Professional Documents
Culture Documents
This book focuses on global activism and uses a power perspective to provide an
in-depth and coherent analysis of both the possibilities and limitations of global
activism.
Bringing together scholars from IR, sociology and political science, Power and
Transnational Activism offers new and critical insights on global activism and
power. It features case studies on the following social and political issues: China
and Tibet, HIV/AIDS, climate change, child labour, the WTO, women and the
United Nations, the global public sphere, regional integration, national power,
world social forums, policing, media power and global civil society. This volume
provides a balanced and critical discussion of strengths and weaknesses, oppor-
tunities and limits, in transnational activism. Addressing power from a plurality
of theoretical perspectives within IR and political sociology, the analysis provides
vital reflections on the understanding of activism and the understanding of the
current globalization process and its challenges.
Exploring the scope and limits of transnational activist power in the era of
globalization, this book will be of interest to students and scholars of globaliza-
tion, global sociology and international politics.
This series is designed to break new ground in the literature on globalization and its academic and popular
understanding. Rather than perpetuating or simply reacting to the economic understanding of globalization,
this series seeks to capture the term and broaden its meaning to encompass a wide range of issues and disci-
plines and convey a sense of alternative possibilities for the future.
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collection of thousands of eBooks please go to www.eBookstore.tandf.co.uk.
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with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or
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information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from
the publishers.
PART I
Critiques and appraisals 21
PART II
The state and the national 73
PART III
Representation and discourse 171
Index 262
Illustrations
Figures
5.1 Explanations of transnational protest policing 103
7.1 Sequence of mechanisms causing and constituting
social boundary change in the case of environmental
activism and ecoterrorism 145
10.1 Distribution of press releases of Attac and media coverage,
2000–2008 198
10.2 Globalization and related topics in the newspaper
die tageszeitung 201
10.3 Evaluation of the protesters in German newspapers 205
Tables
8.1 The international charitable sector in three countries 159
8.2 Variation in INGO structure and strategy 163
10.1 Distribution of Indymedias 196
10.2 Investigated conflicts 200
10.3 Quantitative coverage of five conflicts in German newspapers 202
10.4 The foci of reports in German newspapers by conflict 203
10.5 Mentioning of aspects of globalization by conflict in
German newspapers 204
10.6 The foci of German and Czech newspaper articles on the
Prague event 206
contributors
Introduction
As the United States and its allies in the war on terror prepared for war in Iraq in
early 2003, millions of people took to the streets all over the world on 15 February
in what is probably the largest simultaneous protest event in human history
(Walgrave and Rucht 2010; Walgrave and Verhulst 2009). but to no avail. The
United States chose to ignore the chorus of protesters and proceeded to invade
Iraq. Almost 7 years later, in December 2009, thousands of activists descended
on Copenhagen to pressure the world’s political leaders to take decisive and
legally binding action on climate change. For a week, activists of all stripes
turned a winter-cold Copenhagen into a hotspot of activism (Reitan, this volume).
The climate deal that emerged from the COP15 meeting was, nevertheless, a
disappointment for activists who had hoped to make a difference there.
These events have a dual meaning that sets the scene for the volume. Both
demonstrate how transnational activism has become a force to be reckoned
with.2 The ability to coordinate events of this magnitude and mobilize thousands,
if not millions, of people is testimony to the emergence of a vibrant sector of
transnational activists and transnational counter-publics (see the concluding
chapter for an elaboration). However, the events also display the limits of activ-
ist power and the continued power of states (Ayres, this volume; della Porta and
Reiter, this volume; Fleay, this volume). Despite the enormous mobilizing effort
and success, activists failed to achieve what they wanted: no war and a strong
climate deal. The protests were, at one and the same time, major successes and
huge failures. No matter which interpretation is preferred, these events and out-
comes invite us to pause and ask a range of critical questions about transnational
activists: if they exercise power, what kind of power is it? And what are its lim-
its and (unintended) consequences? These are the questions that have motivated
this volume and its contributors (see below for presentations). The present vol-
ume is the first attempt to forge a systematic discussion on aspects of power and
transnational activism.
In this chapter, I address the problematic through an exploration of two key
concepts in social movement research: Framing and political opportunity. Framing
points to activists’ communication and persuasion strategies (Gamson 1995;
2 Thomas Olesen
Snow and Benford 1988, 1992; Snow et al. 1986; see Benford and Snow 2000;
Noakes and Johnston 2005; Polletta and Ho 2006 for reviews). When activists
succeed in these efforts, they affect public debates and, through that, play a part
in shaping and changing norms, values, opinions and agendas: They exercise
communicative power! However, to paraphrase Marx in the 18th Brumaire, they
do not do so under conditions of their own choosing. These structural conditions
for activism are at the centre of political opportunity theory. Authors in this tradi-
tion have identified a number of external factors shaping the emergence and
course of activism, for example, conflicts within the ruling elite, changes in gov-
ernment, regime change and the historical traditions of state–activist interaction
(Kriesi et al. 1995; McAdam 1982, 1996; Meyer 2004; Meyer and Minkoff 2004;
Tarrow 1998; Tilly 1978).
