International Funding of NGOs in India: Bringing the State Back In

This article seeks to understand how the Indian state exercises control over transnational ties between foreign and domestic actors by examining the national legislative practices that determine receipt of foreign funds and the data on foreign funding flows to NGOs (a database of more than 18,000 associations). The article shows how legislative practices of democratic states serve to reduce foreign influence. Issue characteristics are also shown to determine state response to externalization, blocking transnational ties in “high politics” areas such as minority claims. Finally, within state imposed restrictions, religious rather than secular organizations remain dominant transnational actors in India. The study contributes evidence to suggest that contrary to the arguments of world polity theory and many transnational social movement scholars, states continue to remain powerful actors limiting transnationalization.

Non‐state authoritarianism and diaspora politics

Diaspora politics has been celebrated as a form of transnationalism that can potentially challenge authoritarian regimes. Arguably, opposition groups and political activists can mobilize beyond the territorial limits of the state, thus bypassing some of the constraints to political organization found in authoritarian states. The literature on transnational and extraterritorial repression complicates this model, for it shows that states can use strategies of ‘long‐distance authoritarianism’ to monitor, intimidate and harass diasporic populations abroad. Yet, non‐state actors in the diaspora also sometimes use such repressive strategies to mobilize internally, gain hegemony within the diaspora, and marginalize or eliminate internal rivals. This raises the question of whether such activities can be understood as non‐state forms of authoritarianism. Cases of diasporic politics pertaining to Turkey and Sri Lanka are briefly explored with a view to examining how state and non‐state forms of transnational repression can, under some conditions, result in the dynamics of competitive authoritarianism within a diaspora. In such cases, ‘ordinary’ members of the diaspora may become caught between multiple forms of transnational repression in addition to potentially experiencing marginalization and securitization in their new home.     

Development,the state,and transnational political connections: state and subject formations in Latin America

Focusing on the processes of making and sustaining transnational political ties between actors, international actors and states, this paper reviews recent work from a number of disciplines on globalization and politics, and outlines an agenda for future research. Rather than seeing transnational political linkages merely as forerunners to the loss of local sovereignty, the paper argues for a wider conceptualization of transnational connections, embedded within processes of state formation in Latin America. Using a variety of examples, it is argued that transnational networks are associated with a wide range of meanings and a variety of responses by diverse actors. Drawing on recent work in political science, post‐structuralism and anthropology, it is suggested that geographical concepts ‐ related to scale, process and networks ‐ offer a means through which to analyze and ‘map out’ these transnational political processes.     

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.     

Governing transnational social problems: public health politics on the US–Mexico border

Governance research suggests that transnational networks are the key to developing and implementing cooperative public policy across borders. I examine this claim through analysing how the US–Mexico Border Health Commission, a policy instrument designed to enhance transnational public health cooperation, developed from idea to law in Mexico and the United States. Despite a long‐standing transnational network, the policy process took over ten years and was contentious, politicized by domestic policymaking in the United States. I show how transnational networked governance intersects with domestic politics and find that the structure of overlap between the two are places where actors promoting state and transnational interests struggle with each other to define public problems in an attempt to shape policy outcomes.     

Transnational migration: taking stock and future directions

Increasing numbers of sending states are systematically offering social and political membership to migrants residing outside their territories. The proliferation of these dual memberships contradicts conventional notions about immigrant incorporation, their impact on sending countries, and the relationship between migration and development in both contexts. But how do ordinary individuals actually live their lives across borders? Is assimilation incompatible with transnational membership? How does economic and social development change when it takes place across borders? This article takes stock of what is known about everyday transnational practices and the institutional actors that facilitate or impede them and outlines questions for future research. In it, I define what I mean by transnational practices and describe the institutions that create and are created by these activities. I discuss the ways in which they distribute migrants’ resources and energies across borders, based primarily on studies of migration to the United States.     

NGOs’ transnational advocacy networks: from ‘legitimacy’ to ‘political responsibility’?

