Transnational Social Movement Organizations Research Articles

Legitimacy and Legitimation Practices: An Analysis of TSMO Networks

Private transnational organizations have grown in number and in influence. However, sociologists and political scientists often study them separately, either as transnational social movement organizations (TSMOs) or the larger category of international non-governmental organizations (INGOs). In this paper, I examine the determinants of TSMO legitimacy by drawing on the literature on INGOs. In so doing, I call for bridging the disciplinary gap between sociology and political science. Empirically, I find that legitimation benefits already prominent organizations more than those that are not. Networking thus helps reproduce the hierarchy among the TSMOs, challenging the earlier notion that TSMOs are horizontally networked. However, I also find that Southern TSMOs are more likely to gain legitimacy than Northern TSMOs once they are visible to their peers. The analysis of TSMOs thus cautions our bias to study Northern INGOs and generalize the findings to INGO population. Overall, my findings reveal that the incentives and strategies that INGO research has documented exist among TSMOs despite their counter-hegemonic ambitions.

Activists Against Autocrats: TSMO Networks and Democratic Diffusion

Do transnational social movement organizations (TSMOs) promote the international diffusion of democracy? If so, how? Scholars of democratization have studied a plethora of international factors in the spread of democracy, including geographic or regional proximity, colonial history, trade and alliance networks, and joint inter-governmental organization (IGO) memberships. Few have studied the role of TSMO networks in democratic diffusion. We theorize that TSMOs empower and connect civil societies and thus promote democracy from the “bottom up.” Leveraging a new TSMO Dataset and data on the dimensions of democracy from the Varieties of Democracy project over the 1953–2013 period, we find that TSMOs promote democratic diffusion. TSMOs are strongest at diffusing participatory democracy. TSMOs also contribute to the diffusion of electoral democracy but do so by promoting the diffusion of freedom of association and freedom of expression rather than elections.

Transnational social movement organizations and gender mainstreaming bureaucracies: an event history analysis, 1981-1998

The 1980s and 1990s marked an explosive historical period in both the advancement of transnational social movement organizations and changes in the institutional structures of nation states. As a new set of global norms and values emerged, independent campaigns (women’s rights, human rights, and development) began to overlap and intersect. However, scholars, activists, and policy makers often view transnational social movement organizations as issue-specific and isolated from one another. Consequently, few empirical studies explore whether either transnational organizations in general or specific types of transnational organizations affect world cultural policy. Additionally, only a small body of literature questions variation in these relationships among developed and developing nations. One place where organizations worked both independently and jointly was in the global movement to establish national bureaucracies for gender mainstreaming. Yet, despite its global popularity, mainstreaming played out as a different process in developed and developing nations. This paper examines the relationship between national gender policy, rights-based organizing, and economic development. It asks how these forces each impacted the likelihood of the establishment of national bureaucracies for gender mainstreaming during the 1980s and 1990s. Results illustrate the power of transnational social movement organizations broadly in the advancement of gender policy among nations of both the developed and developing world as well as the unique role of democracy, intergovernmental organizations, and foreign aid in understanding the variation in the experiences of developed verses developing nations.

The Transnational Women's Rights Movement and the World Economy

Promoting the ratification of the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women (CEDAW) was a key objective of the transnational women's movement of the 1980s and 1990s. Yet, few studies examine what factors contribute to ratification. The small body of literature on this topic comes from a world-society perspective, which suggests that CEDAW represented a global shift toward women's rights and that ratification increased as international NGOs proliferated. However, this framing fails to consider whether diffusion varies in a stratified world-system. I combine world-society and world-systems approaches, adding to the literature by examining the impact of women's and human rights transnational social movement organizations on CEDAW ratification at varied world-system positions. The findings illustrate the complex strengths and limitations of a global movement, with such organizations having a negative effect on ratification among core nations, a positive effect in the semiperiphery, and no effect among periphery nations. This suggests that the impact of mobilization was neither a universal application of global scripts nor simply representative of the broad domination of core nations, but a complex and diverse result of civil society actors embedded in a politically stratified world.