In the past 10–15 years, scholars have sought to transcend the national orienta-
tion in early theories on framing and political opportunity (for framing: see e.g.
Joachim 2003; Keck and Sikkink 1998; Olesen 2005; Smith 2002; Tsutsui 2006;
for political opportunities: see e.g. Maney 2002; Sikkink 2005; Smith et al.
1997a; Tarrow 2001, 2005). However, these works have insufficiently integrated
framing and political opportunity theories with relevance for the study of trans-
national activism. In this chapter, I wish to move in that direction by emphasizing
the discursive dimension of transnational activists’ opportunities and constraints
and, hence, power. In their comparative analysis of discursive opportunity struc-
tures in Germany and the United States, Ferree et al. (2002: 62) define these as
‘all of the institutional and cultural access points that actors can seize upon to
attempt to bring their frames into the public forum’.3 Despite being developed
with the national level in mind, the concept has significant yet unexplored poten-
tial for improving our understanding of transnational activism and power. The
challenge is twofold: First, how might we conceive discursive opportunity struc-
tures in a transnational context? Second, where do they come from, who creates
them and how do they change?
It is a recurring argument in the literature that transnational activists’ main
power resource is their ability to initiate and shape public debates on moral and
political issues (Beck, this volume; see also the next section for a discussion and
critique of this approach). Although I accept the basic thrust of this argument, I
wish to explore how transnational framing always unfolds within a transnational
discursive opportunity structure.4 A key argument is that states play a prominent
role in defining this structure, particularly through their securitization (see below
for elaboration) of issues and events (Buzan et al. 1998). Placing states in this
central position makes it possible to condense the chapter’s central argument:
That there is a close and complex relationship between the political and discur-
sive dimensions of the transnational opportunity structure, which in turn influ-
ences activists’ transnational framing efforts in significant ways. Tackling this
issue is admittedly ambitious. The answers given below are, thus, theoretically
explorative. The chapter consequently offers a tentative step towards integrating
key insights from International Relations theory (i.e. securitization theory) with
political sociological approaches (i.e. framing and discursive opportunities).
Introduction 3
Combining theories in the way outlined above enables an exploration of both
the light and dark side of transnational activist power – as already indicated by
the opening empirical illustrations. It is the volume’s general ambition, as well,
to provide a balanced and critical discussion of strengths and weaknesses, oppor-
tunities and limits, in transnational activism. Much of the literature on transna-
tional activism since its inception the mid-1990s has been optimistic and rather
celebratory in tone. It is my conviction, however, that if transnational activists are
to maintain and perhaps even expand their role and relevance in domestic and
transnational politics, they – as well as the scholars who study them – must
engage in continuous critical self-reflection on the character of their power.
Raising questions of this nature is not meant to denigrate transnational activism
or to provide ammunition for those who see it as an undesirable disturbance and/
or epiphenomenon. Rather, hopefully, the volume could provide a ‘provocative’
intellectual toolbox for activists and scholars striving to improve their under-
standing of transnational activist power and, through that, to expand the academic
and political space for such activism (this discussion is continued in the conclud-
ing chapter, which explores activists’ contribution to democracy in contemporary
domestic and transnational politics).
power is also exercised when A devotes his energies to creating and rein-
forcing social and political values and institutional practices that limit the
scope of the political process to public consideration of only those issues
which are comparatively innocuous to A.
(Bachrach and Baratz 1962: 948)
Notes
1 I wish to thank colleagues in the Sociology Section at the Department of Political
Science, Aarhus University for their useful comments on an earlier draft of this chapter.
I am also indebted to Caroline Fleay and Ruth Reitan for their insights and editorial
suggestions.
2 I define transnational activism broadly as encompassing at least three types: First, activists
located at the domestic level and engaged in activities aimed at national targets and topics
but who draw on transnationally available symbols and frames and interact with like-
minded organizations in other countries via communicative networks; second, domesti-
cally located activists whose main activities are directed to places and situations outside
their national context: for example, a Swedish organization protesting repression in Burma
or a British organization protesting the war in Iraq and third, organizations with branches
in several countries, for example Greenpeace and Amnesty International.
