Transnational Social Movement Organizations and Counter-hegemonic Struggles Today.pdf (original) (raw)
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Global Networks, 2017
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.
Restructuring World Politics: Transnational Social Movements, Networks, and Norms
2002
From the earliest campaign against Augusto Pinochet’s repressive practices to the recent massive demonstrations against the World Trade Organization, transnational collective action involving nongovernmental organizations has been restructuring politics and changing the world. Ranging from Santiago to Seattle and covering more than twenty-five years of transnational advocacy, the essays in Restructuring World Politics offer a clear, richly nuanced picture of this process and its far-reaching implications in an increasingly globalized political economy. The book brings together scholars, activists, and policy makers to show how such advocacy addresses—and reshapes—key issues in the areas of labor, human rights, gender justice, democratization, and sustainable development throughout the world. A primary goal of transnational advocacy is to create, strengthen, implement, and monitor international norms. How transnational networks go about doing this, why and when they succeed, and what problems and complications they face are the main themes of this book. Looking at a wide range of cases where nongovernmental actors attempt to change norms and the practices of states, international organizations, and firms in the private sector—from debt restructuring to protecting human rights, from anti-dam projects in India to the prodemocracy movement in Indonesia—the authors compellingly depict international nongovernmental organizations and transnational social movements as considerable, emerging powers in international politics, initiating, facilitating, and directing the transformation of global norms and practices.
Alternative policy groups and transnational counter-hegemonic struggle
Global Economic Crisis and the Politics of Diversity, edited by Yildiz Atasoy, 2014
This chapter focuses on an emergent component of global civil society: transnational alternative policy groups (TAPGs) that research and promote democratic alternatives to neoliberal globalization. Since the 1970s, an increasingly crisis-ridden economic globalization has fuelled concerns in the global North that democracy is being hollowed out as governments lose capacity to pursue policies that stray from what has been called the corporate agenda, even as democratic forces and practices within a number of Southern states have recently strengthened due to pressure from below – as in Latin America’s ‘pink tide’ and the Middle East’s ‘Arab Spring.’ Indeed, as neoliberal globalization have reshaped the political-economic terrain, North and South, transnational movements have developed as advocates of a ‘democratic globalization’ that endeavours to enrich human relations across space by empowering communities and citizens to participate in the full range of decisions that govern their lives (Chase-Dunn 2002; Munck 2010; Smith 2008; Smith and Wiest 2012). Alongside and in symbiosis with these movements, TAPGs have emerged – ‘think tanks’ that research and promote democratic alternatives to the corporate agenda of top-down globalization. As collective intellectuals of alter-globalization, these are think tanks of a different sort from the conventional ones that advise political and corporate elites. Groups such as the Third World Institute (ITeM, Montevideo), the Centre de recherche et d'information pour le développement (Paris), the Transnational Institute (Amsterdam), and Focus on the Global South (Bangkok) create knowledge that challenges existing corporate priorities and state policies, and that advocates alternative ways of organizing economic, political and cultural life. They disseminate this knowledge not only via mainstream media venues but through activist networks and alternative media, and they often work collaboratively with social movements in implementing these alternative ideas. This chapter provides a preliminary analysis, and addresses some of the challenges they face as transnational counter-hegemonic actors on the contested terrain of global civil society.
2003
The world(-)systems* perspective provides a useful framework for discerning the continuities and discontinuities (emergent properties) of long historical waves of global integration (globalization) and social resistance to (capitalist) globalization.. The capitalist world(-)system has experienced long cycles of economic and political integration for centuries and these have been interspersed by periods of social resistance to capitalist globalization, in which disadvantaged, exploited and dominated groups contest the hierarchies that global capitalism and hegemonic states have constructed. In the contemporary period the intensification of capitalist globalization has been accompanied by a strengthening of social resistance and the emergence of new social movements that resist neoliberal globalization and attempt to build alternatives. Careful study of these long waves of globalization and resistance can provide us with important insights that are relevant to the task of building a more humane and democratic global commonwealth in the 21 st century. Research and teaching on the role of the new social movements and the historical dialectic between globalization, resistance, and democratization should be a central aspect of the new critical Global(ization) Studies.
Transnational Social Movements in an Age of Globalisation
This course surveys a range of theories seeking to make sense of the dynamics of social movement mobilization in both the developed and developing world, focusing on dissidents (variously defined) pressing demands on sovereign states and international organizations through a variety of methods, both violent and non - violent, generally subsumed under the heading of “contentious politics.” After covering the general literature on the relationship between globalization and dissent, the course focuses on a series of transnational trends/movements related to the global fight for (and against) democracy
Grassroots Movements as Transnational Actors: Implications for Global Civil Society
Voluntas, 2002
The past two decades witnessed the emergence of a new range of transnational social movements, networks, and organizations seeking to promote a more just and equitable global order. With this broadening and deepening of cross-border citizen action, however, troubling questions have arisen about their rights of representation and accountability—the internal hierarchies of voice and access within transnational civil society are being highlighted. The rise of transnational grassroots movements, with strong constituency base and sophisticated advocacy capability at both local and global levels, is an important phenomenon in this context. These movements are formed and led by poor and marginalized groups, and defy the stereotype of grassroots movements being narrowly focused on local issues. They embody both a challenge and an opportunity for democratizing and strengthening the role of transnational civil society in global
Transnational Linkages and Movement Communities
2011
To conceptualize the emergence and maintenance of transnational movements and linkages among supporters, we identify three types of movement communities: professional communities, grassroots communities and conscience communities, which are differentiated on bases of location, repertoire and networks. We argue that these 'imagined communities' are all critical to the construction of transnational social movement identities and campaigns. Based on this approach, research is needed to show how different types of movement communities are activated by campaigns, what parts they play in the mobilization and outcomes of campaigns, and how linkages are created and maintained among these communities. This review of work on transnational activism offers a new perspective on transnational linkages focusing on the interactions of social movement communities in movement campaigns. We begin by reviewing international relations, social movement and world polity perspectives on transnational activism. We then define and discuss transnational activism with reference to the relationship between three social movement communities: professional, grassroots and conscience communities. Next, we discuss the role of campaigns in bringing together these communities. We conclude with some directions for future research based on our approach. The growth of transnational activism The explosive growth of intergovernmental organizations (IGOs) and international nongovernmental organizations (INGOs) since the end of World War II (
Social Movements and the Multilateral Arena
Oxford Handbooks Online, 2015
Most social movement research privileges the state as the main, if not the sole arena where social movement contestation takes place. By drawing from work in political sociology, international relations, and political economy of the world-system, scholars can improve understandings of the ways political conflicts are embedded in extra-local contexts. This essay clarifies some assumptions embedded in state-centric approaches and explores ideas at the borders of social movement scholarship and related fields about how the world beyond states impacts conflicts at local, national, and global scales. Having engaged the interstate arena in unprecedented ways during the 1990s, many activist groups saw more clearly this system's limited capacities for responding to deepening global crises. The early twenty-first century thus saw a growth in transnational social movement activity outside the interstate arena. This encourages us to rethink relationships between social movements and not just the state, but also the interstate system itself.