Transnational Sphere Research Articles

MEASURING THE EUROPEANIZATION OF THE ANTI-GM MOVEMENT: EVIDENCE FROM FIVE EU COUNTRIES*

This study investigates the Europeanization of the anti-GM movement. Drawing on a quantitative protest event analysis that covers the period from 1995 to 2009 in Austria, France, Germany, Spain, and the UK, as well as in the sub-, supra- and transnational spheres (N = 1,865), it compares four pathways to Europeanization: domestication, externalization, supranationalization, and transnational pressure. It explains the relative prominence of these pathways through a general theory of movement behavior that is based on transaction costs and contextual opportunities and on the specifics of the EU's GM policy domain. It then examines alternatives to these standard predictions. While Europeanization is a multilevel process entailing national, sub-, supra- and transnational arenas, nation states remain the key arenas of movement for Europeanization, which is reinforced by the contentious nature of the GM policy domain. While grassroots actors show a certain tendency towards transnational activism, only well-resourced, professional actors exploit opportunities at all levels.

The emergence of carbon disclosure: Exploring the role of governance entrepreneurs

An innovative approach to mitigating climate change beyond the international negotiations and hard-law approaches is governing by disclosure – the acquisition and dissemination of information to influence the behavior of particular actors. This paper analyzes the institutionalization of carbon disclosure as an organizational field, focusing in particular on the role of governance entrepreneurs in this process. The emergence of carbon disclosure is scrutinized along four distinct stages of transnational institutionalization: start-up; competition and growth; convergence and consolidation; integration into international public policy. For each phase, the role and relevance of governance entrepreneurs is analyzed. The article finds that during the first stage, entrepreneurs mainly acts as innovators and “out-of-the-box” thinkers; in stage 2, entrepreneurs can be characterized as flexible adaptors and opportunity seekers, while in stage 3, the role of meta-governors in dominant. Finally, the last stage, entrepreneurs acts as connectors and bridge-builder between the transnational sphere of carbon disclosure and the wider international governance arena.

Rodogno (Davide), Struck (Bernhard), Vogel (Jakob), eds – Shaping the Transnational Sphere. Experts, Networks and Issues from the 1840s to the 1930s . – Oxford, Berghahn Books, 2015 (Studies in Contemporary European History). XIV + 306 p. Illustrations. Bibliogr. Index

Rodogno (Davide), Struck (Bernhard), Vogel (Jakob), eds – Shaping the Transnational Sphere. Experts, Networks and Issues from the 1840s to the 1930s . – Oxford, Berghahn Books, 2015 (Studies in Contemporary European History). XIV + 306 p. Illustrations. Bibliogr. Index

The Beginning of the Notion of “Transnational Sphere of Life”: Exploring from engaging in the Kim Heero case by Hideki Kajimura

The Beginning of the Notion of “Transnational Sphere of Life”: Exploring from engaging in the Kim Heero case by Hideki Kajimura

Wandering Dhamma and transnational fellowship: Addiction, aspiration and belonging among ethnic minorities on the northern Thai border

This article compares Buddhist and Christian approaches to the drug problem among ethnic minorities in northern Thailand. Government programmes implemented through Buddhist monasteries aim to construct Buddhist subjects and realise agendas of national security in border areas. Yet, they also offer development support and access to resources. Meanwhile, gospel rehabilitation centres provide much-needed drug treatment services while drawing highlanders into transnational spheres of Christian fellowship. Consequently, I argue that the relationship between ethnic minorities and the state can be defined in terms of aspiration and negotiation, as well as resistance and evasion, as has been previously argued in the literature.

Migrant Domestic Workers as ‘Agents’ of Development in Asia

Temporary contract migration represents the predominant form of legal migration policy in Asia. With its rationale of the filling of jobs and provision of income-generating opportunities, it is linked to the migration–development nexus debate. This paper focuses on the impact of migrants’ agency as development actors within a transnational sphere. The mainstream migration–development nexus debate and policy prescriptions imagine diaspora groups as the ideal conduit for grassroots-driven development initiatives. While ‘diaspora group-led’ initiatives assume long-term, if not permanent, migration, temporary migration creates a dynamic that is fundamentally distinct. Temporality of migration, as mandated by bilateral agreements and promoted by global institutions in Asia, shapes migrant agency and migrants’ development aspirations in essentially different ways, but temporary contract migrants are nevertheless constructed as the ‘agents of development’ at the macro level of politics and policies, while receiving limited research attention. This paper analyses temporality, migrant agency and the migration–development nexus debate in relation to female domestic workers who epitomise the feminisation of migration and constitute the largest number of newly hired migrants in many key source countries in Southeast Asia. This introduces a gender dimension to our discussion of temporary migration in its link to migrants’ developmental agency.