3 See Koopmans (2004) for a related discussion of discursive opportunity structures.
4 An activist frame is transnational when it concerns (a) transnational topics (e.g. global
warming), (b) world political issues (e.g. the war in Iraq), (c) conditions and events in
countries other than that of the activist organization promoting the frame (e.g. a German
organization advocating for indigenous rights in Ecuador) and (d) calls for attention from
activists in other countries (e.g. the Zapatistas’ communiques directed to non-Mexican
activists).
5 See, for example, Bandy and Smith (2005); della Porta (2009); della Porta et al.
(1999/2009); della Porta and Tarrow (2005); Gills (2000); Guidry et al. (2000); Hamel
et al. (2001); Laxer and Halperin (2003); Richter et al. (2006); Risse et al. (1999); Smith
et al. (1997b); Teune (forthcoming). To this list, we should also add the Global Civil
Society Yearbook published since 2001 and edited by scholars associated with the
London School of Economics, especially Helmut Anheier, Marlies Glasius, and Mary
Kaldor.
6 In the concluding chapter, I take a step beyond Bachrach and Baratz’ conception of power
to address what is often referred to as the third face of power: dominance over identities
and interests (Lukes 1974/2005).
7 The concept of metapackages bears some resemblance to the concept of master frames
developed by Snow and Benford (1992).
8 The 9/11 focus does not imply that securitization frames are only a product of the current
era. According to Campbell (1998), for example, they are constitutive of the modern state
itself.
9 Of course, democracies with exclusionary practices are not uncommon. Historically,
we can think of American democracy which – until the 1950s and the emergence of
the civil rights movement – socially and politically excluded the black community.
However, as Alexander shows (Chapters 11–14), the very democratic foundation of
American society provided the civil rights movement with arguments that could not
in the long run be denied by White America without seriously contradicting its own
values.
Introduction 15
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Part I
Introduction
To understand the power of civil society movements and groups, we have to
understand the Great Transformation of the state-centred order per se. The exclu-
sive scenario according to which nation-states and the system of international
relations between states determined the space of collective political action is
broken down from both the inside and the outside at the same time and is succes-
sively replaced by a more complex, border transcending subpolitical and global
political ‘meta-power game’, one that changes the rules of power, is full of para-
doxes, unpredictable and open ended. Exactly what does this mean, though?
Note
1 Parts of this chapter are taken from Ulrich Beck (2005).
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Demokratieproblem in der Weltrisikogesellschaft, Baden-Baden: Nomos.
2 Evading the challenge
The limits of global activism
David Chandler
Introduction
Although state-based political action is held to reinforce frameworks and hierarchies
of power and exclusion, new social movements based on global activism are seen to
herald new forms of emancipatory political action that recognize and include diver-
sity and build new forms of global ‘counter-hegemonic’ politics. This chapter seeks
to briefly examine and challenge some of these claims. It suggests that, rather than
challenging power, global activism tends to undermine community connections.
This is because the political ethos it advocates is deeply corrosive of social engage-
ment and prone to elitist rather than inclusive consequences. The radical ethos of
global activism is one that seeks to create new methods of protest, awareness raising
and engagement derived from a refusal to play by the rules laid down by state-based
party politics. Advocates of this approach suggest that these radical movements
bring politics and ethics together by expanding the sphere of moral concern and by
developing political strategies that avoid and bypass state-based constraints on what
constitutes the political (see Hardt and Negri 2006; Graeber 2004; Falk and Strauss
2003; Pianta 2003). Global activism is defined by the demand not merely to ‘seek to
replace one form of power with another’ but instead claims the ‘objective of “whit-
tling down” the capacity of concentrated centres of power’ (Stammers 1999: 1006).
The emphasis is on ‘the struggle to reclaim space’ or to create ‘zones of autonomy’
and thereby to ‘create counter-powers to the state’ (Kingsnorth 2004; Notes from
Nowhere 2003; Klein 2002: 20).
From this perspective, political activity at the level of the state is inherently
problematic. States, far from being the focus for political organization and politi-
cal demands, are the central barrier to emancipatory political practice. Operating
on the terms of the state can only legitimize and perpetuate discourses and prac-
tices of political regulation that are built on and maintained by exclusion and war
(Foucault 2003: 98–9; Connolly 1991: 465–6; Pogge 1994: 198; Campbell 1998;
Linklater 1998: 6; Kaldor 2003: 36). It is the rejection of state-based approaches
that marks out this project as distinct from those of the past, and its development
can be traced from the post-1968 ‘new left’ through the 1980s civic ‘opposition-
ists’ in Eastern Europe to the Seattle protests and the anti-globalization and envi-
ronmental activist movements of today. There has been little critical analysis of
Evading the challenge 35
the emergence of global activism and markedly little examination either of their
claims for extending the ideas and concerns of political community beyond the
state or of the limitations of the ethos, which asserts that power can be challenged
globally rather than at the level of constituted government.