NGOs that operate as part of transnational advocacy networks face a number of ‘legitimacy challenges’ concerning their rights to participate in the shaping of global governance. Outlining the legitimacy claims that development NGOs make, the article argues that ‘legitimacy’ is a socially constructed quality that may be ascribed to an NGO by actors and stakeholders with different viewpoints. NGOs operating transnationally link disparate communities and conceptions of legitimacy, and undermine the discourse and practice of sovereignty. Therefore such NGOs will find it difficult to be universally regarded as legitimate, especially by states that hold a sovereignty‐based conception of legitimacy. However, relationships are the building blocks of networks, and efforts to improve them should not be abandoned simply because ‘legitimacy’ is too closely connected with sovereignty. In particular, NGOs ought to improve their relationships with the poor and marginalized communities whose interests they claim to promote. To this end, the concept of ‘political responsibility’ is suggested as a pragmatic approach to understanding power relations as they arise in transnational advocacy networks and campaigns.     

The Revival of Non‐Traditional State Actors' Interests in Africa: Does it Matter for Policy Autonomy?

Africa's external relations are currently undergoing major changes. Non‐traditional state actors like China and India are reviving their ties with African economies and thereby affecting power relations between African states and traditional partners. Meanwhile, high commodity prices and improved credit ratings make external finance available for African governments. This article examines how non‐traditional state actors affect the possibility of African governments setting and funding their own development priorities. It argues that while the current situation may increase the policy autonomy for African economies this is largely a consequence of the increased availability of external finance – and not just from non‐traditional state actors.     

State‐led transnationalism and migration: reaching out to the Argentine community in Spain

Abstract This article focuses on when and how states develop transnational policies. It presents a case study of a relatively small emigrant community, whose departure was not simply caused by poverty or crisis, but most recently by an economic and political debacle that questioned people's values and expectations. I focus on the state side of the equation and identify a shift in Argentina's policy after 2003, though also show how such policies came out of a long history of state intervention in population and migration and are now related to human rights concerns and the unfinished process of democratic consolidation. I argue that the state initiates political transnationalism, not migrants, and highlight the importance of some relatively unexplored factors in the understanding of the motivation, intensity and impact of the state's involvement, such as the characteristics of the emigrant community, the existence of specific political projects, the role of some domestic actors and processes, and the nature of international agreements.     

Remittances,Transnational Dahiras and Governance in Senegal

The potential role of transnational organisations in fostering effective governance goes unexplored despite the increasing positive role that these organisations are playing today. In Senegal, a whole range of non‐state actors have always played a substantial socio‐economic role, even before the rise of the post‐colonial state. The Murid brotherhood can be regarded as part of this category of customary non‐state actors. In the 1980s, young Murids started to organize themselves in what can be viewed as self‐help community‐based organisations whose functions included the provision of social safety nets to their adherents. By the late 1980s, the scope of these youth organisations, or dahiras, expanded beyond the national boundaries. Mention of these dahiras in the vast development literature has so far been confined to the socio‐economic importance of the money they remit. This paper offers to transcend this focus on financial remittances, to explore the potential political role of international dahiras in their home country. By playing the role of alternative providers of social services, dahiras have propelled themselves to a position of legitimate non‐state actors with political clout. Today, some of them are starting to hold government to account for their actions. Their political power is not only derived from their affiliation with customary centres of authority, but it is also the resultant of their increased financial autonomy. Because transnational dahira interventions in Senegal are mostly associated with the role of remittances, their relations with the state are analysed through the lens of revenue generation and other processes of state formation such as internal bargaining between the state and societal forces. The paper is an examination of the potential role of transnational dahiras in demands for responsive governance. Its analytical orientation is placed within the theoretical premises of the “drivers of change” approach, fiscal sociology of state making and governance.     