Shaping the Transnational Sphere: Experts, Networks and Issues from the 1840s to the 1940s, ed. Davide Rodogno, Bernhard Struck and Jakob Vogel

Shaping the Transnational Sphere: Experts, Networks and Issues from the 1840s to the 1940s, ed. Davide Rodogno, Bernhard Struck and Jakob Vogel

Imperial Ideologies, Transnational Activism

This article examines how a transnational religious movement that originated in British India, the Ahmadiyya movement, deployed the norm of religious freedom in the course of its expansion outside the British Empire. Ostracized by mainstream Muslims, Ahmadis used their position as imperial subjects to demand that the British protect their right to religious freedom in political spheres beyond the British Empire and irrespective of territorial jurisdiction. British authorities responded to this transnational activism by considering anew the practical meanings of this right. This article argues that this Ahmadiyya-British encounter had the effect of constituting a transnational sphere in which the place of religious freedom was contested and negotiated, both in terms of the actual physical place in which British colonial subjects could enjoy religious freedoms and the place of Ahmadis with respect to entitlement to religious freedoms. It further demonstrates that the British routinely drew on their assumptions about Islam and imperial notions of religious noninterference to subvert Ahmadiyya claims about religious freedom.

Aligning Transnational Climate Action with International Climate Governance: The Road from Paris

Transnational climate actions have come to constitute a distinguishable sphere of climate governance. Reflecting on the Paris outcome, this article discusses the role of non‐State and subnational actors – especially on the road to the Paris climate change conference. It argues that the intergovernmental and transnational spheres of global climate governance could mutually reinforce each other by continuing mobilization efforts to engage non‐State actors and by harnessing greater ambition, both from State and non‐State actors. For such mutual reinforcement to take effect, however, the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change should engage non‐State actors consistently and systematically. The article also argues that the Paris outcome and, above all, the building blocks that are part of the decision on enhancing pre‐2020 action, constitute the most comprehensive framework of non‐State engagement yet, offering a promising basis for mutual reinforcement of the intergovernmental and transnational spheres of global climate governance.

Reviewing strategies in/for ESD policy engagement: Agency reclaimed

ABSTRACTIn this response article, I draw on critical realist perspectives to engage with the argument put forward in Bengtsson's study, which sees agency as an ontological necessity for Education for Sustainable Development (ESD) policy engagement. Bengtsson supports a notion of the logic of contingent action over the logic of power as dominance, suggesting possibilities for agency and resistance. Although I do not in principle disagree with the agentive possibilities embedded in this aspect of the Bengtsson argument, it is the scope of the conceptualization thereof that I consider in this response. I start with considering the limitations of a Westphalian analysis of policy appropriations and agency for ESD, and argue that the Westphalian frame for policy analysis may be inadequate for capturing the significance of non-state actors and wider generative mechanisms such as informal normative structures, and private, economic power in the global political economy. Drawing on Fraser's (2008) concept of the transnational public sphere, I explore other potential possibilities for agency-centered appropriations or negations of, and/or resistance to ESD policy discourses, potentially expanding the agency-centered perspective referred to in Bengtsson's analysis and critique of policy making for ESD, or, at the very least, by offering a wider view of possibility for what he refers to as the ‘ineradicable moment of conflict, or antagonism.’ In particular, I broaden the notion of the transnational public sphere to be inclusive of Dussel's (1998) three concerns of transformation, namely; poverty and wealth inequality, environmental degradation, and narrow rationalities involving ongoing colonization of people, territories and resources. In doing this, I concur with Fraser, who suggests that the concept of the public sphere may well be “so thoroughly Westphalian in its deep conceptual structure as to be unsalvageable as a critical tool for theorizing the present” and suggest that public sphere thinking and associated conceptions of agency require expansion, which I offer from postcolonial and decolonization literature, critical realism, ontological experiences, and reflection on Environmental Education (EE) /ESD policy in the southern African region. Ultimately, I propose need for a more radical framework for EE/ ESD policy research that reaches beyond analyses of appropriations of policy within the Wesphalian state framework, and that moves beyond critiquing or seeking out resistance moments associated with the assumptions of trickle down effects from UN level policy, or analysis that is centered on the EE versus ESD debate. Such a framework requires a revitalized notion of agency involving commitment to collective, relational (including the socio-materially relational) and transgressive forms of agency for deep societal transformations all round. Overall, it seems that environmental education policy and praxis research conceptualized within a decolonizing transnational sphere frame appears to still be an open and as yet under-explored terrain.

