Transnational Politics Research Articles

An Enemy Abroad: The Transnational Politics of Francis Jeffrey and the War of 1812

In 1813 the celebrated founding editor of the Edinburgh Review, Francis Jeffrey, travelled to New York and Washington while Britain was at war with the United States and there is a surviving journal of that journey. The trip was for a romantic purpose (Jeffrey was to marry and bring back to Britain his second wife) but the timing meant that he was an enemy abroad while on US soil. As such, the journal unsettles our expectations about national identifications and this article examines Jeffrey’s interactions in the White House, his reactions to encounters with African Americans and his Romantic responses to the American landscape in order to investigate his transnational politics.

“Dial 999 for Help!” The Three-Digit Emergency Number and the Transnational Politics of Welfare Activism, 1937–1979

Since 1937 calling for help has meant dialing three digits on a telephone. “999”—the emergency telephone number originally devised in London as the call signal for police, fire brigade, or ambulance assistance—has been appropriated as the model of emergency communications in 162 countries to date (with variations in the specific number used, such as 911 in America). In this article, I argue that the emergency number system provides a lens to rethink the relationship between citizens, state, and local communities in the diverse historical and geographical settings of its introduction, taking as case studies the United Kingdom, the United States of America, and New Zealand. The system has enhanced the possibilities for citizens to intervene in rescuing one another from “danger” by enabling them to coordinate the speed and location of state response to an event deemed an emergency. It thereby rests on an idea of citizenship characterized by active and reciprocal surveillance of each other’s behavior, as well as democratized access to medical or other emergency assistance. However, this article suggests that the system has been marked by its uneven distribution in economically deprived communities (conditioned by the commercial imperatives of telephone companies), reinforcing inequalities of access to state services along lines of wealth, class, and race both domestically and internationally. I therefore suggest it compromised the apparatus of “British” social democracy in this era, cultivating new forms of political and consumer activism among social groups demanding access to telephones for emergency assistance.

Mobilizing transnational gender politics in post-genocide Rwanda

Mobilizing transnational gender politics in post-genocide Rwanda

Intergovernmental policy makes transnational politics? The unusually transnational politics of TTIP

When the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP) negotiations were underway, its politics were distinctively transnational. Numerous alliances between European and American industry associations advocated an ambitious agreement to mitigate the effects of conflicting rules. Some civic interest groups also closely cooperated to shape the agreement, while a broad, loose transatlantic coalition of civic interest groups opposed it. The extent of transnationalism in TTIP was greater than what had come before in the transatlantic relationship and what is evident in contemporaneous analogous trade negotiations. This article argues that while the salience of a trade negotiation affects whether societal actors mobilize, it is not sufficient to prompt transnational cooperation. Rather transnational cooperation stems primarily from what the actors are seeking to achieve and whether they have a motive and opportunity to work together. By clarifying the conditions under which transnational cooperation is more likely, this article informs the emerging literature on the new politics of trade. By making the case that the motives to mobilize and cooperate require distinct analysis, it contributes to the literature on transnationalism.

Revisionism as a logic of institutional change

AbstractHow does a treaty‐based organisation account for its shifts in policy and procedure? With the European Union's history in focus, the paper observes a pattern of evolution by which departures from existing practice are justified as moves to better honour commitments already held. This logic of change‐as‐fidelity has long been the usual way of doing transnational politics in post‐war Europe. The concept of revisionism, borrowed from the study of innovation in purposive organisations more generally, elucidates its place in the early European Community. The paper goes on to examine how more recent developments, especially visible in the Euro crisis, challenge this logic of change and threaten to displace it. It concludes by discussing what this implies for the political nature of the EU, and whether the revival of the revisionist method is plausible or desirable.

Authentically African: Arts and the Transnational Politics of Congolese Culture. SarahVan Beurden. athens: ohio university press, 2015. 372 pp .

Authentically African: Arts and the Transnational Politics of Congolese Culture. SarahVan Beurden. athens: ohio university press, 2015. 372 <scp>pp</scp> .

International Art World and Transnational Artwork: Creative Presence in Rebecca Belmore’s Fountain at the Venice Biennale

Drawing from and contributing to the International Relations (IR) aesthetics literature, I analyse how Anishinaabe artist Rebecca Belmore’s 2005 Venice Biennale performance-based video installation Fountain is an enactment of creative presence at an intersection of international and transnational politics. Belmore’s aesthetic method of engaging with water as a visual interface between the artist and viewer, by projecting the film of her performance onto a stream of falling water in the Canadian Pavilion exhibition, offers a method of understanding and transforming settler colonial power relations in world politics. I argue that Belmore’s artistic labour and knowledge production is an expression of Indigenous self-determination by discussing how Fountain is situated in relation with Indigenous peoples’ transnational land and waterway reclamations and cultural resurgences as well as the colonial context of the international art world dynamics of the Venice Biennale. My analysis of Belmore’s decolonial sensibility and political imagination with respect to water contributes to IR aesthetics debates by foregrounding the embodiment of knowledge production and performance artwork as a method of decolonisation.

