, higher levels of political corruption and repression of religious organizations entail a higher risk of anti-government violence by religious organizations after 1979, but not before.

Separate National Apologies, Transnational Injustices: Second World War Oppression, Anti-Japanese Persecution, and the Politics of Apology in Five Countries

AbstractDuring the Second World War, several Allied countries oppressed Japanese diaspora groups (also known as Nikkei). The United States and Canada apologized in 1988; today, Brazil and Mexico face reparative demands for their persecution of Nikkei communities. There has been no integrated analysis of these interconnected injustices. This article offers a preliminary account, highlighting some of the key transnational factors involved. It also addresses the significant domestic bias of public discussions about the injustices, a bias that ignores the historical centrality of transnational forces in historical processes of anti-Asian oppression. We ask whether the possible spread of apology politics from the US and Canadian cases to Brazil, Mexico, and Australia might help to promote a new political awareness of the transnational character of the wartime oppression of Nikkei civilians in Allied countries. However, our analysis reveals that the politics of apology tends to promote domestic bias in public understandings of anti-Japanese racism. Indeed, to the extent that transnationality emerged in our cases, it was in the perverse form of “White civility” comparisons that chided countries in the Global South to emulate their allegedly more advanced apologetic counterparts from the North. Yet, there remain compelling reasons for domestic political apologies in our cases. The point is not to proscribe apologies but rather to understand their biases and, in the cases at hand, to use the spread of apology debates in our cases to promote a more widespread understanding of transnationality in the production of anti-Asian racism and White supremacy.

Anti-Colonialism Versus Self-Determination

Abstract The 1982 Falklands/Malvinas conflict pitted two of the most foundational principles of postwar international relations—anti-colonialism and self-determination—against each other, creating dilemmas for the great powers and smaller states alike in determining where to place their loyalties. The British consistently upheld the self-determination of the islanders, while portraying the war as a struggle between the forces of democracy and those of dictatorship. Though the United States strove for the appearance of neutrality, support for the United Kingdom resulted in the effective abandonment of the anti-colonialism of the Monroe Doctrine. The Soviet Union viewed the war as an anachronistic return to open imperialist aggression, and backed the fiercely anti-communist military junta in Argentina, even as it waged what was viewed as a “third world war” against the transnational forces of Marxism-Leninism. Meanwhile, the countries of the Western Hemisphere polarised into Latin American demands for decolonisation and the devotion of the Anglophone Caribbean to the principle of self-determination. This division was reflected in the debates and resolutions of the Organization of American States, the Non-Aligned Movement, and the United Nations.

Lessons for Left-Wing Populism from the 2010s Austerity Wave in Europe

Lessons for Left-Wing Populism from the 2010s Austerity Wave in Europe

Citizenship: flexible, fungible, fragile

ABSTRACT Since the 1980s, rising Asia has opened up our understanding of liberal citizenship to the forces of a globalizing world economy. Previously, scholars have treated citizenship as an ideal type – a construct of politico-legal and spiritual elements – determined by the nation-state. My approach situates the unstable character of citizenship within the vicissitudes of global capitalism and competitive nations. By investigating citizenship not as a fixed construct, but as a contingent category subject to transnational forces, I emphasize the interaction of newcomers and nation-states in shaping the mutations of citizenship.

Imperial literacy, choice and F.W. Albrecht’s Lutheran experiments in Aboriginal education in post-war Central Australia

ABSTRACT This paper argues that Aboriginal children’s engagement with education in the central Australian region of the Northern Territory in the mid-twentieth century can be understood as strategic engagements with formal western education systems and assimilation policies. It addresses a methodological problem stemming from a project that focuses on the work of the Finke River Mission (FRM) and its head missionary Friedrich Wilhelm Albrecht who, during the 1950s and 1960s, initiated an education scheme that targeted ‘half-caste’ Indigenous girls living on pastoral stations in central Australia. The scheme demonstrates the key concern of this special issue in that it is an example of the entanglements of transnational forces with local expressions of Indigenous education in Australia.