The dilemmas of pro-development actors: viewing state–ethnic minority relations and intra-ethnic dynamics through contentious development projects

Studies of ethnic minority peoples in Asia have long focussed on the relations between ethnic minority communities and the modern state and on the role of development in shaping these relations. This paper is concerned with how ethnic minorities respond to the state-led development. While there are numerous studies focussing on the collective agency of ethnic minorities opposing development projects, few studies consider the agency of pro-development actors. Pro-development actors are usually dismissed as co-opted, manipulated, inauthentic, or elite-driven, yet they can offer crucial insights into understanding state–ethnic minority relations and particularly intra-ethnic minority relations. This paper concentrates on pro-dam actors from the Lepcha minority in the Indian state of Sikkim to make four interlinked arguments. First, examining pro-development actors breaks the homogenous view of state–ethnic minority relations and shifts the focus to intra-ethnic relationships. Second, collective agency of ethnic minorities is not fixed in a particular relationship with the state nor does it have a particular position on development. Third, the long-term experience of development is vital in understanding how ethnic minorities manoeuvre and alter their position on contentious projects. Lastly, analysis of pro-development actors creates major dilemmas for researchers which are not easily overcome.     

Translating Spirituality: Universalism and Particularism in the Diffusion of Spiritual Care from the United States to Israel

Research on the transnational diffusion of ideas and practices shows how cultural objects go through translation, adaptation, and vernacularization when implemented in new localities. Less attention is given to the translators themselves and their heterogeneous and often conflicting visions. Drawing on the notion of transnational social fields (TSF s), this article investigates how cultural objects get vernacularized differently in different parts of the TSF , demonstrating how processes of translation reflect larger social and political struggles over questions of identity. As a case study, we focus on the attempt of actors from Israel and the United States to institutionalize spiritual care in Israeli health‐care organizations. The analysis reveals how spiritual care functioned as a porous cultural object, open to a wide range of interpretations and debates. While actors in New York saw in spiritual care the opportunity to bridge to Israeli Jews and create a global Jewish identity, Israeli actors split between using spiritual care as a vehicle for creating a local Israeli Jewish identity and seeing in spiritual care the opportunity to establish universal identities, broader than the Jewish one. The disagreement and conflicts between the groups influenced the translation process, turning it into a contentious struggle that involved different positions on the continuum between particularism and universalism.     

How states tighten control: a field theory perspective on journalism in contemporary Crimea

This article contributes to denationalizing Bourdieu’s field theory by analysing the relationship between a regional news media field, the state and transnational influences. The article seeks to answer the question of how a state can impose limits on the autonomy of the news media field during political transition. Field theory is applied to changes that have taken place in Crimean news media since Russia’s annexation of the peninsula in 2014. Drawing on narrative interviews with journalists who worked in Crimea in 2012–17, expert interviews, and secondary sources, I demonstrate how Crimea’s news media field went from being dominated by varied Ukrainian private news media owners to becoming dominated by the Russian state. I show that states can employ direct measures such as anti‐press violence and ownership appropriation of news media outlets in order to increase concentration of state media ownership. In addition, states can reallocate capital in the news media field, disenfranchising some journalists and outlets while favouring others. The adaptive strategies of individual journalists, who, upon losing capital, can sometimes relocate or leave their jobs, also changes the composition of news media fields. Departing from a common view of social spaces as bounded within nation‐states, I examine how the news media field of Crimea has been shaped by both transnational influences, and by the direct imposition of Russian state power through a reconstitution of national borders.     

Gendered Motivations,Sociocultural Constraints,and Psychobehavioral Consequences of Transnational Partnerships in Cambodia

Global flows of people, information, and capital have created transnational spaces in Cambodia. Within those spaces exists the formation of complex and multilayered interpersonal relationships between people attempting to capitalize on the opportunities created by these flows. The purpose of this article is to describe these transnational relationships, namely, between young women employed in the entertainment sectors in Phnom Penh and their western male partners, while highlighting the racialized and gendered motivations of the global actors, the inevitable sociocultural conflicts/constraints/misunderstandings that arise within the partnerships, and the resulting challenges and psychobehavioral consequences experienced by the mobile and differentiated individuals involved in these postcolonial relational formations.     

