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.     

Globalizing social movement theory: The case of eugenics

Transnational social movements are affected not only by national-level factors, but also by factors that operate at the global level. This article develops two conceptual tools for analyzing global factors: international political opportunity and global culture. The conduciveness of both factors appears to be important in understanding eugenics activity, which this article examines as a transnational social movement. The lack of international political opportunity before World War I and the hostile climate of global culture after World War II hindered eugenic mobilization during these periods, while the emergence of opportunities and cultural conduciveness during the Interwar period was associated with movement growth and effectiveness.     

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.     

Organizational structure and strength and transnational campaign outcomes: a comparison of two transnational advocacy networks

In this article I address the question of why some transnational advocacy networks (TANs) are better able to influence policy outcomes than others. How do we explain the variation in the political impact of TAN campaigns? Drawing on some of the theoretical formulations developed by social movement and international relations scholars, I argue that organizational structure and organizational strength can help us understand this variation. A comparison of a highly influential and successful TAN, the International Campaign to Ban Landmines, with a less successful TAN, the International Action Network on Small Arms, demonstrates that such networks can mobilize a large number of diverse civil society groups. However, a coherent and well‐coordinated campaign with a clear political message provides the major explanation as to why some TANs are more likely to shape the global policy process than others.     

Transnationalism and Diffusion: A Study of the Food Sovereignty Movements in the UK and Canada

Abstract

This paper explores a number of questions surrounding the transnational diffusion of social movements and their ideas through case studies of the food sovereignty movements in the UK and in Canada: How do social movements in one country or world region diffuse to another country or region? How do social movement participants learn about other movements and their ideas in different countries and organize and mobilize around these same ideas while at the same time adapting them to their local context? What are the channels and mechanisms of social movement diffusion? In addressing these questions, the paper contributes to our understanding of the transnational diffusion of social movements and the ways in which social movement participants adopt, interpret, and adapt new ideas, organizational forms, and agendas and causes that originated outside their own countries. It highlights the ways in which groups and communities around the world recontextualize social movement discourses to make them relevant to their own circumstances and to connect their causes and struggles to global movements.     

The deregulated global economy: women workers and strategies of resistance

This article discusses the lack of input from women in international debates about the global economy. Women in the South are the most vulnerable to exploitation and most ignored in international discussions of how to protect fair labor standards. Restructuring has led to loss of secure jobs in the public sector and the expansion of female employment in low-paid, insecure, unskilled jobs. Businesses desire a cheap and flexible workforce. Declines in social services, the elimination of subsidies on basic goods, and the introduction of user fees puts pressure on women to supplement family income. A parallel outcome is reduced employment rights, neglect of health and safety standards, and increased disregard among women for their domestic responsibilities. There is a need for alternative models of development. The Self-Employed Women's Organization in India serves as a model for resisting exploitation among self-employed and home-based employees. Female industrial strikers are demanding attention to excessive hours of work, enforced overtime, bullying, and lack of sanitary and medical facilities. There is always fear that organized resistance will lead to industrial relocation or loss of jobs. The International Labor Organization has had a code for 20 years, but the threat of exposure to the press is sometimes more effective. There must be regulation throughout subcontracting chains of transnational companies. International alliances should revolve around issues/strategies identified by workers. International alliances are needed for influencing multinational companies and national governments and lobbying global economic and financial institutions. Standards that are included in social clause discussions are minimum requirements that do not address gender-specific issues. Women Working Worldwide is developing a position statement of social clauses that incorporates a women's perspective.     

Civil society challenges the global food system: the International Monsanto Tribunal

ABSTRACT

The global food system has severe implications for human health, soil quality, biodiversity, and quality of life. This paper provides an analysis on how transnational alliances challenge the global food system. We illustrate this by focusing on the activities and hearings of the International Monsanto Tribunal (IMT), held in the Hague in 2016. The IMT provided a platform for civil society and enabled transnational alliances to demand attention for local struggles and legal disputes in relation to Monsanto’s products. With the involvement of independent and renowned experts, the knowledge exchange between local victims and civil society was enhanced, and the IMT reinforced social movement’s goals towards demanding justice for the negative effects associated with the global food system. The advisory opinion determined that Monsanto’s practices are in violation with human rights standards. The IMT exemplified that there is an immediate need for structural change in the current global food system.     

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.     

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.     

