STATES AS TARGETS: THE RISE OF TRANSNATIONAL ACTIVISM

Transnational advocacy networks have gained in prominence so extensively that it is

hard to believe, in hindsight, that just 20 years ago this was an understudied
phenomenon in international relations and political sociology. Margaret Keck and
Kathryn Sikkink blazed the trail for contemporary scholars with their book Activists
Beyond Borders, which illustrated how transnational activism has deep roots that go
back to nineteenth-century campaigns against slavery, against foot-binding practices in
China, and for women's voting rights. Keck and

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Sikkink coined the phrase 'boomerang pattern of influence' (1998: 12) to describe what can happen
when domestic civil society organizations on the losing ends of political struggles within their
respective countries join forces with compatible advocacy groups overseas that can pressure the
national governments in question. As noted by Keck and Sikkink (1998: 37): 'When a state
recognizes the legitimacy of international interventions and changes its domestic behavior in response
to international pressure, it reconstitutes the relationship between the state, its citizens and
international actors'. This is 'how network practices instantiate new norms' as states transform their
policies and practices, especially with regard to human rights and fundamental freedoms.
Coincidentally, at just about the same time as Keck and Sikkink published their book, the
Norwegian Nobel Committee itself an important actor within transnational civil society — called
attention to the rising trend of Internet activism by awarding the Peace Prize to the International
Campaign to Ban Landmines and its coordinator, Jody Williams, whose Vermont barn (where she
had her home office) became a local symbol for the larger dynamic of global activism. The 1997
Peace Prize also reminds us of the centrality of states; after all, the global advocacy campaign to ban
landmines as a weapon of war specifically targeted states and urged them to sign the Ottawa Treaty
that now has 160 countries on board. (Similar to the International Criminal Court, however, some of
the world's largest countries, such as China, Russia, and the United States have not signed.)
Then there is the sustained global citizens campaign — what many call the global justice
movement to call for alternatives to neoliberal economic globalization. Many scholars and activists
trace the contemporary origins of this movement to the transnational campaign launched in 1994 in
Chiapas, Mexico, by the Zapatista Army of National Liberation (Ejército Zapatista de Liberación
Nacional) in response to the North American Free Trade Agreement. Another early victory for the
movement came in 1998, when citizen activists stopped the Multilateral Agreement on Investment
dead in its tracks, with activists objecting that it would create a 'bill of rights' for global corporations
but make it difficult for states to regulate investors from abroad (Barlow and Clarke, 1997). And then
in November 1999 came what remains the 'alter-globalization' movement's single most celebrated
event: the meeting of the World Trade Organization (WTO) in Seattle. Some of the problems that
continue to confront the movement became more obvious in the aftermath of Seattle: media attention
often focused more on street disruptions and violent incidents and deceptively framed the movement
as 'anti-globalization' rather than for an alternative model of globalization more attentive to human
rights, participatory democracy, local control, sustainability and cultural diversity (Cavanagh and
Mander, 2004: 77—103). In any case, the surge in public consciousness of globalization and all its
implications led growing numbers of everyday people during this period to begin thinking of
themselves as 'global citizens' and to link this idea substantially with concepts of awareness,
responsibility, participation and crosscultural empathy (Schattle, 2008).
Following the terrorist attacks that hit New York and Washington on 1 1 September
2001, the public visibility of the movement challenging the 'Washington consensus'
version of economic globalization entered a doldrums phase. It didn't help that the first
WTO meeting held after 9/11 took place in Dohar, Qatar, a remote location difficult for
activists to target, and national governments around the world have ratcheted up denials
of entry to activists seeking to travel into countries in the days leading up to the big
meetings of international organizations. The global justice movement as a vehicle for
citizens to interact beyond the nation-state continued to expand and become more
coherent, particularly with the entry of the World Social Forum as a counterpoint to the
World Economic Forum (Steger and Wilson,
2012). And yet, power disparities have