Davide Rodogno, Bernhard Struck, and Jakob Vogel, editors.Shaping the Transnational Sphere: Experts, Networks and Issues from the 1840s to the 1930s.

Davide Rodogno, Bernhard Struck, and Jakob Vogel, editors.<i>Shaping the Transnational Sphere: Experts, Networks and Issues from the 1840s to the 1930s</i>.

Multi-stakeholderism in Internet governance: putting a fiction into practice

ABSTRACTThis article assumes that the multi-stakeholder concept is a fiction that provides meaning to a disorderly world. However, the multi-stakeholder concept does not only represent reality, it also gives rise to expectations, objectives and benchmarks. A second assumption of this article, therefore, is that the multi-stakeholder concept is performative. To the extent that the actors in Internet governance identify with its tale of inclusion and bottom-up policymaking, they are struggling to achieve its goals including those that Yaron Ezrahi would call a ‘publicly “believable impossibility”’. It is the effort of implementing the multi-stakeholder fiction which is at the centre of this article. Its performative power will be explored with regard to three common imaginaries: the imaginary of global representation, the democratisation of the transnational sphere and the possibility of improved outcomes. Two organisations, both of which strongly promote the multi-stakeholder approach, will serve as examples: the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers and the Internet Governance Forum. Following a brief overview of the origins of the multi-stakeholder concept and the empirical evidence of its performance, the article will focus on institutional practices in Internet governance.

NGOs: A New History of Transnational Civil Society by Thomas Davies, and: Shaping the Transnational Sphere: Experts, Networks and Issues from the 1840s to the 1930s ed. by Davide Rodogno, Bernhard Struck, and Jakob Vogel

NGOs: A New History of Transnational Civil Society by Thomas Davies, and: Shaping the Transnational Sphere: Experts, Networks and Issues from the 1840s to the 1930s ed. by Davide Rodogno, Bernhard Struck, and Jakob Vogel

Motivations for mobility and settlement of Polish female migrants in Barcelona and Berlin

ABSTRACTThis article focuses on individual perceptions that shape migration decisions and investigates how the process of migration or settlement itself is framed by a variety of personal considerations. It is a comparative study of Polish female migrants in Barcelona and Berlin who moved for the sake of economic and educational opportunities, because of family reunification and formation considerations (‘move for love') – as well as other reasons. It is argued that the factors influencing women's decisions about continuous mobility or settlement are negotiated within social, cultural and economic transnational spheres and exchanges. In most cases, Polish women formed families with foreigners or Polish migrants in the host countries which contributed to their settlement decisions. Complex perceptions of life abroad juxtaposed with previous experiences and present ideas about life in Poland also influence decisions to move or settle. It is argued that the specific cultural, intellectual, economic and professional capital as well as the potential of these privileged EU migrant women accounts for their opportunity to choose and their specific freedom to make migration related decisions. A balancing of premises related to life-projects in both localities is an important aspect of the gendered experience of migration within Europe. It also brings attention to individual agency in a globalized world. The study is based on ethnographic research in Barcelona and Berlin that has been conducted since 2010.

European versus American Public Spheres: Negotiating Differences and Similarities in Times of Crisis

