‘Capturing Anarchists Across Borders’: The Transnational Dimensions of Italian Antimilitarist Campaigns, 1911–14

Abstract

This article engages with questions of the integration of different scales of analysis in the study of labour and radical movements: ‘transnational’, ‘national’ and ‘local’ or ‘trans-local’. The article places the study of transnational anarchism in a ‘national’ and ‘trans-local’ perspective. The analysis of the intersection between the networks of those who migrated from Italy and those who remained provides a fruitful means to uncover dynamics within the transnational anarchist movement and the interplay, in both directions, between home country, exile communities and host countries. The article focuses on the crucial, but still unexplored, contributions of communities of Italian anarchists abroad (in, among other places, London, Paris, Berne, Marseille, Barre and Buenos Aires) to the anti-militarist campaigns against the Italian colonial enterprise in Libya from 1911 to 1914, in terms of propaganda, theoretical debate, financing and countercultural production. The investigation of the initiatives of anarchist exiles and how they coordinated with their comrades in Italy provides a significant case study, not only to understand network-based transnational anarchism but also to reflect on mechanisms of political migration and their influence on the development of social conflicts.     

Politicians and Social Movements: The Impact of Electoral Victory on Local,National, and Transnational Activism by Hmong Americans in Minneapolis–St. Paul

Political opportunity theory predicts that increased access to the political system benefits social movements by disadvantaged groups. To test this prediction, this paper evaluates the impact of two elected Hmong American officials on social movement campaigns in their community during their time in office. Content analysis of newspaper reports is used to (i) create a sample of nine local, national, and transnational social movement campaigns in the community; and (ii) determine in which of four possible ways the elected officials supported the campaigns: favorable media interviews, speeches at events, event organization, and legislation initiation. Only the two transnational campaigns which mobilized the entire community received all four types of support. The paper concludes that elected officials, even former activists from an ethnic minority community, carefully select the causes they will fully support. After electoral victory, social movements must still actively engage sympathetic politicians in order to turn an opening in the political system into actual access to power.     

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

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.     

Transnational politics at the edges of sovereignty: social movements,crossings and the state at the US–Mexico border

This article documents the history of border crossings among a group of social movement activists located in southern Arizona. By comparing two types of US–Mexico border crossings separated ten years apart, the article explores how political groups become ‘transnationalized’ and in relation to what kinds of ‘states’. By contrasting the shift from a state‐centric movement to a transnational coalition, the case study analyses why, in the later period, political activists were no longer able to identify the same kind of state. In chronicling the disappearance of one kind of state formation and the emergence of a transnational one, this research argues that globalization—rather than simply reflecting a decline of the nation state—is a process entailing not only new forms of transnational political activism but also new forms of the state.     

Competing for Lebanon's Diaspora: Transnationalism and Domestic Struggles in a Weak State

Just as state strength influences relationships between state and society and among social forces within a national territory, so does it shape relationships between states and their emigrants and diasporas across territorial borders. Scholars debate how transnational migration affirms or challenges the dominance of the nation‐state. When sending states are weak, however, diaspora–homeland linkages can undermine the role of the state in a way that is not transformative, but sustaining of the status quo. Examining Lebanon, this paper explores how domestic actors extend their struggles to vie over and through kin abroad. Three realms of competition are paramount: demography, votes, and money. The resulting transnational outreach reproduces a politics in which both expatriates and the state function as resources as much as actors.     

Transnational Debt Groups: The Challenges of Campaigning Within the Internationalising State

A central question facing transnational civil society campaigns is where they can exercise power most effectively in a globalising world. Is the nation state still a worthy site for struggle, or has power shifted significantly to the international arena? Taking transnational debt campaigning as a case study, and using Robert Cox’s concept of the internationalising state, this article examines these questions. While building common cause transnationally, and developing a transnational profile, were important dimensions of debt campaigning, the evidence from the study is that debt campaigns focussed strongly on national governments in order to influence international decision-makers. In this context, the article argues that transnational debt campaigns were re-articulating their governments towards greater accountability to domestic societies, countering the thrust towards the internationalisation of the state.     

Mobilizing in transnational contentious spaces: linking relations,emotions and space in migrant activism

Despite proliferation of political protest by migrants in recent years, analyses from a social movement perspective remain scarce. This lacuna is not coincidental, but theoretically grounded. According to dominant movement theories, migrants are unlikely subjects of mobilization due to legal obstacles, scarce resources and closed political and discursive opportunities. The article therefore explores how marginalized migrants organize transnational political protest against all evident odds. Drawing from extensive fieldwork and bridging transnational migration and social movement studies, it is argued that migrants mobilize within transnational social spaces, which link relations and emotions acquired on the move with the relational qualities at the locality of arrival. The article illustrates how the transnational spaces most migrants inhabit can be politicized and transformed into particular social formations, for which the term ‘transnational contentious spaces’ is suggested.     