Differentiating risks to academic freedom in the globalised university in China

Academic freedom in China is unquestionably under threat from various quarters. Yet the assumption that only the logics of authoritarian Communist Party power shape the terrain in which scholars operate provides us with a limited perspective on these threats. The Chinese academy has become deeply entangled with transnational forces, and is increasingly driven by similar business logics to those in play in universities around the world. We argue that these forces too contribute to the context for the exercise of academic freedom and its restriction. As is the case elsewhere, discourses around developing the national ‘knowledge economy’ and related logics of securitisation around knowledge production create conditions in which some forms of academic research are prioritised over others. Echoing the ‘culture wars’ plaguing the academy in many other countries, the research agendas most under threat in China are ones that connect to transnational movements and struggles, especially those focussed on labour and class, gender and feminism, race and ethnicity and human rights. In this article, we outline what we see as the key forces shaping the landscape for academic freedom in China, with a concentration on areas of research and teaching in the social sciences and humanities that are most at risk in the current conjuncture.

India’s counterinsurgency knowledge: theorizing global position in wars on terror

ABSTRACT Within recent critical debates about the geographies and circulations of counterinsurgency knowledge, scholars have focused primarily on dominant centres of power and authority in the global North. Building a framework drawn from critical geography, this article decentres these locations and actors by exploring the global production and circulation of counterinsurgency knowledge from the vantage point of Indian strategic thinkers. Focusing on the work of the Indian think tank the Institute for Conflict Management (ICM), the article traces how Indian counterinsurgency knowledge has been produced, packaged and circulated transnationally since the late 1990s. It argues the power and utility that forms of counterinsurgency knowledge command – Indian or otherwise – are never reducible to the essential features of what actors or texts say. Rather, it suggests that counterinsurgency knowledge is produced through particular relations and locations of power-knowledge that define what they represent and where they fit in. It theorizes forms of counterinsurgency knowledge as positions within broader transnational forces, entwined with colonial histories of pacification. In doing so, it illuminates the contestations and forms of work in staging or organizing the world through practices that make some forms, actors, and locations important and relegate others to the peripheries of global politics.

Photographs, Diaspora, and Identity: Homecoming in Hala Alyan’s The Arsonists’ City

ABSTRACT Hala Alyan is an Arab American novelist and poet. Besides The Arsonists’ City (2021), which will be examined in this paper, she has published a novel titled Salt Houses (2017) and four collections of poetry. This paper argues that Alyan’s novel shows how photographs help the protagonist, Ava, to re-discover her own identity and unveil a forty-year-old family secret. This goal will be achieved by drawing on Roland Barthes’s concepts of punctum and stadium. Ava’s story is situated within the broader context of Palestinian experiences of displacement and homelessness. Her life turns upside down when she spends her summer holiday in Beirut in the late 2010s. She realises her identity by tracing a number of photographs which she finds in an album in her grandparents’ old house in Beirut. Like other Arab novelists in diaspora, Alyan portrays Ava’s identity as a site over which social, cultural and transnational forces converge.

Tanty feminisms

A geneaology of Caribbean feminism is a geneaology of tanty feminisms. Occupying numerous articulations throughout the history of the Caribbean region and its diasporas, the figure of the ‘tanty’, or ‘aunty’ as they are known in non-Caribbean contexts, and the consequential amital social relations they produce have been indispensable to contemporary discourses and practices of Caribbean feminist thought and praxis. The tanty cannot be read as indebted to a singular person, figure or monolithic legacy but operates as a fluid and transnational force of Caribbean feminist knowing that instructs us through non-normative embodied transgressions, and pedagogies of free up. Yet, despite their presence of vital integrity to Caribbean popular culture, community organizing, history, politics and literature, discussions of the politics and pedagogies of tantyhood remain underrepresented in scholarly Caribbean feminist literatures. In this article, I reflect upon my creative practice as a drag artist and self-proclaimed tanty in an annual digital photography series I have produced over the last three years entitled ‘Coolieween’. In this work, I reference Indo-/Caribbean folklore and mythologies, and stories of horror, the grotesque and the paranormal as entangled with queer affects, embodiments and aesthetics. Drag artistry, which, like tantyhood, agitates the invisible boundaries of neo-colonial gender, racial and sexual binaries, provides a critical feminist terrain to metaphorize the institutional crossings of pain and pleasure held within historical and contemporary ontologies of Indo-Caribbeanness. Investigating the pedagogy of this crossing is central to understanding, as well as critiquing, long-standing attachments of pain, injury, pathologization and trauma that have been commonly scripted to Indo-Caribbean subjectivities, often in reference to genealogies of kala pani poetics and other diaspora narratives that have sutured ideas of Indo-Caribbeanness as always-already broken, fragmented and dislocated. In this article, I instead centre paradigms of erotics and pleasure as a transformative medium to turn our optics towards transformative reconfigurations of Indo-Caribbean feminist selfhoods. As I argue here, by thinking with and through tanty feminisms, we are provided with intergenerational and transnational languages of unsettling logic that continually instruct us through everyday modalities of Indo-Caribbean feminist living and being.