Bridges to learning: international student mobilities,education agencies and inter‐personal networks

International education is a fundamentally transnational project. It relies on the movement of individuals or knowledge across national borders, disturbs the centrality of the nation‐state in educational reproduction, and is facilitated by economic and social networks that act as bridges between countries of origin and education. In this article, I address this latter point through reference to research conducted with South Korean international students in Auckland, New Zealand. In particular, I discuss the emergence of transnational social and economic activities that are facilitating the movement of international students from South Korea to Auckland — activities that might usefully be understood as forming ‘bridges to learning’. These include the activities of education agencies, immigrant entrepreneurs and the interpersonal relationships with which many students engage in the negotiation of their transnational lives. In a broader sense I illustrate how the emerging mobilities of international students cannot be viewed as independent of other phenomena but must be seen as embedded within transnational processes that take place at different geographic and social scales.     

A Broadened Horizon: The Value of International Social Work Internships

Globalization demands that social work educators initiate educational programs that promote understanding of global problems and country‐specific interventions to address transnational problems. Moreover, the global movement of peoples means that social workers must be increasingly adept at working with different cultural groups. This paper outlines an international social work internship jointly sponsored by San Diego State University and Thammasat University in Bangkok, Thailand. The internship program sought to expose students to social work and social welfare practices different than those in the United States and to the impact of problems such as AIDS and child abuse in a different culture. Moreover, the internship program focused on cultural learning and promoted the development of ethnorelativism, a perspective that incorporates another culture's world view. The paper outlines the creation of the internships, student activities and learning, and skills gained.     

INTENSIFYING GLOBAL DEPENDENCY: Foreign Debt, Structural Adjustment, and Third World Underdevelopment

Dependency-oriented arguments have not focused sufficient attention on the growing international debt crisis. This omission is unfortunate because foreign debt has introduced several important dynamics into the world capitalist system. Perhaps most important, the International Monetary Fund (IMF) has emerged as one of the most powerful transnational financial institutions, as it makes loans to and evaluates credit worthiness of Third World states. To be acceptable credit risks, underdeveloped states often must implement a number of IMF "structural adjustment" or austerity measures. Our cross-national analysis-which includes an examination of important outliers-indicates that IMF-imposed conditionality is the primary impediment to economic expansion in the Third World. Growing service payments on the external debt also inhibit economic growth, but less so. Moreover, although structural adjustment does not yet significantly impact physical quality of life, foreign investment and level of international reserves do exhibit a negative effect on this indicator. Dependency arguments should be revised and broadened given the profound impact of the global debt crisis.     

Climate justice and sustained transnational mobilization

ABSTRACT

Samir Amin’s final essay called for the creation of a new international organization of progressive social forces. Here I review evidence from twenty-first century transnational movements germane for understanding the likelihood of the emergence of such an international organization and the issues and sectors most likely to facilitate coalitional unity. More specifically, the ecological crises identified by Amin in the form of global warming and climate change have created an unprecedented global environmental threat capable of unifying diverse social strata across the planet. The climate justice movement has already established a global infrastructure and template to coordinate a new international organization for confronting neoliberal forms of globalization. Pre-existing movement organizing around environmental racism, climate justice in the global South, and recent intersectional mobilizations serve as promising models for building an enduring international organization that will represent subaltern groups and have a substantial impact on world politics.     

Informal Learning for Citizenship Building in Shared Struggles for Rights: Cases of Political Solidarity Between Colombian and Spanish Organisations

Dominant discourses and practices in international cooperation have been characterised by depoliticisation and unequal power relationships. However, a number of more transformative experiences of cooperation also exist, where joint work between Northern and Southern social organisations is linked with a more political perspective. These kinds of experiences can be considered processes of informal learning in social action: through shared actions, strategies and frameworks and through interaction between organisations, institutions and the grassroots, informal and multidimensional learning processes occur in the people and organisations engaged. The study approaches four cases of networks that have linked Spanish and Colombian organisations which promote advocacy and social mobilisation for the defence of human rights in Colombia. The results show that people engaged in the cases experience intense learning processes that are relevant for the construction of solidarities and a radical global citizenship, but that these processes are also replete with limitations, tensions and challenges.     