Powered and Disempowered by Numbers: Data Issues in Global Governance

The articles in this special section argue that, by looking at quantification as a technical and political technique of power, we can effectively engage with newly established types of transnational power and better under-stand how numbers can enable reconfigurations and hence reorderings of power relations. The section looks at how numbers, in the form of risk assessments, measuring for results, and governance indicators, have a crucial impact in current transnational politics, which in turn influences resource allocation and recognition, discourses on undesirable individuals, possibilities for political leverage, and potential ownership.

Spectres of Pan-Islam: Methodological Nationalism and British Imperial Policy after the First World War

ABSTRACTIn the aftermath of the First World War, British officials were forced to contend with a threat that seemed to undermine their empire from India to Egypt. The anti-colonial revolts that spread across the world in this moment were caused by many factors from the collapse of the Ottoman Empire to far more local concerns. However, many British officials imagined these contemporaneous revolts to be caused by a pan-Islamic conspiracy. The threat of pan-Islam was inflated in the minds of these officials in large part because it fundamentally contradicted their conception of how politics should be ordered on a global scale. This article suggests that the spectre of pan-Islam helped to crystallise a methodological nationalism in imperial policies over Muslim populations. The amorphous spatiality of pan-Islam redoubled a growing commitment to bounded national spaces as a natural unit of political activity. To those officials obsessed with pan-Islam, it was so frightening precisely because it questioned the spatial paradigm through which they understood the world. Other officials saw pan-Islam as a minor nuisance, because they believe that such transnational politics could not possibly survive in a world inherently ordered into contiguous nations. The threat of pan-Islam helped to push both sets of officials into a methodological nationalism, but some saw nationalism as inevitable while others feared that Islam was a compelling threat to a European-dominated inter-national order.

The Ethnic Avant-Garde: Minority Cultures and World Revolution

The Ethnic Avant-Garde: Minority Cultures and World Revolution

Paradoxes of Transnational Labour Rights Campaigns: The Case of Play Fair in Indonesia

ABSTRACTNeoliberal globalization has moved industrial production to low‐wage countries such as China or Indonesia, fuelling rapid economic growth and rising national income. New employment opportunities, however, have been under‐pinned by poverty wages and inhumane working conditions as states ‘race to the bottom’ in terms of labour rights and regulations in order to be competitive and attract capital investment. Labour agency at the bottom of transnational supply chains is often said to be structurally powerless because of the international mobility of capital. The ‘boomerang effect’ has often been presented as a remedy that increases local bargaining power in the global South by mobilizing consumer pressure in the global North through multi‐stakeholder initiatives or transnational advocacy networks. The problem with this perspective is that it overstates the Northern dimension of this transnational politics and underestimates the local power base of Southern trade unions and labour movements. The incipient debate about Networks of Labour Activism (NOLA) aims to overcome this Northern bias. This article contributes to this debate by highlighting some of the limitations and unintended effects of multi‐stakeholder initiatives and taking a closer look at the Play Fair alliance and the ‘Freedom of Association Protocol’ in Indonesia's athletic footwear industry.

Book Review: Affective Relations: The Transnational Politics of Empathy

Book Review: Affective Relations: The Transnational Politics of Empathy

Démontrer les techniques de captage, transport et stockage du CO2 (CTSC) pour le climat

L’article revient sur les oppositions publiques qui accompagnent la démonstration des techniques de captage, transport et stockage du CO2 (CTSC) en Europe. Le CTSC regroupe plusieurs techniques visant à séparer et capter le dioxyde de carbone de ses sources industrielles, à le transporter vers un lieu de stockage et à l’isoler de l’atmosphère sur le long terme. Dans un contexte où le changement climatique devient un enjeu reconnu, la stratégie d’un stockage visant à gérer les rejets de CO2 d’origine industrielle gagne en puissance. Durant la dernière décennie, la Commission européenne s’est engagée en partenariat avec des acteurs industriels dans une démarche de « démonstration » du CTSC articulée autour du développement de démonstrateurs sur site afin d’amener ces techniques à un stade commercial. L’article revient sur deux projets industriels abandonnés en 2010. L’analyse permet de saisir les relations entre politique transnationale et échelle locale. Elle révèle les limites d’un modèle de développement technologique qui reporte l’épreuve de la démonstration du CTSC au niveau européen sur les sites, tout en ignorant le potentiel de politisation de cette démonstration au niveau local.&#x0D;

Sarah Van Beurden. Authentically African: Arts and the Transnational Politics of Congolese Culture.

Sarah Van Beurden. Authentically African: Arts and the Transnational Politics of Congolese Culture.

Great Masters of Mexican Folk Art in Los Angeles: transnational exhibition, diasporic emplacement, and the expedient politics of display

ABSTRACTIn this essay, I trace the Great Masters of Mexican Folk Art exhibition from its inception in a privatized programme managed by the transnational bank Banamex through its multiple instantiations within U.S. museums in order to explore the transnational politics of the exhibition, as well as its role in the diasporic emplacement of Mexican Americans. In so doing, I unsettle the ways we understand the commodification of difference through museum display and argue for the re-conceptualization of the museum as a transnational space in which varied multicultural imaginaries can be engaged and mobilized.