The following sections draw out the historical development of the core ideas at
the heart of radical global activist approaches, focusing on the grounds for the
rejection of the formal political framework of state-based politics, the centrality
of individual autonomy and the importance of the global or transnational dimen-
sion. The concluding sections dwell on the limitations of this political approach,
highlighting the problems involved in privileging individual ethics over societal
accountability and the consequences of this approach in legitimising highly indi-
vidualized political responses, which tend to fragment and atomize political
practices rather than constitute a new and more inclusive form of politics.
The realm of ‘anti-politics’ or the parallel polis was one where the indi-
vidual would refuse such [political] collaboration. . . . In all these discus-
sions, the role of the individual and the importance of personal links,
36 David Chandler
something that was central to individual dissidence, were considered pri-
mary, overriding claims to political authority . . . [A]nti-politics . . . was a
new type of politics because it was not about the capture of state power; it
was the politics of those who don’t want to be politicians and don’t want
to share power.
(Kaldor 2003: 56)
Lipschutz similarly argues that mass politics cannot lead to emancipatory prog-
ress because ‘in a sense, even societies in the West have been “colonized” by their
states’ (Lipschutz 1992: 392).
Advocates of global activism assert that the state-level focus of old movements
limited their progressive potential: ‘[I]t was through the state that “old” move-
ments were “tamed”. This was true both of workers’ movements, which became
left political parties and trade unions, and anti-colonial struggles, which were
transformed into new ruling parties’ (Connolly 1991: 476). Hardt and Negri
(2001: 133), for example, write that sovereignty is a ‘poisoned gift’, where osten-
sible revolutionaries ‘get bogged down in “realism”’, resulting in ‘the opposite of
the nationalist dream of an autonomous, self-centred development’ as new struc-
tures of domestic and international domination become established. Their critique
of national sovereignty puts a question mark over the political and ethical legiti-
macy of the modern democratic process:
Evading the challenge 37
The entire logical chain of representation might be summarized like this:
the people representing the multitude, the nation representing the people,
and the state representing the nation. Each link is an attempt to hold in
suspension the crisis of modernity. Representation in each case means a
further step of abstraction and control.
(Hardt and Negri 2001: 134)
The new generation of radicals did not, as a rule, challenge the official
leadership of the trade unions, but side-stepped the organized working
class altogether, to find new constituencies and fields of activism. Taking
the path of least resistance, these radicals took their struggle elsewhere.
38 David Chandler
The critique of, and political distancing from, organized labour on the grounds
of the rejection of any collective political subject went hand-in-hand with a critique
of mass politics and liberal democracy, which similarly implied a collective politi-
cal subject, that is, the electorate. Leading theorists of the ‘new left’, Laclau and
Mouffe (2001), argued that democratic struggles were not necessarily popular
struggles to be legitimated through the formal equality of the ballot box. They
denied the central importance of state-based politics of democratic representation,
arguing that there was no one ontologically privileged political space (Laclau and
Mouffe 2001; also Jessop 1990). For these theorists of ‘radical democracy’, demo-
cratic struggles (e.g., the feminist or anti-racist struggles) took place in a ‘plurality
of political spaces’ shaped by their own, relatively autonomous, ‘ensemble of prac-
tices and discourses’ (Jessop 1990: 132). There was no longer one ‘political space’;
the key demands were therefore not for equal political rights of participation but for
the recognition of difference and ‘autonomy’ (Jessop 1990: 184).
The centrality of autonomy to the definition and nature of new social move-
ments make them implicitly anti-state, not only because of their subjective
political views but also because of their organizational practices. The radical
approach sees the bearers of a new globalized democracy as social organizations,
which reject formal political processes and work at the sub-political level. For
Melucci (1988: 247), new social movements exist outside the traditional civil
society/state nexus; submerged in everyday life, they ‘have created meanings and
definitions of identity’, which contrast with traditional political boundaries. They
become ‘visible’ but are not institutionalized; that is, they do not have to make
claims to legitimacy based on public electoral or financial support (see Martin
2003). This, in Melucci’s (1988: 259) words, is the ‘democracy of everyday life’,
where legitimacy and recognition stem from ‘mere existence’ rather than the
power of argument or representation.
