Local Armed Uprisings and the Transnational Image of Claim Making: The Kurds of Turkey and the Zapatistas of Mexico in Comparative Perspective

Abstract

The purpose of this article is to explore why and how some local armed uprisings are able to go global with a transnational image of ‘social justice’ while others fail to build such image despite becoming transnational. The cases to be analyzed in the article are the pro-Kurdish mobilization in the leadership of the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) in Turkey and the pro-Mayan Zapatista Army of National Liberation (EZLN) movement in Mexico. In explaining the relative success of the latter, the study seeks to make connections with the globalization literature in general and the transnational social movement literature in particular. Particularly, the article focuses on the ability of social movements to market their causes in international arena with a good image. Overall, this study lays out several key strategic differences between the two movements such as the holding and the use of arms, duration of armed resistance, and the leadership and organizational structure to unpack why some social movements are more successful to market their causes as a just cause within ‘global civil society’ and why others fail to do so ending with being listed as a terrorist organization.     

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.     

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.     

Organizing “Below and to the Left”: Differences in the Citizenship and Transnational Practices of Two Zapatista Groups

This article examines the political transnational practices—that is, both the physical and symbolic border‐crossing political practices—of two Zapatista groups. This study seeks to contribute to the existing body of literature on transnationalism and citizenship by focusing on immigrants’ political transnational activities in the global South, as well as transnational activists’ practices in the global North influenced by the global South. I argue that transnational ideological and political influences are bidirectional, that is, influences also flow from the global South to the global North. In addition, I argue that different transnational practices are strongly shaped by structural opportunities and constraints on activists, in this case, by citizenship status and economic class. My arguments are drawn from fieldwork and in‐depth interviews conducted in the San Francisco Bay Area with two Zapatista groups, which I name the Localizers and the Globalizers.     

Representation Beyond the State: Towards Transnational Democratic Non-state Politics

The crises of representative democracy and of state-based politics have been declared many times and ‘participation’ is often advocated as a remedy for the shortcomings of both. While the literature has extensively discussed representative practices in relation to territorial states, we argue in this article that more attention should be paid to the question of representation within transnational social movements striving for a politics that transcends current territorially bounded representative democracy. Analysing the World Social Forum and West African participatory trade policy-making, we find that as transnational social movements aiming at democratic goals deepen their interactions, they can face demanding questions such as: who or what has a right to be made present in a given political process and how is this established? We claim that avoiding the question of representation in transnational non-state-centred politics leaves power too many places to hide.     

The role of emotions during the Arab Spring in Tunisia and Egypt in light of repertoires

ABSTRACT

This article examines the role of emotions during the Arab Spring in Tunisia and Egypt in the context of collective level emotions in mobilizations. Emotions are understood as a catalyst whose mechanism of action is performed through repertories. This article seeks to answer how emotions, having a triggering role, are performed through repertoires while accelerating mobilization against authoritarian orders, creating the intersection of individual and collective level emotions in public spheres of Tunisia and Egypt, and thus affecting the transnational diffusion of emotions. The significant reason to address emotions is to explain what stimulated the Arab Spring and how it spread over the region starting from Tunisia and Egypt. This article synthesizes two literatures: International Relations (IR) and social movements studies in light of emotions and components of repertoires which are as follows: collective action, collective identity, symbolic politics, network society and information politics.     

Network,exposure and rhetoric: Italian occupational fields and heterogeneity in constructing the globalized self

Drawing on the findings of a broad inter‐university research programme conducted in Italy, in this article we explore how individuals' transnational networks combine with other dimensions of their social experience in the production of a self‐perception of their own ‘global identity’. In particular, attention is focused on the structures and social spaces of everyday life in five crucial occupations (corporate managers, financial services workers, artists, media professionals and schoolteachers) where people's professional action is performed simultaneously along local and global axes. Within these groups the globalized self does not merely reflect individuals' engagement in transnational networks, but is also the outcome of a complex process including two added dimensions of social life in the job setting: (1) the degree and type of non‐filtered exposure to pressures stemming from the global environment, which both constrain and enable subjective practices of coping with change and ambiguity; and (2) the degree and type of competence in the rhetorics of globalization, namely the level of access to well‐known repertoires of interpretive resources for making sense of global trends. This analysis is consistent with social science conceptualizations arguing for a more nuanced understanding of globalization. In this light, not only is globalization a multidimensional process but it also produces a variety of responses and meanings by differently positioned actors.     