Cuba, the United States, and Cultures of the Transnational Left, 1930–1975

Scholars in American studies now routinely utilize the apparatus of history, including intensive archival research in topics once the province of political and diplomatic historians. True to their interdisciplinary mandate, however, they operate more like literary scholars than historians. The resulting studies do not construct narratives of change over time, interrogating causation and contingency; rather, they practice history by allusion, ranging and choosing from whatever mix of subjects, events, or trends seem useful. The paradigm for such monographs is Michael Denning's provocative, deservedly influential The Cultural Front: The Laboring of American Culture in the Twentieth Century (1996), which offers a powerful narrative of the 1930s Popular Front. Unfortunately, some more recent works simply frustrate in their refusal to take history seriously as history, rather than a vehicle from which to elaborate hypotheses about culture. Cuba, the United States, and the Cultures of the Transnational Left is a prime example of the new American cultural studies. It begins with a clear periodization and a historical subject: “US-Cuban political and cultural exchange around the Cuban revolutions of 1933 and 1959” (p. 3). The book's stated goal, however, is quite different. It seeks to examine the “transition from modernism to postmodernism, a critical juncture in late capitalism” using “diverse cultural studies methods” as a way “to rethink poetry and policy decisions in the same breath and to probe a range of representational sites mined from transnational tributaries” (pp. 3, 11, 13). In practice this leads to a pastiche mixing up cultural diplomacy, transnational politics of all sorts, and literary analysis. Actors include the Foreign Policy Association, the communist movements in both countries, the State Department's Division of Cultural Relations, the Black Panthers and other African American revolutionaries, the poets Nicolas Guillen and Langston Hughes, and, as a parting note, the Haitian rapper Wyclef Jean's 1997 mix-up of “Guantanamera.”

Education in Exile: International Scholarships, Cold War Politics, and Conflicts among SWAPO Members in Tanzania, 1961–1968

This article explores education in exile through a discussion of Namibians’ search for scholarships outside their national borders and of the locations where most studied abroad during the 1960s. These sites include Kurasini International Education Centre and Nkumbi International College, secondary schools established by the African-American Institute in Dar es Salaam and Kabwe, respectively, and Kongwa camp, the site in central Tanzania where the South West Africa People’s Organisation’s (SWAPO) first guerrillas embarked on military training and English and mathematics classes. I argue that Kurasini, Nkumbi, and Kongwa were key sites in SWAPO’s 1960s exile landscape. They channelled prior dialogue about education among Namibians and produced conflicts within the liberation movement that reverberated over later decades. These locations also draw attention to a broader political field. The places in which Namibian exiles lived, and the circumstances in which they lived there, shaped what ‘the Cold War’ meant and how its language was mobilised by competing groups within SWAPO. Such a perspective remains unexplored in historical literature, including literature on the Cold War in southern Africa, which highlights how global powers engaged with African nationalist movements without considering the manner in which liberation movement members used such interventions for other ends. This view should be developed through historical work focused on places where exiles lived and on how they became embedded within both transnational and intra-national politics.

Steam Transport, Sovereignty, and Empire in North America, circa 1850–1885

The mid-nineteenth century witnessed a revolution in steam transportation. This essay considers how innovations in transport transformed North America's politics and economics, with special focus given to the imperial formations and structures that accompanied the introduction of new systems of steam infrastructure. The essay also considers opposition to steam transport, arguing that conflicts over infrastructure left their mark on the era's national and transnational politics.

Against Conservative Internationalism

Europe’s integration and its broader postwar reconstruction, some scholars now claim, were conservative projects, geared toward bolstering traditional social, cultural, and economic hierarchies. Marco Duranti’s The Conservative Human Rights Revolution is a sweeping political and institutional history that reconstructs a transnational movement of conservative politicians and thinkers, who established the European Court of Human rights (ECHR) in the aftermath of the Second World War. In Samuel Moyn’s narrative, Christian Human Rights, the postwar popularity of human rights signals the triumph of conservatism. Udi Greenberg reviews Conservative Human Rights Revolution: European Identity, Transnational Politics, and the Origins of the European Convention by Marco Duranti and Christian Human Rights by Samuel Moyn.

"LONG LIVE ANARCHISM" AND ITS SOUTHERN DISCONTENT: SOUTH-VERTING THE “TRANS-” OF RADICAL TRANSNATIONAL KNOWLEDGE IN IL RISVEGLIO

&nbsp;This study proposes the re-orienting of the radical transnational politics exchanged in the first anti-fascist and anarchist newspaper Il Risveglio, produced in 1927 in Australia. It combines a critical analysis of its transnational and translocal political imaginaries with an examination of the linkages of its “trans” of gender, race, class and imperial relations to unsettle its responses to the historical, Italian based southern discontent. It argues that its focus on the social question and the predominance of northern-based responses to women’s equality and the racialisation of migrants effaces and negates the lives of diaspora from the southern regions. This negation also intersects with its support for the formation of a white working class and negation of Indigenous sovereign ontologies and epistemologies in the settler colony of Australia. This paper demonstrates that the effacement of the southern discontent is re-configured across varied and relational systems of radical diasporic knowledge.