In effect, the claim for recognition on the basis of existence rather than the
ideas forwarded or numbers of people involved inverses the traditional ‘bench-
marks’ for judging political legitimacy. The focus on the everyday and the mar-
ginal has led to a growing appreciation of global activist networks that tend to be
least connected to formal political institutions and to a celebration of the ‘every-
day’ survival strategies of the Southern poor, which are held to ‘reposition the
locus of power’ and ‘transform the nature of power’. From this perspective, isola-
tion and the reliance on contacts within disparate ‘local communities result in a
decentralized strength, rooted in the autonomy of the national and local process’
(Patel et al. 2001: 244). Unlike the formal political struggle for representation, the
‘struggles’ of global activism are based on the claim of autonomy, held to be a
self-constituting goal or end-point.
The global interconnectedness that is celebrated is, in fact, the flip side of a
lack of connection domestically: ‘Air travel and the Internet create new horizon-
tal communities of people, who perhaps have more in common, than with those
who live close by’ (Kaldor 2003: 111–12). What these ‘citizen pilgrims’ have in
common is their isolation from and rejection of their own political communities.
The transfer of loyalties to an ‘invisible political community’ is merely a radical
re-representation of their rejection of a real and all too visible political commu-
nity: the electorate.
In fact, the global movement for emancipation ‘from below’ could be read as
a product of the end of any genuine transnational struggle. When radical theorists
celebrate ‘the early 1990s’ as ‘the time when civic transnationalism really came
of age’ (Falk and Strauss 2003: 211), they betray a certain lack of historical
imagination. Colás (2002) in International Civil Society makes the point that the
42 David Chandler
idea that transnational politics has only recently emerged demonstrates a lack of
historical awareness on the part of the advocates of ‘globalization from below’.
In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the main political currents, whether
they were conservatives, communists, anarchists, socialists, pacifists, feminists or
even nationalists, were, in fact, internationally as much as nationally orientated.
For example, the People’s International League, a cross-European association of
nationalists, was established by Mazzini in 1847, the International Working
Men’s Association or First International was formed in 1864, and the International
Congress of Women was established in 1888 (Colás 2002: 55–7). Rather than
being new or on the rise, transnational political activism is in a parlous state
today. The transnational social movements of modernity had the independence of
aim and capacity to effect meaningful political change at both domestic and inter-
national levels without either relying on states to act on their behalf or, at the
other extreme, avoiding any engagement with formal politics for fear of losing
their autonomy.
It would seem that the dynamic towards global activism is one driven by
domestic marginalization and the attempt to avoid the pressures and accountabil-
ity of domestic politics rather than the attraction of the international sphere per se.
As Kaldor (2003: 82) states: ‘almost all social movements and NGOs . . . have
some kind of transnational relations. Precisely because these groups inhabit a
political space outside formal national politics (parties and elections)’. Claire
Fox, writing about the burgeoning international activities of British local author-
ities, ranging from multiple twinning, to capacity-building partnerships as far a
field as Indonesia, Vietnam and Kosovo, notes that it seems that easy-sounding
solutions to problems elsewhere are more attractive than engaging with a domes-
tic audience. For her, it appears that ‘New Internationalism is in danger of becom-
ing a con-trick, a worthy sounding escape-route from the angst and insecurity of
running and representing local areas’ (Fox 2003).
Rather than be exposed through a formal struggle to win the argument with
people in a genuine debate, isolated activists are instead drawn to the forums of
international financial and inter-state institutions where there is no democratic
discussion, and they have no formal rights or responsibilities. Protesting outside
meetings of the World Trade Organization (WTO) or the G8 does not involve
winning any arguments. At best, it is a matter of courtier politics and elite lobby-
ing, shortcutting any attempt to win popular representative support. At worst, it is
a radical justification for the refusal to engage politically and for a retreat into
personal solipsism.
Lobbying power
The attempt to give elite lobbying a moral legitimacy can easily lead to the
exploitation of marginal struggles in the non-Western world, where people are
least likely to complain about Western advocates claiming to represent them and
guide their struggle. Of course, this does not mean that there is no local opposi-
tion, or resentment, over some ‘social movements’ that ‘consist of nothing more
Evading the challenge 43
than an office and a big grant from somewhere or other’ and ‘call a workshop,
pay people to attend, give them a nice meal and then write up a good report’ but
‘build nothing on the ground’ (Ngwane 2004; see also Sali-Terzic 2001).
However, for the advocates of global activism, these inequalities are not denied
but re-presented as giving voice to the ‘voiceless’ rather than to formal political
majorities, enabling marginal groups or the alleged ‘voices’ of the environment
or of future generations to be heard. Kaldor (2003: 5), for example, echoes net-
work theorists Keck and Sikkink (1998) in their use of the ‘boomerang effect’ to
describe the way civil society groups could ‘bypass the state’ through appealing
to transnational networks, international institutions and foreign governments.