Forced transnationalism: transnational coping strategies and gendered stigma among Jamaican deportees

Once forcibly returned to their countries of citizenship, how and why do deportees engage in transnational relationships? Through analyses of 37 interviews with Jamaican deportees, I approach the question of why deportees engage in transnational practices and reveal that deportees use transnational ties as coping strategies to deal with financial and emotional hardship. This reliance on transnational ties, however, has two consequences: (1) male deportees who rely on transnational strategies to survive face a gendered stigma because they must relinquish the provider role and become dependants; and (2) the transnational coping strategies serve as a reminder of the shame, isolation and alienation that deportees experience because of their deportation. This consideration of the consequences of transnational relationships sheds light on why some migrants are transnational and others are not.     

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.     

Traffickers,Brokers, Employment Agents,and Social Networks: The Regulation of Intermediaries in the Migration of Ethiopian Domestic Workers to the Middle East

This paper examines the regulatory regimes surrounding the operations of intermediaries who facilitate Ethiopian women's employment as contract domestic workers in the Middle East. Drawing on empirical research in Ethiopia, Lebanon, and Kuwait, the paper focuses on the commonly observed problem of “regulatory failure,” as states and international agencies frequently fail to achieve their objectives in the regulation of intermediaries of migration. This paper argues that a decentered approach to regulation can provide a productive diagnosis of regulatory failure, one that recognizes how power may be dispersed between social actors and (non‐unitary) state actors and how it is differentially exercised across multiple regulatory regimes within this migration trajectory.     

The Politics of Migrants' Transnational Political Practices

This article critically examines transnational political engagement of migrants and refugees in local, national and global political processes. Based on inductive reading of existing scholarship and in particular the author's own research on Turks and Kurds in Europe, the article discusses key concepts and trends in our understanding of why, how and with what consequences migrants engage in transnational political practices. These practices, this article suggests, are influenced by the particular multilevel institutional environment, which migrant political actors negotiate their way through. This environment includes not only political institutions in the sending and receiving country, but also global norms and institutions and networks of other nonstate actors. Finally, the article argues for critical examination of the democratic transparency and accountability of migrants' transnational networks in any analysis of their long and short‐term impact on domestic and global politics.     

Local press meets transnational activism: news dynamics in an anti‐WTO protest

Transnational protests often involve a cross‐cultural encounter between “foreign” protesters and the local media and public, whose repertoires of contentious practices and discourses may differ. Examining how transnational and local actors interact in these events is one way to understand the significance and impact of transnational activism. At the same time, local media coverage of transnational protests can also be analyzed as such a cross‐cultural encounter. Following these premises, this article examines Hong Kong media coverage of the transnational protests during the World Trade Organization's 6th Ministerial Conference, which was held in the city in December 2005. The analysis focuses particularly on how this non‐routine news event provided the conditions for a more reflective interactive dynamics between the protesters and journalists, which contributed to emergence of media discourses negotiating and redefining the existing cultural understanding of protest actions. However, the case study also shows the limits regarding how far the redefinition and negotiation can go. Theoretical implications of the analysis are discussed.     

The Power of Legal Norms in the EU's External Border Control

Despite an increased level of legalization of JHA, academic literature has paid little attention to the role of law in this field. It is the objective of this article to assess the EU's attempt to reconcile its current practices of extraterritorial border control coordinated by Frontex in the Mediterranean with international human rights law, notably the principle of non‐refoulement. By drawing on insights on both rationalist and constructivist accounts, we argue that international human rights principles such as non‐refoulement are usually broad enough for everyone to identify and agree with and to provide state actors sufficient leeway to interpret the rules according to their interest. However, thanks to the activities of numerous inter‐, supra‐, and transnational actors offering various and competing legal interpretations, EU member states feel compelled to react by triggering several rounds of rule‐specification that have the power to clarify pertinent law and strengthen fundamental rights standards.