The Challenges of Organizational Classification: A Research Note

Social movement, civil society, and world polity scholars use counts of nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) to evaluate important theoretical and empirical claims. To construct these measures, researchers often classify NGOs by their goals and/or domains. However, over time, the ways organizations describe and orient themselves change, blurring boundaries between organizations and complicating measurement. In this research note, we identify methodological challenges of organizational classification in the context of our work constructing a longitudinal dataset of transnational social movement organizations. We draw attention to an understudied cause of measurement error: overcounting of organizations. We suggest that as automated methods for classifying data become widespread, devising strategies for dealing with these challenges becomes even more pressing.

Transnational Social Movement Organizations and Counter-Hegemonic Struggles Today

World-systems analysts have drawn our attention to the importance of the long-standing worldwide struggles of subaltern groups to defend their livelihoods and address fundamental conflicts of our times. Climate change, financial volatility, and rising inequality are exposing the existential threats the global capitalist system poses to growing numbers—many of whom once enjoyed some of its benefits. These urgent challenges create possibilities for social movements to attract more widespread support for alternatives to global capitalism. Using data on transnational social movement organizations (TSMOs) from 1953-2013, we assess possibilities for counter-hegemonic movements to provide the organizational infrastructure for a global movement to transform the world-system. We describe the organizational foundations for transnational cooperation among social movements and consider what changes in the population suggest about its counter-hegemonic potential. Our study reveals substantial organizational expansion, greater participation from actors in the periphery, regionalization, radicalization in the issue frames pursued by activist organizations, and network ties that suggest more limited and strategic engagement with the inter-state system. We attribute these changes to U.S. hegemonic decline, the end of the Cold War, and changes in inter-state institutions.

Between Law and Transnational Social Movement Organizations: Stabilizing Expectations of Global Public Goods

This article draws on Niklas Luhmann's theory and method to present transnational social movement organizations as a solution to the problem of increased expectations of global public goods which fail to find adequate accommodation in law. As a concrete example of the limits of law in this respect, it examines the non liquet of the World Court on the question of the illegality of nuclear weapons. The trajectory of anti‐nuclear norms is traced beyond the limits of law to the alternative structure of transnational social movement organizations, and the article presents such organizations as stabilizing increased expectations of global public goods through their recursive decision making and their capacity to continuously project those expectations at the legal and political systems. This generates observations on the concept of ‘global governance ‘, the structural relations between global civil society and international law, and the role of this form of organization in the evolution of the global political system.

Transnational social movements and changing organizational fields in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries

© 2016 The Author(s) Global Networks © 2016 Global Networks Partnership & John Wiley & Sons Ltd Recent decades have seen dramatic changes in the global political arena, including shifts in geopolitical arrangements, increases in popular mobilization and contestation over the direction of globalization, and efforts by elites to channel or curb popular opposition. We explore how these factors affect changes in global politics. Organizational populations are shaped by ongoing interactions among civil-society, corporate and governmental actors operating at multiple levels. During the 1990s and 2000s, corporate and government actors promoted the ‘neoliberalization of civil society’ and the appropriation of movement concepts and practices to support elite interests. Not all movement actors have been passive witnesses to this process: they have engaged in intense internal debates, and they have adapted their organizational strategies to advance social transformation. This article draws from quantitative research on the population of transnational social movement organizations (TSMOs) and on qualitative research on contemporary transnational activism to describe changes in transnational organizing at a time of growing contention in world politics. We show how interactions among global actors have shaped new, hybrid organizational forms and spaces that include actors other than states in influential roles.

A Global Civil Society in a World Polity, or Angels and Nomads Against Empire?