Kaldor (2003: 95) describes the relationship:
[A] kind of two-way street [links Southern] groups and individuals who
directly represent victims, whether it be the victims of human rights viola-
tions, poverty or environmental degradation, with the so-called Northern
solidarity ‘outsiders’. The former provide testimony, stories and informa-
tion about their situation and they confer legitimacy on those who cam-
paign on their behalf. The latter provide access to global institutions,
funders or global media as well as ‘interpretations’ more suited to the
global context.
The popularity of global activist struggles for radicals in the West would seem
to be a reflection of similar problems to those faced by East European opposition-
ist figures in the 1980s: the weakness of their own domestic position. In the
search for new political avenues that do not rely on representational legitimacy,
Western radicals have talked-up the importance of international institutional gath-
erings that previously attracted little interest. Pianta (2003: 238) argues, for
example, that ‘the new power of summits of states and inter-governmental
organisations’ needs to be confronted through the invention of parallel summits.
In the face of an inability to make an impact at home, the transnational activists
have sought to latch on to the ready-made agenda of international institutions. It
is increasingly apparent that these radical movements are shaped and cohered
more by external agendas, for example, the timetable of meetings of the G8,
WTO or the United Nations (UN) than by any collective drive of their own.
Significantly, rather than global activism bringing pressure to bear on institu-
tions, it is these institutions, particularly the UN, that have been largely respon-
sible for creating a global activist network providing an agenda of forums that
could act as a cohering focus for the establishment of a ‘loose coalition of groups
and individuals worldwide’ (Bunch 2001). Rather than being seen as a threat to
the powers that be, the ‘new’ social movements are more often than not seen by
the international establishment as making a positive contribution. For example,
after the G8 summit in Genoa in 2001, global institutions responded by welcom-
ing the dialogue. The International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Bank
invited lobby groups including Global Exchange, Jobs with Justice, 50 Years is
Enough and Essential Action to engage in public debate. Guy Verhofstadt, Prime
44 David Chandler
Minister of Belgium and President of the European Union at the time, wrote an
open letter to the anti-globalization movement, published in major national news-
papers around the world, and collected the responses. The French Prime Minister,
Lionel Jospin, welcomed ‘the emergence of a citizen’s movement at the planetary
level’ (Kaldor 2003: 103).
As highlighted by George W. Bush’s relationship with U2 rock star Bono,
governments and international institutions can only gain from their association
with radical advocates (Vidal 2002; Carroll 2003). The reason for this positive
reception from the establishment lies in the fact that the relationship of advocacy
implies a mutual interest rather than any radical opposition (Heartfield 2004). The
power of the advocate rests on an entirely different basis to that of an elected
representative: lacking the representative’s independent basis of legitimacy, the
advocate’s position necessarily depends on the good favour of governing elites.
This lack of representational accountability leaves control in the hands of the
powerful, while offering the appearance of ‘openness’, ‘transparency’ and
‘accountability’. As Charnovitz (1997: 283) notes, the power to appoint non-state
actors and lobby groups to advisory committees ensures that states control the
policy process through determining which groups should be ‘recognized’. Under
these circumstances, the more ‘radical’ global civic activists become the more the
doors of inter-state forums have been opened to them (Heins 2004).
Despite the claims of many critical theorists, there are few indications that
operating outside the formal political sphere of electoral representation facilitates
a radical challenge to political power and existing hierarchies of control.
Compared to political social movements of the past, global activist movements
based on advocacy pose much less of a threat to the status quo, and there is a
growing number of critical studies considering the limits of non-governmental
organization (NGO) and non-state actor engagement in evolving mechanisms of
global governance (see e.g. Hudock 1999; Hearn 2000; Wilkinson and Hughes
2002; Laxer and Halperin 2003). However, for Kaldor, the advocacy movement
‘represents, in some respects, a revival of the great anti-capitalist movements of
the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries’. She points out that ‘[a]t the
World Social Forum in Porto Alegre in 2002, the activists defined themselves as
a “global movement for social justice and solidarity”’ (2003: 101).
The activists may have declared themselves to constitute a ‘global movement’,
but it could be argued that what is distinctive about global activism is precisely
the individual character of global activism rather than the collective mass charac-
ter of the ‘great anti-capitalist movements’ of the last two centuries. According to
Grugel (2003: 276):
Baker (2002: 149) has also suggested that personal ethics should be the basis of
the public resistance to power. This blurring of the private and the public is cen-
tral to the libratory promise of post-political activism, because it ‘holds out the
hope of both personal and political autonomy, in short, of self-rule’.