Abstract Leading European social thinkers like Jurgen Habermas and Niklas Luhmann wax eloquently on the importance of having a well-developed public sphere, a sort of “fourth power” or social sphere apart from government where ideas are freely exchanged, “discontents” find a hearing, and new social compromises or at least understandings are generated. In order to overcome the current crisis of the European unification project, Europe needs a common, transnational public sphere which despite some efforts still doesn’t exist. The article compares the current status of public spheres in the United States and the European Union, which it finds to be substantially different. In the United States, there is a real sense of nation (the existence of a single “country” identity) and highly developed media outlets, which these days reflect and amplify severely polarized left/right political identities. In contrast, in (Continental) Europe, a true transnational media sphere has not (as yet) developed; media outlets remain primarily national in orientation. We contend that – although few would wish for the political polarization that exists in the U.S. – the EU urgently needs a genuine public sphere that would help transcend the existing 28 national identities. Unlike in the U.S., in Europe the cultural unification which is the – still undervalued – basis of the political project can’t consist of “melting” languages, national myths, historic memories or ethnic habits, but only in the generation of a joint, multi-lingual, multicultural and multi-national public sphere. The creation of such a sphere is not on the priority agenda of European governments, nor of the European Commission; but it should be. However, such a joint public sphere cannot develop until there is greater institutional integration, that is, an advance of European federalism at the governmental level to a much higher degree. Keywords: Public Sphere – Public Debate – Europe – USA – Media – European unification – U.S. polarization – Transatlantic relations

Sexual Labor and the Transnational Sphere

Sexual Labor and the Transnational Sphere

Building Productive Links between the UNFCCC and the Broader Global Climate Governance Landscape1. This article reflects and builds upon discussions at a December 2013 workshop held in Neemrana, India, sponsored by the Centre for Policy Research (New Delhi) and the Mitigation Action Plans and Scenarios (MAPS) program of the Energy Research Centre (Cape Town). This article builds on pp. 14–19

This forum article outlines a research agenda focused on linkages between the UNFCCC and other governance arrangements that also address climate change. We take as our point of departure the recognition that the UNFCCC is no longer the sole site of global climate change governance, and thus the types of linkage across what we call the global climate governance landscape including as a central node the UNFCCC are important for thinking through how improved global responses to climate change may be pursued. The forum identifies two specific types of linkage: division-of-labor linkages and catalytic linkages. We illustrate these with some examples and raise questions we believe would be useful to pursue in future research.

Global policing and transnational rule with law

This paper advances the ‘rule with law’ concept. After a brief overview of the global policing field and its relationship with law, we use socio-legal theories of policing to examine four examples of law in action: (i) the global money system, (ii) transnational mobility, (iii) intellectual property, and (iv) high policing. These examples illustrate how legal instruments become tools in the hands of public and private social actors operating in the transnational sphere. The paper advances three arguments. First, we argue that global policing practices exemplify rule with law not rule of law. Second, we argue that attempts to codify transnational (criminal) law and procedure must recognise the distinction between ‘law in the books’ and the ‘living law’ as revealed in the practice of transnational policing. Third, we argue that the study of transnational policing should not be restricted to the response to transnational organised crime or defined as coterminous with transnational criminal law. Global policing practices deploy many kinds of public and private law as power tools in the governance of the global system.

Guises of transnationalism in Israel/Palestine: a few notes on 5 Broken Cameras

Film production in the Middle East is largely transnational, depending in many cases on external funding and co-production agreements. To date, the lion’s share of the funding comes from European organizations such as regional and national film funds, broadcasters, NGOs and the EU. Adopting an approach called ‘critical transnationalism’, this article examines modes of transnational film production in the Middle East through the case study of Greenhouse – a development programme for documentary filmmakers – and its acclaimed documentary 5 Broken Cameras (Israel/Palestine/France/Netherland, 2011). I argue that in this case a discourse of empowerment in the transnational sphere replicated neocolonial power dynamics, which undermined the liberating potential of transnational documentaries to transcend essentialist national discourses and cultural hegemonies. The production and exhibition contexts of the film have reproduced the neo-Orientalist discourse of Othering that locks the Palestinian into the position of the subaltern native, and aligns Israel with a European/Western position of cultural superiority.

What Roles for Scientific Associations in Contemporary Science?

This article aims to discuss the contemporary activities and roles that scientific associations play in science and society. It is based on a comprehensive study of scientific associations in Portugal, relying on a multi-method, quantitative and qualitative approach. After a brief review of the (scarce) literature on associations in the social studies of science, we provide an outline of the expanding field of scientific associations in Portugal. We then proceed to present and discuss the five main roles of associations identified through the research: communication among peers, promotion of research, science dissemination, representation of professional interests and policy advice. We conclude that the external roles of associations (establishing connections between science and society) have become more important than the internal ones. Whereas the internationalisation of science has moved the communication, collaboration and competition between researchers into the transnational sphere, the links that associations forge between science and other social spheres are still deeply rooted in national settings and much dependant on specific configurations and practices by government, business and other social actors.