Making Global Society: Friendship Networks among Transnational Professionals in the Building Design Industry

Abstract Little is currently known about the nature and wider implications of transnationalism among professionals, despite the fact that companies are increasingly establishing overseas business links, seeking foreign contracts and obliging professional employees to work overseas for long periods of time. Focusing on the research generated by a small study of mainly architects and engineers who had worked abroad at some time in the building design industry in this article I explore their transnational experiences and the factors that enabled them to construct viable friendship networks extending over time and into global life. These experiences are briefly contrasted with the social processes constructed by migrants and others operating in transnational social space. Though professionals appear to lack the clear sense of collective unity, the pre‐existing identity and/or the same sense of membership and organization as other types of transnational communities may exhibit, these networks nevertheless demonstrated a high degree of sociality and affectivity and a capacity to generate further transnational relationships. They also revealed a strongly postnational orientation arising from the conjunction of a unique combination of shared factors especially age, emotional deprivation, location and the nature of overseas work.     

Social License to Operate in Crowdfunding Campaigns

Organizations and individuals need to engage their communities to gain the social license to operate (SLO). In crowdfunding, SLO is reflected in funding by the members of communities of interest around crowdfunding campaigns. Thus campaign creators’ success relies on obtaining SLO from their communities. This article examines how crowdfunding campaign creators engage their communities to gain and maintain SLO to secure funding for their campaigns. Content analysis of 68 successful and unsuccessful Kickstarter campaigns shows how successful campaign creators build their communities by the use of weak ties and have abundant relational and episodic engagement with their communities to obtain SLO. The results also show how successful campaign creators practice dialogic engagement to maintain their SLO over time. This study expands public relations to crowdfunding by framing crowdfunding as a community engagement practice and operationalizing SLO as tangible funding.     

Social support networks,instant messaging,and gender equity in refugee education

ABSTRACT

This paper addresses the role of instant messaging chat groups to support teacher training and gender equity initiatives in Kenyan refugee camps. Our findings are based on survey data with refugee teachers in Dadaab and Kakuma refugee camps (n?=?203), group interviews with refugee teachers in Kakuma (n?=?21), and interviews with international instructors of teacher training programs in Nairobi, Toronto, and Vancouver (n?=?14). In our analysis, we apply amplification theory, feminist science and technology studies paradigms, and considerations of transnational approaches to understand the use of instant messaging among refugee teacher communities. Our framework explores how social and cultural norms are amplified through transnational text and instant messaging related to teacher training and in support of gender equity. Peer-to-peer group chats draw on transnational learning opportunities and expand these engagements through group chats between men and women refugee teachers across camps as well as through community engagement about gender equity initiatives in education. International instructors identify both value and hesitation in navigating the quantity and content of these communications, such as learning more about refugee teachers’ daily lives in the camps and concern about following and managing the amount of communication that can ensue over chat groups. Our work has practical implications for transnational teacher training programs in refugee camps, illuminates how mobile technology and chat groups allow women and men in the community to engage and support girls’ education, and questions how text messaging affects the lived and day-to-day experiences of women refugee teachers.     

‘Spatializing’ knowledge communities: towards a conceptualization of transnational innovation networks

In this article we seek to move beyond existing conceptualizations of innovation systems in two key respects. First, we identify the need for a shift away from research that focuses on discrete scales as the locus for understanding innovation towards that which places more emphasis on network relationships operating between and across different scales. Second, we illustrate the need for approaches that recognize the significance of innovative networks that extend beyond firms and, in particular, those associated with the movement of knowledgeable individuals. By synthesizing recent insights from three literatures on ‘communities’ of varying kinds — namely communities of practice, knowledge communities and transnational communities — we propose a conceptualization of transnational innovation networks based around three overlapping and mutually constitutive domains. In addition to the much‐studied ‘corporate‐institutional’ domain, we also identify ‘social network’ and ‘hegemonic‐discursive’ domains that may be important components of transnational innovation networks operating across different localities.     

Transnational Discursive Opportunities and Social Movement Risk Frames Opposing GMOs

Research on social movement frames has been cumulative. Recently, scholars started studying the structural incentives and constraints for claim-makers by relying on the concept of discursive opportunity structure (DOS) while bringing the public sphere and the media to the centre of analysis of political contention. This article draws on these literatures to investigate social movement campaigns against genetically modified (GM) crops and pesticides in Argentina, Brazil and Mexico. First, it argues that there is a transnational DOS that provides structural incentives and constraints to frame risks in symbolic struggles to define GM crops. Next, based on a content analysis of national newspapers, it describes the use of risk frames in national public discourses. Finally, it addresses the question of how this transnationalized DOS is framed by the media by looking at the discursive opportunities for social movements as well as other collective actors in their framing disputes. The study provides evidence of a transnationalization of public debates and offers explanations for national variations by resorting to other components of the DOS such as national policy discourse, timing of political agendas, media structure and culture. It concludes by recognizing the need to consider the various dimensions of opportunity structures for movement action, i.e. political, discursive, and economic, and their relative degree of transnationalization or autonomy over global forces.     

