Building democratic public spheres? Transnational advocacy networks and the social forum process

What, if anything, can transnational advocacy networks (TANs) contribute to the democratization of public spheres outside Westphalian frameworks? On the one hand, TANs excel at turning international public campaigns into political influence – connecting people and power across borders. On the other hand, the increasingly policy‐orientated nature of TANs raises questions about their legitimacy in speaking on behalf of multiple publics. In this article, I suggest that a TAN's success in ensuring the political efficacy of public spheres, while at the same time undermining their normative legitimacy, reflects two sides of the same coin. This is a consequence of the recent internal professionalization of advocacy networks. Framing professionalization as a particular form of communicative distortion within TAN decision‐making, I suggest that networks should incorporate internal deliberative mechanisms, adapted from international social forums, to enhance the normative legitimacy of democratic public spheres.     

The Problems of Public Relations: Eisenhower,Latin America and the Potential Lessons for the Bush Administration

Abstract

Accompanied by intense media interest, President George W. Bush visited Latin America in March 2007. The trip, it seemed, was a rather obvious attempt to try and improve inter-American relations by demonstrating that the US did care about is neighbours to the South; to counter the seemingly endless bad press and repair some of the damage done to the American brand by Bush's policies and the influence of Venezuelan president, Hugo Chávez. As this article will demonstrate, though, this was reminiscent of another era: that of the 1950s and the presidency of Dwight D. Eisenhower. Throughout his eight years in office, Eisenhower would consistently use public relations operations as a way of improving inter-American relations. However, the intense problems that this eventually brought about suggest that the present administration may have been misguided in its attempts to follow a similar path to its Republican predecessor's.     

Diaspora mobilization and the politics of loyalty in the time of Ebola: evidence from the Sierra Leonean diaspora in the UK

Following the recent involvement of overseas diasporas and citizen groups in humanitarian crises, scholars are reconsidering how these groups mobilize and what distinguishes them from formal humanitarian organizations. In this article, I document the individual and collective mobilization of a section of the Sierra Leonean diaspora during the 2014/15 Ebola outbreak. I focus on the individual health‐related communications of Sierra Leoneans living in London, on a specific UK‐based diaspora association called the Kono District Development Association‐UK, and on efforts to coordinate the diaspora. Bolten (2012), and Van Hear and Cohen (2017), show that diasporic mobilization operates through ‘nested scales’ of loyalty to kin, association and nation, and that these different loyalties overlap and conflict. I argue that such overlapping engagements challenge policy orientations to ‘national’ diasporas and offer an alternative model of international humanitarianism.     

Public culture and national integration in multi-cultural states Comparative observations from the United States and Nigeria

Abstract

National integration in multi-cultural states is untenable without an entrenched public culture because this comprises the values shared by all groups and constitutes the common grounds on which the diverse groups conceptualize and appreciate the state. In the United States of America groups tend to struggle to define public culture from a universalistic/impersonal perspective, whereas in Nigeria, groups strive to impose their particularistic definition of public culture on the entire polity. The result is that in the United States the universalist position vis-à-vis 'America' engenders widespread identification of groups with the existing public culture. In Nigeria, the area of society-wide agreement which constitutes public culture is still too narrow. People therefore struggle to overthrow existing public culture rather than identify with it due to its parochiality. National integration and its attached benefits, like democracy and political stability, can be realized only with the development and entrenchment of a supportive public culture.