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

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

Teachers in Neoinstitutional and World Culture Theory

Theorizing the role that teachers play in national education systems in a period of rapid globalization has proven challenging for social scientists and comparative education theorists alike. In accounting for the manifold roles and functions of teachers over time, theory must account for both cultural persistence (institutionalization) as well as cultural change at multiple levels. As teachers did not play a prominent role in early neoinstitutional theories, later researchers in the world culture strand of theorizing had to account for interactions between transnational forces and local effects, postulating what role teachers played in adapting and resisting or promoting specific reforms by drawing on culturalist studies as well as theories of the social construction of reality. World culture scholars have increasingly investigated topics like sensemaking, teacher work roles, teacher quality, and the regimes of teacher beliefs. Future work in this tradition will likely grapple with issues of cultural dynamics at multiple levels.

Do Polarization Narratives Apply to Politics on the Periphery? The Case of Atlantic Canada.

Researchers, policymakers, and the public often claim that “extreme” political views have become increasingly commonplace and that polarization on issues of race and immigration has become a central dilemma for contemporary politics. The popular narrative of political polarization captures tensions that many are noticing and experiencing. However, there is also significant confusion around the concept, as well as gaps between popular perceptions and empirical findings on the different forms of polarization and their prevalence across regions. It is unclear to what extent polarization describes a global phenomenon, as its national and subnational manifestations vary considerably, produced from distinct local histories as well as diffuse transnational forces. While the United States is often treated as ground zero for political polarization, nearby Canada does not appear to be experiencing polarization to nearly the same degree. Using data from a 2019 survey on Atlantic Canadians’ political views and perceptions of change, this paper examines whether underlying forms of political polarization are manifesting in the region. We assess whether mass ideological polarization and partisan sorting can be found in Atlantic Canada, looking at socio-cultural and economic dimensions of political values. We also examine perceptions of polarization in the region, using Multiple Correspondence Analysis to observe underlying associations between perceptions, extreme or polarized views, and partisanship. This mapping approach provides insight into latent patterns often missed by more traditional methods.

Nilai-Nilai Karakter sebagai Pembentuk Peradaban Manusia di Era Globalisasi

Talking about human civilization certainly cannot be separated from the values ​​that exist in humans themselves. In the current era of globalization, it turns out to have a very large influence on human life in various aspects of life, both social, political, economic, cultural, and others. Globalization has changed everyday life, especially felt by developing countries, and at the same time has created new transnational systems and forces. Globalization has affected the younger generation of Muslims, especially in developing countries, such as Indonesia. Departing from the above, it is necessary to launch and implement a strategy for inculcating the values ​​of local civilization in order to respond to the challenges of globalization. This is important to do so that teenagers or students are not trapped in the damage caused by globalization, one of which is the cultivation of character and ethical values ​​to students and youth. The inculcation of character and ethical values ​​is very important as the shaper of human civilization so that Indonesia, which is known as an ethical country, does not fade and is crushed by globalization and bad influences from other countries. The research methodology in this study uses a qualitative approach. It can be concluded that character values ​​are a strong foundation and fortress to withstand the negative currents of globalization.
 

The Pacific Alliance: regional integration as neoliberal discipline

ABSTRACT This article examines how the Pacific Alliance constitutes a multilevel state project to lock-in neoliberal reforms in each member country. Using a strategic relational approach to institutions that emphasizes the interconnection between institutional and social dynamics, it demonstrates that the AP is a state project that is both a regional market access strategy and a domestic disciplinary mechanism. Notably, it represents an attempt to reinforce the neoliberal economic export models that predominate in each member country: Chile, Mexico, Peru, and Colombia. Buttressed by dominant domestic and transnational social forces in each country, technocrats in each member countries seek to reproduce institutional strategies of depoliticization that were successfully employed in their countries at a regional level in the AP in view of growing political instability and discontentment with neoliberalism.