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solidified during the past decade: while the World Economic Forum is lavishly funded, efficiently
organized, and easy to observe online (at least superficially) with a comprehensive website and
abundantly archived documents and transcripts of proceedings (print, audio and video), the World
Social Forum can be trickier for everyday people to follow, partly because its culture of avoiding
hierarchy and centralized control leaves it without a single permanent website. While this does not
keep the World Social Forum's active members from communicating with each other all year round,
it renders this civil society clearinghouse less transparent, in some important respects, than its more
powerful counterparts underwritten by the world's largest corporations and national governments. The
disparities in power and public visibility hand an advantage in the globalization debates to market and
state forces that ultimately back neoliberalism rather than more socially and environmentally
responsive alternatives.
Scholarship in this field has advanced steadily, especially by examining the ways transnational
activism has opened up new points of interaction between domestic politics and international
relations. From the perspective of contentious politics, Sidney Tarrow (2005: 59—60) has shown how
domestic political and social activists 'come to see their local grievances in terms that connect them to
economic globalization'. As a result, they turn to what Tarrow calls 'global framing' and link their
particular local or national claims with more widely recognized claims, causes and symbols than their
original issue might have seemed to warrant. (Tarrow describes, for example, how American activists
fighting to save community gardens partnered with farmers from developing countries outside the
1999 World Trade Organization summit in Seattle.) Tarrow also has explored how transnational
activists tend to be 'rooted cosmopolitans' who stay planted mainly within their respective home
countries and local communities alongside occasional forays abroad that place them more directly in
contact with fellow activists and the governing or corporate institutions of interest:
The new transnational activism is as multifaceted as the internationalism within which it has emerged. Although
globalization and global neoliberalism are frames around which many activists mobilize, the protests and organizations
we have seen in this study are not the product of a g obal imaginary but of domestically rooted activists (who) are the
connective tissue of the global and the local, working as activators, brokers and advoCates for claims both domestic and
international. (Tarrow, 2005: 205-6)

Global activists, then, direct a great deal of energy at states, and whether or not particular campaigns
by global civil society activists succeed or fail depends heavily on how they are received within the
corridors of specific national governments. As Joshua Busby argues in Moral Movements and
Foreign Policy, campaigns have a better shot at success when activists and their network partners can
convince key 'gatekeepers' that important shared values are at stake. What works in one country
sometimes backfires in another: the Irish celebrity musician Bono, for instance, made a seemingly
unlikely connection with the late US Senator Jesse Helms, on the issue of debt relief for developing
countries by emphasizing how the Jubilee 2000 campaign had an important link with Biblical
scriptures. The appeal to religion succeeded in Washington but then fell flat in Tokyo, where the
argument needed to be 'reframed as a test of Japan's international contribution' (Busby 2010: 12, 70-
103).
The social media revolution has lifted advocacy groups and social movements into an exciting new
phase and energized civil society organizations at all levels. The revolutions in Tunisia and Egypt in
early 2011 showed how engaged citizens could topple dictatorships, even if these cases were
exceptional and citizens elsewhere in the region continue to weather the storms of political repression
and police brutality; even within Egypt, public frustration with the successor government and its
authoritarian tactics remained high in early 2014, especially after repeated crackdowns on prominent
democratic activists. But change is afoot around the world: protests in Myanmar (Burma) helped
along by cyber-activism eventually pushed the government there to open up partially, while in China,
citizens are more connected and vocal than before, even if the government is still working to
manipulate public opinion and crush dissent (Shirk, 2010). Social media platforms have also eased
the way for citizens groups across the 'global south' to build network partners. Facebook, Twitter and
their localized counterparts around the world now figure heavily in much of the new scholarship in
transnational advocacy movements; in the aftermath of the Arab Spring, for instance, scholars and
commentators were plumbing the depths of cyberspace to assess whether 'the revolution would be
retweeted' (Gladwell, 2010; Starbird and Palen, 2012). Political
elites and everyday citizens everywhere are using new media to navigate and renegotiate their
relationships in the global age — and this leads us to another important development in global studies:
the growing interaction between the fields of international relations and political communication.