Transnational Normative Struggles and Globalization: The Case of Indigenous Peoples in Bolivia and Ecuador

Since the 1990s, the indigenous rights movement has catapulted from resource-poor, local activists to global activists. The rise of transnational indigenous rights movements has paralleled and interfaced with significant structural developments at the international and state-systemic level, raising questions about the interplay between global and local politics as arenas of social change. To trace these transnational networks to the articulation of norms supportive of indigenous claims, we examine two cases of transnational indigenous activism and domestic responses in the Andean region of South America. We find that the additional dimension of domestic and transnational mobilization that first contests existing international norms, such as neoliberalism and individual rights, and then seeks to diffuse normative changes at both the domestic and international levels provides new insight about norm formation, transformation, and diffusion in international politics in favor of anti-globalization and community equality norms on local, national, and global levels.     

The insufficient imagery of top-down,bottom-up in global movements analysis

Scholars have shown various ways in which new types of transnational interdependence influence conflicts and resistance. Conventional conceptualization often depicts movements as emerging from the ‘bottom-up’ efforts of distinctive, individual collectives to challenge the ‘top-down’ hegemony of bureaucratic states, multinational corporations, and some international civil society organizations. But globalization scholars, and particularly those developing a framework of world society studies, place interactions among different levels of action and orientation at the center of conflict analysis and show how mobilization and change occurs across complex, interdependent relationships. In this article, I interrogate the different and often contradictory ways that dimensions of mobilization and social change are commonly denoted in this usage. I then explore alternative global theoretical frameworks that give greater explanatory power to the dynamic global–local interface. To move beyond the constraints of binary thinking in global movements analysis, I suggest that future scholarship clearly specify significant attributes of mobilization, identify how attributes vary and co-mingle, and locate social processes among a host of global–local relationships.     

Is the locus of class development of the transnational capitalist class situated within nation‐states or in the emergent transnational space?

The rise of the modern corporation has disrupted the class structures of nation‐states because, in the era of globalization, such reorganization now occurs across borders. Yet, has globalization been deep enough to facilitate the emergence of a transnational capitalist class (TCC) in which both class formation and consolidation processes are located in the transnational space itself? I contribute to our understanding of the TCC by contrasting the personal characteristics, life histories and capital endowments of members of the British corporate elite with and without transnational board appointments. The existence of the honours system in the UK allows us to compare individuals objectively in terms of their symbolic capital and to link this trait to embeddedness in the TCC. By studying 448 directors from the 100 largest firms in the UK in 2011, I find evidence of a TCC with a class consolidation process that is located within transnational space, but whose class formation dynamics are still tethered to national processes of elite production and reproduction.     

New media, new movements? The role of the internet in shaping the 'anti-globalization' movement

Collective action and social movement protest has become commonplace in our 'demonstration-democracy' and no longer surprises the media or the public. However, as will be shown, this was not the case with the recent anti-globalization protests that attracted demonstrators from countries all over the world. The battles of Seattle, Washington, Prague and Genoa, with an unforeseen mixture of nationalities and movements, became world news. Interestingly, the new media seemed to play a crucial role in the organization of these global protests. This article maps this movement-in-progress via an analysis of the websites of anti-globalization, or more specifically anti-neo-liberal globalization organizations. It examines the contribution of these sites to three different conditions that establish movement formation; collective identity; actual mobilization and a network of organizations. This ongoing, explorative research indicates signs of an integration of different organizations involved and attributes an important role to the Internet. However, whilst both our methodology and subject are evolving rapidly, conclusions, as our initial results show, must be tempered.     

Diasporas and transitional justice: transnational activism from local to global levels of engagement

Scholarship on transitional justice, transnational social movements, and transnational diaspora mobilization has offered little understanding about how memorialization initiatives with substantial diaspora involvement emerge transnational and are embedded and sustained in different contexts. We argue that diasporas play a galvanizing role in transnational interest‐based and symbolic politics, expanding claim‐making from the local to national, supranational, and global levels of engagement. Using initiatives to memorialize atrocities committed at the former Omarska concentration camp in Bosnia and Herzegovina, we identify a four‐stage mobilization process. First, initiatives emerged and diffused across transnational networks after a local political opportunity opened in the homeland. Second, attempts at coordination of activities took place transnational through an NGO. Third, initiatives were contextualized on the nation‐state level in different host‐states, depending on the political opportunities and constraints available there. Fourth, memorialization claims were eventually shifted from the national to the supranational and global levels. The article concludes by demonstrating the potential to apply the analysis to similar global movements in which diasporas are directly involved.     