Twenty-three-year-old Caoimhe Butterly is a leading example of the new breed
of transnational political activists. Brought up in a culture of liberation theology
and with her father working around the world as an economic advisor to the
United Nations, she worked in soup kitchens in New York, in Guatemala and with
the Zapatista communities in Mexico before working in pre-war Iraq with an
activist group opposing sanctions and then moving to Palestine working in Jenin
camp. Interviewed in the Guardian, after being shot by Israeli troops, she was
asked whether she planned to leave. Her reply was ‘I’m going nowhere. I am
staying until this occupation ends. I have the right to be here, a responsibility to
be here. So does anyone who knows what is going on here’ (Barlow 2002).
This is a very different form of political activism from the solidarity work of
trade unionists and political activists in the past. Rather than engaging in political
debate and discussion with colleagues and workmates or raising concerns in elec-
tion campaigns, the new breed of post-modern activist is more concerned to act as
a moral individual than to engage in collective political action. The rights that are
claimed are those of individual engagement with other people’s struggles rather
than any specific political claims of the Palestinians or of others. Caiomhe argues
that she has a duty to be in Palestine, to bear witness and to negotiate with Israeli
forces on behalf of Palestinian victims, and, implicitly, that any morally aware
person has a similar duty. The self-centredness of this type of ethical politics is
reflected in the title of leftist British comedian Jeremy Hardy’s film of his experi-
ence in the region: Jeremy Hardy versus the Israeli Army (see also Hardy 2003).
Ken Nichols O’Keefe, leading the volunteer mission of peace activists acting as
human shields during the 2003 Iraq war, spells out the transnational ethos. According
to O’Keefe (2002) ‘we the “citizens” are responsible for the actions of “our” govern-
ments. . . . [W]e are collectively guilty for what we allow to be done in our name’.
For this reason, O’Keefe (2002) has renounced his US citizenship and would ‘invite
everybody to join me in declaring themselves not citizens of nations but world citi-
zens prepared to act in solidarity with the most wretched on our planet and to join
us’. Along with Caiomhe, O’Keefe is implicitly critical of those who do not take up
the invitation to put morality first. O’Keefe (2002) would ‘rather die in defense of
justice and peace than “prosper” in complicity with mass murder and war’.
It can appear that the motivation of the global civic activists acting as human
shields and witnesses in Iraq and the West Bank has less to do with the politics of
Evading the challenge 47
the conflicts than with their own personal need to make a moral statement.
Ronald Forthofer, from the Episcopal Church in Longmont, Colorado, a human
shield in Beit Jalla on the West Bank, stated: ‘We believe that we who are pro-
tected in America should experience and live in the same way that Palestinians
are living in the suffering’ (Hazboun 2001). Kate Edwards, a community worker
from Manchester, explained why she joined the International Solidarity Movement
in the occupied territories: ‘I wanted to challenge myself to see if I could cope
working in a place like this. I have good friends and a comfortable life. I wanted
to do something for those who were not as fortunate as me’ (Beaumont and
Wainwright 2002). But rather than donate to the International Red Cross or
another professionally trained organization, Kate felt the need to put her own life
at risk, suffering severe internal injuries from bullet wounds in Bethlehem, after
refusing to follow Israeli troop orders to halt. A similar individualized sense of
political mission has been argued to drive young British Muslims to volunteer as
suicide bombers in conflicts abroad. As Appleton (2003) notes:
In the not so recent past, it was religious leaders and moral authority figures
who ‘intervened’ in other people’s struggles in the hope of bringing a peaceful
resolution by bearing witness to the suffering and attempting to help. Today, the
collapse of a broader political or moral framework has led to individuals claiming
their own moral right of global activist ‘intervention’ without any legitimacy
derived from a collective authority.
Conclusion
The celebration of global activism would appear to be based less on any emer-
gence of new political forces at the global level than the desire of Western activ-
ists and commentators to justify their avoidance of accountability to any collective
source of political community or elected authority. The focus on the shared inter-
ests with those ‘excluded’, or the ‘imagined’ global community of radical activ-
ists, is a way of legitimizing the avoidance of any accountability to those still
‘trapped inside’ the electorate (see e.g. Connolly 1991: 479). The struggle for
individual ethical and political autonomy, the claim for the recognition of sepa-
rate ‘political spaces’ and for the ‘incommunicability’ of political causes, demon-
strates the limits of the radical claims for global activism. The rejection of the
48 David Chandler
formal political sphere, as a way of mediating between the individual and the
social, leaves political struggles isolated from any shared framework of meaning
or from any formal processes of democratic accountability.
