Transnational Activism Essay ⋆ Essays on Controversial Topics ⋆ EssayEmpire

In an era of accelerating globalization, social and political activists increasingly operate beyond and across state borders. Their activities, commonly referred to as “transnational activism,” reflect broader changes in the global political economy. New communication technologies play an important role in fueling this type of activism and expanding it across diverse institutional realms. Social problems scholars increasingly focus on the prominent role that transnational activists play in the emergence of global social movements and their importance in understanding the larger dynamics of contemporary social change.

Confrontations with the existing order posed by such movements, depending on the nature of changes sought and the degree of militancy, eventually draw a response by state agencies and other private forms of organized social control. For social problems specialists, a daunting set of analytical issues results from the increasingly transnational character of this social process. As the theater of operations of social activism expands, its complexity deepens in a directly proportional manner. This makes transnational activism both challenging and exciting for critical analysts who must direct their attention to local, national, and global arenas of protest and response.

Types of Transnational Activism

Transnational activism spans a broad range of social movements, including labor internationalism, youth group federations, international feminist networks, pan-indigenous movements, global environmental coalitions, religious social activism, and alter-globalization forums. Their ideological orientation crosses the entire political spectrum from fundamentalist conservative to radical revolutionary, with no inherent link to any particular one of the numerous strategies available. From politicized consumer activities such as boycotts to mass protest, direct action, and even armed struggle, the forms that such activism can assume seem to expand continually.

Just like other kinds of activist activity, however, transnational activism tends to fall into some general behavioral patterns. Determining its relationship with social movements as an organized expression of resistance are responses to local, national, regional, and global social forces and to unacceptable institutionalized practices. At the same time, the broader political economy substantially conditions the landscape of transnational social movements and tends to structure or delimit their fields of operation. For example, a global trend toward energy and natural resource shortages can result in a global tendency to relax environmental protection standards. This in turn can generate transnational activism by global alliances of environmental groups in protest of the ecological consequences.

The dynamic of opposition and resistance is both a product of existing social forces and an active shaper of future institutionalized practices. Given the uneven character of social mobilization, structural upturns and downturns of the global economy, and political swings in the social control strategies of state and supra-state authorities, transnational activist activities tend to ebb and flow at uneven rhythms. At any given moment, however, transactional activism possesses the potential for unity and effectively coordinated actions, making it an essential focus for studying social change.

For example, in the less-developed regions of the global South, the world superpowers implemented policies in the 1970s as a response to a global recession, seeking to restore previous rates of growth and profit through greater liberalization and penetration of transnational corporations into developing economies. Emphasis on free trade agreements, opening up new markets, and expanding investment from the North adversely affected the most vulnerable sectors of the developing South. This in turn yielded a dramatic increase in poverty, unemployment, and numerous social inequalities, resulting in an inevitable crescendo of protest by those so affected.

Soon the resurgent demands of organized social movements transformed into a groundswell of support for demanding greater global justice. Beginning from loosely knit, transnational coalitions of protest groups, the movement gradually coalesced into an ever-more-consolidated clamor for social justice under the umbrella of a global mobilization. This transnational activist movement manifested a diverse social composition of many feeling the brunt of neoliberal-style globalization, including public sector workers, peasant farmers, students, oppressed national minorities, women, and even portions of a newly impoverished middle class.

As the global, elite-dominated media establishment sought to label the movement an expression of “globalphobia,” transnational social justice activists proved resilient in developing their own label of “alter-globalization,” showing that its struggle aimed to confront a specific kind of globalization; that is, a neoliberal project designed in the interests of certain national elites in collusion with foreign hegemonic powers.

Transnational global justice activists developed new slogans and distinctive forms of protest, taking advantage of new communications technologies to construct increasingly more complex networks and alternative media networks. Their visibility quickly expanded with the consolidation of the World Social Forum, whose central unifying slogan, “Another World Is Possible,” took hold. An important part of this struggle consisted in leading protests against a new generation of commercial schemes designed to make neoliberal policies self-perpetuating through their enshrinement in international trade laws. The World Trade Organization (WTO), created in 1995, is the best example, just as the 1999 protests in Seattle against the WTO marked intensification of popular resistance against it.

Sociological Approaches

To capture fully the dynamics of transnational activism, social problems research must confront the theoretical challenges of conceptualizing social movements in relation to nation-states and the transnational legal order developing within a larger and historically evolving political economy. To this end, two broad bands of methodological approaches toward transnational activism presently do so. Social constructionism (with its more subjectivistic roots in critical labeling theory), symbolic interactionism, and postmodernist critical theory focus on the “claims” that activists make in “framing” the overarching social problem fueling their protest and the various social forces shaping the life cycle or “rise and fall” of their activist activities. In contrast, structural approaches (with their more objectivistic roots in political sociology), resource mobilization, and political economy emphasize national, regional, and global trends that affect material social conditions, political power relations, and social class inequalities, all of which fuel dynamics of resistance against the existing distribution of wealth and power, prevailing social control agencies, and an emerging transnational legal order.

Modest attempts to bridge these two camps mostly emphasize the uneven manner in which transnational activism emerged, making it decisive in some areas while more nation-based social movements continue to predominate in others. This favors a more eclectic approach by looking both at political opportunity structures and framing processes as potentially key components of transnational activist activity. A more integrated, dialectical approach will eventually need to root transnational activism in the global political economy, the dynamic logic of social movements, and the expanding role of the legal order as a mediator of local, national, and supra-national power relations.

Bibliography:

Petras, James. 2003. The New Development Politics: The Age of Empire Building and New Social Movements. Aldershot, England: Ashgate.
Sen, Jai, Anita Anand, Arturo Escobar, and Peter Waterman. 2005. World Social Forum: Challenging Empires. New Delhi, India: Viveka Foundation. Retrieved March 30, 2017 (https://www.researchgate.net/publication/5219720_The_World_Social_Forum_Challenging_Empires).
Stout, A. Kathryn, Richard A. Dello Buono, and William J. Chambliss. 2004. Social Problems, Law, and Society. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield.
Tarrow, Sidney. 2005. The New Transnational Activism. Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press.
Tilly, Charles and Sidney Tarrow. 2006. Contentious Politics. Boulder, CO: Paradigm.

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