Clifford Bob, The Marketing of Rebellion: Insurgents, Media and International Activism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 254 pp. Richard J. F. Day, Gramsci Is Dead: Anarchist Currents in Newest Social Movements (London: Pluto, 2005), 262 pp. Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Multitude: War and Democracy in Age of Empire (New York: Penguin Press, 2004), 427 pp. Lisa Jordan and Peter van Tuijl, eds., NGO Accountability: Politics, Principles and Innovations (London: Earthscan, 2006), 288 pp. Over past quarter-century, nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) and activist networks have increasingly gone global. Between 1973 and 1993, transnational social movement organizations concerned with human rights, environment, peace, and development more than tripled in number, rising to over 600 organizations. (1) Formerly local and national NGOs and community organizations now regularly operate transnationally: swapping information, networking, coordinating campaigns, framing claims, and locating shared targets. This is a change not only in frequency of interactions across borders, but also in networks' density, adaptability, complexity, and reach. Sidney Tarrow and Donatella Della Porta have called this trend the most dramatic change we see in world of contentious politics. (2) Transnational social movements are dynamic networks of multiple organizations and issues, forged in parallel and autonomous international summits, protest events, and via Internet. (3) They have even created their own space, World Social Forum (WSF), as well as a web of regional, national, local, and thematic forums modeled on WSF's horizontal, open space format. Here, movements deepen and broaden their solidarity ties and joint analyses under strategically ambiguous slogan that Another World Is Possible. While diverse, networks are united in conviction that this alternative should be forms of governance than neoliberal globalization. Activists decry this current global (dis)order as being characterized by mounting poverty and inequality within and among societies, corporate encroachment of the commons, environmental devastation, feminization of poverty, exacerbation of conflicts, and erosion of democracy. They identify and denounce World Bank, International Monetary Fund (IMF), and World Trade Organization (WTO) as main institutional promoters of neoliberalism. Beyond this shared oppositional orientation, these actors have diverse--and often conflicting--demands, organizational cultures, tactics, and ultimate goals. At most recent WSF in Nairobi, Immanuel Wallerstein spoke of a family of movements, replete with all affinities, identifications, and squabbles that constitute such relationships. Broadly, movements divide between reformist NGOs and more radical direct action social movements and networks. At bottom, feuds between these two tendencies stem from fundamentally different conceptions of existing global governance and order (as well as their place within it) and from degree and methods of change that each pursues. Contemporary activist forums like WSF have brought these different circles into contact with one another and thus have helped to attenuate polemic between them. Yet tensions remain, and there is evidence that other superpower is both demobilizing and fracturing along traditional leftist fault lines. But who are these new global actors? What are their points of convergence, contradiction, and outright conflict? And how do they engage with, legitimize, or challenge both state and international governance regimes that states have constructed? Finally, what can we learn about nature of global governance from movements' relatively marginal vantage points? These questions orient this essay. Each of four books examined here offers a unique standpoint and insight into this upstart clan of nonstate (and sometimes antistate) actors that challenge patrician families comprising global governance: those of states, intergovernmental organizations (IGOs), and transnational corporations (TNCs). …

From International Relations to Global Governance Theory: Conceptualizing NGOs after the Rio Breakthrough of 1992

This essay systematizes the ontology of non-governmental organizations (NGOs) and the processes of their inclusion in world politics. It tracks conceptualizations of NGOs, their integration into IR theory, and the resultant move toward global governance (GG) theory. First, I provide an interdisciplinary ontological evolution of NGOs in international relations (IR): as international interest groups, then transnational social movement organizations, then transnational advocacy networks, and most recently as global civil society. All stress different features of NGO activism, but none have successfully replaced the term ‘NGO.’ Second, this new ontology requires a new process for participation in world politics—GG. GG theory expands on IR theory to include NGOs in multi-actor, issue-driven relationships.

Explaining Participation in Regional Transnational Social Movement Organizations

Since the late 1980s, governments have focused intensely on formalizing political and economic relationships within regions. There has also been a concurrent rise in transnational, regional level organizing among social movement activists globally, suggesting the regionalization of `global civil society.' However, opportunities for participation in transnational associations vary widely across countries. In this article, we examine the influence of international (both global and regional) institutional contexts, citizen participation in international society, and national level factors on varying levels of participation in regional transnational social movement organizations (TSMOs). We use negative binomial regression to examine relationships among these factors at three time points: 1980, 1990, and 2000. We find that in the early time period, citizen network connections to international society facilitated the formation of and participation in regionally organized TSMOs. Over time, however, regional and global institutional contexts were more predictive of participation in regional TSMOs than were international network ties. Our analysis also uncovered how qualitatively different forms of regionalism translated into significantly different levels of TSMO regionalization. In Europe, where the regional institutional structure is more elaborated than elsewhere in the world, the number of regional TSMOs in which citizens participated greatly outpaced that found elsewhere. Irrespective of international, institutional factors, however, state-level features remained crucial to explaining the development of regional TSMO sectors and the variable levels of participation in them. Citizens in states with restrictions on political rights and civil liberties had significantly lower participation in these organizations in 1990 and 2000. Even so, over time, citizens in states with more ties to global and regional multilateral processes found more ways to overcome this disadvantage and strengthen their participation in regional, transnational civil society.

