Transnational Movements Essay ⋆ Political Science Essay Examples ⋆ EssayEmpire

A decade ago, the term transnational movements would have seemed an oxymoron because the social movement was considered the quintessential accompaniment to the development of the national state. The rise of movements coincided with the rise of the national state; they grew up under institutional umbrellas such as elections and courts, and national states offered the opportunities and posed the threats around which they mobilized. As late as the mid-1990s, national politics focused on the concept of political opportunity structure in the social movement canon. Yet by the turn of the century, books with titles like Transnational Social Movements and Global Politics (1997) by Jackie Smith and colleagues, Margaret Keck and Kathryn Sikkink’s Activists Beyond Borders (1998), Donatella della Porta and colleagues’ Social Movements in a Globalizing World (1999), and John Boli and George Thomas’s Constructing World Culture (1999) were making their appearance because of changes in international politics, academia, and activism.

Globalization—or the belief in it—was the first change. When people can board an airplane or open their computers and engage in collective action with others from elsewhere in the world, then the reality of transnational activism becomes a real possibility. Second, some observers and many activists extended the term social movement to a wide range of cross-border phenomena that would have gone by more prosaic names in previous eras: transnational nongovernmental organizations (NGOs), international advocacy campaigns, the diffusion of claims from one country to another, the representation of domestic interests in international institutions, and even the framing of domestic conflicts in “global” terms. Third, by the late 1990s, the domestic social movement politics of the 1960s and 1970s had become institutionalized. Dramatic events like the Chiapas insurgency in 1994 drew attention from the pedestrian world of domestic politics to more exciting conflicts elsewhere. These trends culminated in the series of social forums that began in Porto Alegre, Brazil, in 2001, which inspired many regional forums in the half-decade that followed. Finally, despite the resurgence of hegemonic interstate politics in the wake of the 9/11 and the World Trade Center bombing, there has been a rise in internationalization—defined as increased contacts among nonstate actors, links between governmental actors below the level of foreign policy makers, and a slow but steady increase in the adjudication of conflicts through international tribunals. Internationalization provides targets for contesting neoliberal international policies and makes “activism beyond borders” easier to mount and sustain.

Successful Transnational Campaigns

Since the mid-1990s, globalization and neoliberalism have become the foci of many activists and students of transnational contention. Although spectacular transnational events like the much-vaunted “battle of Seattle” target global neoliberalism, the most successful transnational campaigns are, for example, in the campaign against antipersonnel landmines, the struggle against HIV/AIDS in Africa, and the growth of international jurisdiction over war criminals and human rights abusers. Highly focused campaign coalitions like these appear to be far more successful than the more sweeping demands for “global justice” on the part of activists who seek the reversal of globalization.

Campaigns in narrower sectors of transnational activism are more successful, first, because of the difficulty that global justice protesters have in locating globalization in a single, accessible target. Second, campaigners in more specialized fields can find significant state allies. Third, while ant globalization protesters find only targets in the international arena (e.g., the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund, and the World Trade Organization), campaigners with more focused goals—against HIV/AIDS, for the environment, and against war and torture—find both opposition and support among international institutions.

The campaign to end the production and use of landmines in the 1990s illustrates all three factors: The target was clear and precise; a coalition of like-minded states worked closely with an international coalition of NGOs. Also, international institutions, such as the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) and the United Nations, supported the campaign and lent it legitimacy. In fact, had it not been for a change in strategy on the part of the ICRC and the leading role of medium-sized states like Canada, Belgium, and France in favor of the treaty, the campaign would probably have failed.

Transnational Contention

Relations between NGO “insiders” and social movement “outsiders” are an issue. Some argue that NGOs are, by definition, part of the institutional world of foundations, governments, and international institutions and are thus incapable of mounting effective challenges; others argue that social movements gain advantages from forming coalitions with NGOs that allow them to play on both sides of the institutional frontier. There are also long-term effects of external intervention on domestic activists after their international allies depart. While some NGOs and social movements claim a universal mission to struggle against wrongs, in practice, most of them choose their targets for intervention in the light of strategic goals and resource constraints. How violent forms of transnational activism relate to “good” global movements, which scholars studied in the late 1990s, is also of concern.

A final issue, and the broadest, is whether the growth of transnational activism reflects only the growing resources and inclination of domestic actors to move outward, or whether it reveals a more fundamental shift from a world of distinct domestic and international spheres to a fusion of domestic and international action. In the former case, transnational activism would not be fundamentally different from past transnational campaigns, such those against slavery and poison gas. In the latter, transnational activism may one day lead to the creation of a global civil society.

Bibliography:

Bob, Clifford. The Marketing of Rebellion: Insurgents, Media, and Transnational Support. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005.
Boli, John, and George Thomas, eds. Constructing World Culture: International Nongovernmental Organizations since 1875. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999.
Cameron, Maxwell A., Robert J. Lawson, and Brian W.Tomlin, eds. To Walk without Fear:The Global Movement to Ban Landmines. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998.
della Porta, Donatella, ed. The Global Justice Movement. Boulder: Paradigm, 2007.
della Porta, Donatella, Hanspeter Kriesi, and Dieter Rucht, eds. Social Movements in a Globalizing World. Houndsville, UK: Macmillan, 1999.
Fox, Jonathan, and L. David Brown, eds. The Struggle for Accountability: The World Bank, NGOs, and Grassroots Movements. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1998.
Goldstone, Jack, ed. States, Parties, and Social Movements. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003.
Keck, Margaret, and Kathryn Sikkink. Activists beyond Borders: Advocacy Networks in International Politics. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1998.
McAdam, Doug, John McCarthy, and Mayer N. Zald, eds. Comparative Perspectives on Social Movements. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996.
Meyer, David S., and Sidney Tarrow, eds. The Social Movement Society. Lanham, Md.: Rowman and Littlefield, 1998.
Roht-Arriaza, Naomi. The Pinochet Effect: Transnational Justice in the Age of Human Rights. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2005.
Schmitz, Hans Peter. Transnational Mobilization and Domestic Regime Change:
Africa in Comparative Perspective. Houndsmills, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006.
Smith, Jackie. Changing the World: Struggles for Global Democracy. Forthcoming.
Smith, Jackie, Charles Chatfield, and Ron Pagnucco, eds. Transnational Movements in Global Politics. Syracuse, N.Y.: Syracuse University Press, 1997.
Tarrow, Sidney. The New Transnational Activism. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005.
Tilly, Charles. “Social Movements in National Politics.” In Statemaking and Social Movements: Essays in History and Theory, edited by C. Bright and S. Harding. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1984.

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