Debating globalization in social studies education: approaching globalization historically and discursively

The purpose of this paper is to explore the dominant positions in the debates on globalization in American social studies education. Specifically, the paper illustrates that, first, globalization is conceived of as more of an unprecedented new age and less of a historical development. Second, it is conceived of as more of a natural process and less as an ideological project. All in all, this paper argues that globalization should be approached as a historic and discursive condition in the field of social studies education. To do so, educators should include more skeptical perspectives and critical voices about globalization. Also, they need to approach the vocabulary used to frame globalization discursively, rather than as an objective fact. The paper contends that the different positions taken in the debates on globalization are part and parcel of the social imaginary of globalization. The paper has ramifications not only for American social studies education but also for related subjects such as civics and citizenship education elsewhere.     

Bourdieu and Social Movements: Considering Identity Movements in Terms of Field,Capital and Habitus

This article examines the explanatory capacity of Pierre Bourdieu's work in relation to social movements and, in particular, identity movements. It aims to provide a theoretical framework drawing on Bourdieu's central concepts of field, capital and habitus. These concepts are viewed as providing a theoretical toolkit that can be applied to convincingly explain aspects of social movements that social movement theories, such as political process theory, resource mobilization theory and framing, acknowledge, but are not able to explain within a single theoretical framework. Identity movements are approached here in a way that relates them to the position agents/movements occupy in social spaces, resources and cultural competence. This enables us to consider identity movements from a new perspective that explains, for instance, the interrelatedness of class and identity movements.     

Olympic and world sport: making transnational society?

This paper introduces the special issue of the British Journal of Sociology on the subject of the transnational aspects of Olympic and world sport. The special issue is underpinned by the perspective that because sport provides a space for the forging of transnational connections and global consciousness, it is increasingly significant within contemporary processes of globalization and the making of transnational society. In this article, we examine in turn eight social scientific themes or problems that are prominent within the special issue: globalization, glocalization, neo-liberal ideologies and policies, transnational society, securitization, global civil society, transnational/global public sphere, and fantasy/imagination. We conclude by highlighting five 'circles' of future research inquiry within world sport that should be explored by social scientists.     

Local migrant kin or floating grandmother? Reflections on mobility and informal childcare support strategies among Polish migrants in Ireland

This study investigates mobilization of social support for informal childcare among working Polish mothers in Dublin. The research incorporates 61 semi-structured interviews and maps of ego-centric networks built around the support and childcare organization. Embedded in a support network and transnational family configuration perspective, this study assesses how migrant mothers use the local and transnational connections to mobilize informal child-minding strategies. The results show a great reliance on strong ties, especially partners whose support constitutes a backbone of the family being together. Beyond that, floating grandmothers have proven to be a significant provider of childcare from a transnational perspective. The heavy reliance on the local migrant kin and friends is crucial in providing ad hoc crisis support when transnational ties cannot be mobilized. This in turn demonstrates that distance matters, and while strong ties are not available, the local weak ties are more likely to be relied on.     

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.     

Solidarity Across Borders: The Transnational Anti-Apartheid Movement

This paper focuses on what from a global perspective must be seen as one of the most significant social movements during the post-war era: the transnational anti-apartheid movement. This movement lasted for more than three decades, from late 1950s to 1994, had a presence on all continents, and can be seen to be part of the construction of a global political culture during the Cold War. The paper argues that the history of the anti-apartheid struggle provides an important historical case for the analysis of present-day global politics—especially in so far that movement organizations, action forms, and networks that were formed and developed in the anti-apartheid struggle are present in the contemporary context of the mobilization of a global civil society in relation to neoliberal globalization and supra-national political institutions such as the World Trade Organization, International Monetary Fund, and World Bank.     

Transnational social capital: the socio‐spatialities of civil society

Civil society remains a contested concept, but one that is widely embedded in global development processes. Transnationalism within civil society scholarship is often described dichotomously, either through hierarchical dependency relations or as a more amorphous networked global civil society. These two contrasting spatial imaginaries produce very particular ideas about how transnational relations contribute to civil society. Drawing on empirical material from research with civil society organizations in Barbados and Grenada, in this article I contend that civil society groups use forms of transnational social capital in their work. This does not, however, resonate with the horizontal relations associated with grassroots globalization or vertical chains of dependence. These social relations are imbued with power and agency and are entangled in situated historical, geographical and personal contexts. I conclude that the diverse transnational social relations that are part of civil society activity offer hope and possibilities for continued civil society action in these unexpected spatial arrangements.