The Uneven Geography of Global Civil Society: National and Global Influences on Transnational Association

Recent decades have seen an explosion of transnational networking and activism, but participation varies widely around the globe. Using negative binomial regression, we explore how national and global political and economic factors shape this “uneven geography” of participation in transnational social movement organizations (TSMOs). Contrary to assumptions in popular discourse, we find a continued importance of the state and limited importance of global economic integration in determining participation in transnational associations. But while ties to the global economy do not significantly impact participation, a country’s links to global institutions enhance opportunities for transnational activism. Rich countries’ citizens are more active transnationally, but low-income countries with strong ties to the global polity are also more tied to global activist networks. This suggests that TSMOs do not simply reproduce world-system stratification, but ‐ aided by a supportive institutional environment ‐ they help sow the seeds for its transformation.

Building Bridges or Building Walls? Explaining Regionalization Among Transnational Social Movement Organizations

Before the mid-1980s, most transnational social movement organizations (TSMOs) organized across the North-South divide. However, since the mid-1980s data show that more TSMOs are organized exclusively within either the global North or South. To explain this pattern, I analyze ties between regionally organized TSMOs and other nongovernmental organizations. Groups in the global South were more likely than their Northern counterparts to maintain cross-regional ties. At the same time, Northern groups were significantly more likely to report only regional ties. Environmental and women's organizations were the most likely to maintain only regional ties while economic justice and human rights organizations were the most likely to report cross-regional ties. These findings suggest that the regionalization of TSMOs is best explained as a response to the institutional environment rather than a consequence of intramovement conflict and polarization.

Terrorism, Social Movements, and International Security: How Al Qaeda Affects Southeast Asia

This paper argues that international security studies can most profitably engage the issue of international terrorism by considering terrorist groups as transnational social movement organizations. It takes as its case Al Qaeda's role in Southeast Asia, focusing especially on the efforts of Al Qaeda leaders to align the demands and grievances of local Islamist movements and to spread a set of tactics and methods of political violence. In so doing, the paper builds on the often-neglected literature on the politics of terrorism while tying the argument to prevailing debates over social movements. The paper thus aims at clarifying the ways in which Southeast Asian organizations have adopted Al Qaeda's tactics and language but appear to be addressing primarily local or provincial concerns. This perspective also draws terrorism into current discussions of international security while maintaining a detailed focus on the interactions of individual agents and larger violent movements.

Exploring Connections Between Global Integration and Political Mobilization

With the end of the Cold War, military security issues declined on the international agenda as environmental, economic, and social issues rose. As superpower con?ict faded from the international agenda, space was created for new attempts at multilateral problem-solving. How have these changes a?ected the prospects for transnational organizing? Using data from the Yearbook of International Associations this paper explores changes in the size, issue focus, geographic makeup, and organizational structure of the population of transnational social movement organizations (TSMOs) in recent decades. While not the only form of transna-tional cooperation, these formal organizations provide important infrastructures for sustained transnational political work. Key ?ndings are that while the transnational social movement sector has continued to grow since the mid-20th century, its rate of growth has slowed in the 1990s. Also, human rights and environment predominate on TSMO issue-agendas, but during the 1990s more groups emphasized economic issues and adopted multi-issue organizing frames over single-issue focuses. Newer groups were more likely to be organized regionally, that is within the global North or South, which may re?ect e?orts to develop structures to better connect local settings with global networks.