The concept of horizontal hierarchy and the organization of interorganizational networks: A comparative analysis

This paper is an attempt to describe the organization of interorganizational fields with the concept of horizontal hierarchy. It specifies certain structural properties of interorganizational field based on different types of linkages between organizations, and develops testable hypotheses by focusing on the interrelationships between the properties of these linkages within the conceptual definition of horizontal hierarchy. These hypotheses are later tested on data collected from manpower organizations in 17 communities of a large midwestern state.     

Networks of Contention: The Shape of Online Transnationalism in Early Twenty-First Century Social Movement Coalitions

The study of new media use by transnational social movements is central to contemporary investigations of social contention. In order to shed light on the terrain in which the most recent examples of online mobilization have grown and developed, this paper combines the interest in the transnational dynamics of social contention and the exploration of the use of new information and communication technologies (ICTs) for protest action. In specific terms, the study investigates how early twenty-first century social movement coalitions used Internet tools to build symbolically transnational collective identities. By applying a hyperlink network analysis approach, the study focuses on a website network generated by local chapters of the World Social Forum (WSF), one of the earliest social movement coalitions for global justice. The sample network, selected through snowball sampling, is composed of 222 social forum websites from around the world. The study specifically looks at hyperlinks among social forum websites as signs of belonging and potential means of alliance. The analysis uses network measures, namely of cohesion, centrality, structural equivalence and homophily, to test dynamics of symbolic collective identification underlying the WSF coalition. The findings show that in early twenty-first century transnational contention, culture and place still played a central role in the emergence of transnational movement networks.     

Migration information campaigns: How to analyse their impact?

Information campaigns aim at discouraging potential migrants from leaving their countries irregularly. This article discusses how to analyse the impact of such campaigns by identifying different research lines in the literature. The impact of migration information campaigns may be explored by, firstly, focusing on transnational migratory data and inter-state relations (the macro-level); secondly, by investigating their impact on narratives within societies (the meso-level); and, finally, by investigating the micro-level of their influence on migratory decision-making. At each level, scholars face considerable methodological challenges to filter out the impact of campaigns. This article suggests that a promising research avenue is to analyse more widely the narratives and information sources upon which (potential) migrants rely. Opening up the research focus may avoid the risk of over-emphasising the impact of information campaigns by only looking at them. It allows to better understand which sources of information actually influence migratory behaviour.     

Transnational communities and business systems

The paper examines the concept of ‘transnational communities’ as a way of understanding globalization practices in business and management. It argues that ‘transnational communities’ are emergent properties of the internationalizing of economic activity. Three specific aspects of this process are considered in detail: the development of multinational companies; the development of international regulatory bodies; and the development of cognitive and normative frameworks through the practices of business education, management consultancies and other global professional service firms. It is argued that in each case, transnational spaces are emerging; within these spaces, transnational communities are developing. The article calls for more research into the diverse nature of these spaces and communities as a way of avoiding the sterile polarities of what Held et al. (1999) refer to as the ‘hyperglobalists’ and the ‘sceptics’.     

Rethinking Migrant Families from a Transnational Perspective: Experiences of Parents and Their Children

This article provides an overview of existing studies which take a transnational approach to examining the experiences of migrant parents and their children. In this article, I examine (1) how migrant parents who settle in host societies seek to raise the next generation transnationally, (2) how the children of migrants respond to being raised in a transnational social field, (3) how migrant parents manage relationships with their children who remain in their homeland, and (4) how children left behind think and feel about growing up without the company of one or both of their parent(s). By analyzing how various cross‐border connections are sustained and negotiated in these different types of migrant families, this article highlights the various transnational forces that operate in different types of migrant households.     

Transnational Debt Movements: Challenging States and International Decision-Makers,or Intermeshed with These?

A new wave of transnational civil society campaigning has emerged since the last quarter of the twentieth century. Major changes in world order occurred over this period, which impacted on the context for transnational campaigning. These changes include the end of the Cold War, followed by the embedding of the concept of global governance, including the norm of civil society participation. This article examines the strategies of transnational debt campaigns against this background. It describes the shifts in strategies over time between more consensual engagement approaches and those seeking fundamental transformation, and considers the implications for the relationship between civil society campaigns and states/international decision-makers. It concludes that transnational debt movements fit better with a Gramscian perspective on civil society as containing consensual, and counter-systemic elements, than with a view of civil society as independent of official decision-making structures. It highlights, however, the need to grasp the on-going dynamic between these different elements within civil society.     

Immigrant Incorporation and Sociocultural Transnationalism1

This article analyzes sociocultural transnational linkages among Colombian, Dominican, and Salvadoran immigrants in the United States. It emphasizes the importance of comparative analysis and yields three main findings. First, participation in any particular transnational activity is low, but participation over all the different forms of transnational practices is extended. Second, the process of incorporation does not weaken transnational participation. Third, there is more than one causal path that can account for the rise of transnational sociocultural practices. The different paths can be explained by reference to the context of reception and the mode of incorporation of each group.