Beyond Nation-State Paradigms: Globalization,Sociology, and the Challenge of Transnational Studies

Globalization has made it increasingly necessary to break with nation-state centered analysis in macrosociologies. Social structure is becoming transnationalized, and an epistemological shift is required in concurrence with this ontological change. A new interdisciplinary transnational studies should be predicated on a paradigmatic shift in the focus of social inquiry from the nation-state as the basic unit of analysis to the global system as the appropriate unit. Sociology's fundamental contribution to a transnational studies should be the study oftransnational social structure. This article does not establish a new transnational paradigm. Rather, it surveys and critiques nation-state-centrism in extant paradigms, provides a rationale for a new transnational approach, and proposes a research curriculum of a new transnational studies that may contribute to paradigmatic reconceptualization.     

Contingent Hybridity: The Cultural Politics of Tepoztl‡n's Anti-Golf Movement

In order to maintain some level of local control over both ideological and material resources, local social activists construct hybrid cultures that reflect their simultaneous insertion into local, national, and global cultural discourses. Theirs is a contingent hybridity in that it reflects the specificities of their experience as well as the conscious attempts to resist the homogenizing tendencies of global discourses while not isolating themselves from those discourses. This article analyzes the conflict in the town of Tepoztl?n, Morelos, Mexico, over the construction of a golf course and the ensuing movement against the project. While emphasizing local practices and making use of local communicative networks, movement leaders were also quite adept at moving between the cultural realities of Tepoztl?n and their own experiences outside of the town in order to forge alliances with transnational organizations. As a result, many Tepoztecos now make use of such labels as "environmentalist," but do so within the embedded social and cultural structures of their community.     

Transmigration and urban social work: towards a research agenda

Many Western European countries, and especially the larger cities within these countries, are making a transition towards super-diversity. This shift towards super-diversity is also characterised by a growth of the phenomenon of transmigration, whereby people frequently move back and forth across borders. The social life of transmigrants is not only oriented towards their country of residence, but also consists of complex networks beyond boundaries. Transmigrants constantly shift between different modus operandi and between different visible and invisible, local and global networks. Many transmigrants face a high risk of social vulnerability and are overrepresented in the client population of urban social services. Although much research has been done on transmigration on the one hand, and on international social work on the other hand, the effect of transmigration on social workers and on social work practice is still under-investigated. Based on social work research in Brussels and Antwerp, the authors research the challenges transmigration poses to social work. They demonstrate that there is a difference in perspective between the translocal and transnational lives of transmigrants on the one hand versus the locally rooted practices of social workers on the other hand. Using this analysis as a springboard, they identify a number of avenues for additional inquiry in this field.     

Power,capital, and immigration detention rights: making networked markets in global detention governance at UNHCR

With the expanded use of immigration detention and migration management practices worldwide, detention has emerged as a key issue for United Nations and international human rights institutions. A growing international rights movement seeks to make the practice fairer and more humane, leading to the dominance of a mainstream detention rights agenda and counter‐hegemonic system of governance. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork conducted in Geneva and elsewhere, this article examines the capital, knowledge, and technological expertise that went into the construction of UNHCR's Global Detention Strategy. I highlight the rational calculation undergirding this global detention rights agenda, including the transnational policy networks of NGOs, INGOs, and academics that facilitate the movement's moral authority and capitalist growth. Their practices have become powerful neoliberal development tools, which give veracity to human rights agendas and attract oppositionally‐figured abolitionist praxis.     

Globalization,social exclusion and the possibilities for global social work and welfare

Social work practice in Europe has developed disparately in the context of separate nation states. Yet it has at the level of professional organization a potentially international orientation. Practice can be understood as having a dual configuration: on the one hand it is idiosyncratic to the culture of nation states; on the other it has a dynamic which incorporates an impulse to include broader supranational concerns. This dual configuration is of importance at a time when social work and social policy are increasingly affected by global political and economic processes and compelled to view what were previously national concerns through analysis that is global (cf. Mishra 1999; Deacon et al . 1997; Townsend 1995). Welfare and economic issues are now almost wholly cast in systems that involve a multiplicity of nations, international non-governmental organizations (NGOs), and regional trading blocs that are intricately involved in making decisions that have profound welfare implications. This article will identify the challenge that these developments pose for social work and consider how the social work profession can reflect on a response. We argue that the dual configuration in which it is situated enmeshes social work within a dual set of politics. The first is the politics of the macro-political economy noted above. The second is the micro-cultural politics of identity that are being played out in various national settings but which also contain global impetuses. Thus both contemporary macro- and micro-politics mitigate against practice and analysis situated solely at the level of the national. We argue that a social work that is central to an emerging social development practice based on empowerment and located within a transnational organizational base is best placed to meet the challenges we describe.