Transnational Activist Networks and the Emergence of Labor Internationalism in the NAFTA Countries

Recent accounts of transnational activism have examined a variety of social movement organizations (SMOs) but have paid little attention to labor transnationalism. This article utilizes and adapts this new transnational social movements scholarship to understand contemporary labor activism in the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) countries. Exploring the preexisting networks and intramovement cleavages that helped spawn labor opposition to NAFTA, it focuses on labor activists' complaints under the treaty's labor side accord. I explore how rising political opportunities associated with the treaty and its new institutions created new political arenas, targets for activists, and incentives for cross-border collaboration. The cross-border political exchanges that formed part of labor activists' strategies to utilize these new institutions helped activists create new movement frames, transnational identities, and coalitions. While these outcomes support the findings of literature on transnational SMOs, they point to the particular dilemmas labor activists faced in confronting these issues due to their vulnerability, the status of unions as formal organizations embedded in national institutional structures, and the difficulty of imagining policies and strategies that might be effective in this new transnational sphere.

Bridging Global Divides?

A growing body of research has revealed a rapid expansion in transnational organizing and activism, but we know relatively little about the qualitative changes these transnational ties represent. Using surveys of transnational social movement organizations (TSMOs) and additional case study material, this paper examines the extent to which these organizations have been able to articulate strategic frames that motivate global level organizing and collective action. The analysis also investigates how inequities between the global North and South affect TSMO solidarity. Key findings are that, while TSMOs have helped expand routine communications among geographically dispersed memberships, there is also evidence that they have developed new skills for managing the differences that characterize such memberships. But gaps between Northern and Southern members persist, particularly regarding groups' abilities to relate local concerns to global level campaigns. Another concern is that, while TSMOs help integrate new groups into global political processes, expanding participation in global activism may foster even greater diversity and conflict among social change groups working in global arenas. Transnational groups have been better at cultivating shared understandings of the problems they address than at building consensus around a shared response to these problems.

Informal Alliances vs. Institutional Ties: The Effects of Elite Alliances on Environmental TSMO Networks

A cursory look at the ways that environmental activists seek to shape a growing global environmental agenda reveals a wide range of tactics that do not conform to traditional definitions of institutional versus disruptive politics. Zald and Diani argued in a recent Mobilization forum that our understandings of elite-movement relationships need revision to account for the variety of ways that movement actors relate to economic and political decision makers. While political opportunity analysts have shown that the presence or absence of sympathetic elites has important implications for movement outcomes, this article provides evidence about how the relationships between movement organizations and sympathetic transnational elites affect relationships within movements. By incorporating concepts and techniques from social network analysis, I derive a model to assess the effect of elite alliances on the structural positions in the network of environmental transnational social movement organizations (TSMOs). Findings indicate that elite alliances affect TSMO network positions differently, depending on the type and number of relationships the TSMO has with elites.

Transnational Political Processes and Contention Against the Global Economy

Research on transnational contention has largely overlooked how global economic negotiations and arrangements shape transnational dissent. In this article I examine how neoliberal economic arrangements structure transnational activism. I first describe neoliberalism as an important facet of economic globalization, and then suggest why neoliberal accords have become lightning rods for protest. I propose that transnational opposition to neoliberalism is supported by the growth of transnational mobilizing structures, as well as by the internationalization of political opportunities. For illustration, I draw upon qualitative research on the tactics of Canadian activists over more than fifteen years of sustained protest against trade and investment accords. I conclude by affirming that the link between international political processes and the rise of transnational social movement organizations and coalitions will mean significant transnational mobilizations in the future. I also caution against drawing premature conclusions about the long-term durability of these transnational alliances. Further research on recent anti-WTO and IMF protests will give a fuller picture of the roles played by these transnational alliances.

Transnational Conservation Movement Organizations: Shaping The Protected Area Systems of Less Developed Countries

This article compares transnational conservation organizations' efforts in Ecuador, Chile, and Peru in order to answer several questions: Why do transnational social movement organizations (TSMOs) engage in the politics of some nations but not others? Do TSMOs shape the policy decisions of less developed nations? What is the relationship between national political opportunity structure and transnational mobilization? Based upon historical data and fieldwork data, I argue that transnational conservationists can most easily affect the policies of politically "open" nations that have active domestic conservation movement organizations. In addition to influencing public policies, transnational conservationists are key actors in the development of private systems of biodiversity protection. Operating according to "lifeboat ethics," TSMOs select nations based on political criteria, while those nations most in need of conservation assistance (biodiversity hotspots) are neglected. This strategy contrasts sharply with strategies used by the transnational human rights movement.