This chapter neither provides a defence of some nostalgic vision of the past nor
does it assert that the key problem with radical global activist approaches is their
rejection of formal engagement in existing political institutions and practices. The
point being made here is that the rejection of state-based processes, which force the
individual to engage with and account for the views of other members of society, is
a reflection of a broader problem: an unwillingness to engage in political contesta-
tion. It would appear that many advocates of global activism would rather hide
behind the views of someone else, legitimizing their views as the prior moral claims
of others through lobbying power or putting themselves in harm’s way and leading
by inarticulate example, rather than engaging in a public debate. The unwillingness
of many global activists to engage with their own society reflects the attenuation of
political community rather than a radical challenge to power. Regardless of the
effectiveness of radical lobbying and calls for recognition, this rejection of social
engagement can only enhance the hold of power, further legitimizing the narrowing
of the political sphere to a small circle of unaccountable elites.
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interpass.htm.
3 Coordinated power in
contemporary leftist activism
Ruth Reitan1
Introduction
This chapter juxtaposes the three main historical and contemporary strands of
Western leftist activism – reformist social democracy, revolutionary Marxism–
Leninism and radical autonomism and anarchism – in terms of their competing
notions of power and global governance and yet, conversely, their coordinated
struggle for a more just, egalitarian, democratic, peaceful and ecologically sus-
tainable world. A number of points will be developed herein. First, the core
themes of this book, namely globalization, power and activism, are complex.
Facile or one-dimensional definitions are unhelpful in terms of both theory and
practice. As sociologist Tomlinson (1999: 14) observed of globalization, ‘lose the
complexity and you have lost the phenomenon’. The same goes for power and
activism. Furthermore, it is important to note that although globalization pro-
cesses have fragmentary or disintegrative effects, they are also driven by and
reinforce unprecedented concentrations of economic, political, social and cultural
power. This power is concentrated in global governance bodies ranging from
informal, unelected and unaccountable to inter-governmental, partially demo-
cratic and thus considered somewhat legitimate. Most visible and contentious of
these are transnational banks and corporations, the World Trade Organization
(WTO), the International Monetary Fund (IMF), World Bank, and the post-2007
economic crisis nodes of the Group of 20 (G20) leading industrial states and the
‘G2’ of the United States and China – the latter emerging as a key dyadic stum-
bling block to a strong climate treaty at the 15th United Nations Framework
Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) Conference of Parties (COP15)
negotiations in Copenhagen in December 2009.
In response to this concentration of power at the global level, concerned indi-
viduals and groups around the world have also ‘gone global’ in myriad ways
while remaining engaged in local and national politics broadly defined (see
Reitan 2007). However ironically, in terms of power, global activists are often
more realistic and pragmatic than many idealistic scholars who write about them.
They are keenly aware of their relative and often acute powerlessness in the face
of stronger corporate actors, complex bureaucracies and prevailing policies, ide-
ologies and practices. In recognizing their relative marginality, along with the
complexities of globalization and ways of engaging with, pooling and wielding
52 Ruth Reitan
power, activists have grown increasingly reticent to advance their group’s plat-
form as ‘the sole answer’ or to critique the tactics and strategies of others. Instead,
they recognize the need for multiple and flexible approaches to deal with the
Janus-headed complex that is neo-liberal globalization. They increasingly share
information, build trust, develop consensus declarations and act together in coali-
tions when possible or in parallel blocs when not. They also lobby, advise, or
challenge governance actors at all levels. Furthermore, they experiment with
alternative and autonomous modes of political, economic and social relations.
Thus, they have developed a multi-pronged strategy entailing dynamic, loose and
limited coordination across the spectrum from reform to radicalism.
This spectrum suggests another point of this chapter, that is, that globalization
and the activists responding to it are not new. They can be traced back across
centuries of contestation that Polanyi (1944/2001) called ‘the double movement’
or, more recently, Boswell and Chase-Dunn (2000) termed the ‘spiral of capital-
ism and socialism’. Just as a prime driver of the recent wave of globalization is
the intensification and ‘extensification’ of the capitalist model of incessant priva-
tization, growth and accumulation to all parts of the globe, so too are critiques of
neo-liberal globalization and its negative social, political and ecological effects
framed in broadly socialist terms. These range from reformist platforms for
strengthening social democracy at the national and transnational levels to diverse
calls for a radical and plural democracy and a socialist economy.
Finally, what is arguably unique about the present moment is the degree to
which the global left has not fractured into its historical constituent parts of lib-
eralism, Marxism and anarchism–autonomism. Although these tendencies and
tensions are present, activists make concerted efforts to mitigate, manage and
bridge them towards joint action – or at the very least not working at cross-
purposes. Thus, activists are increasingly coordinating their diverse sources and
forms of power to wield power collectively. To illustrate how this is done, exam-
ples will be drawn from the diverse activist networks organizing around the
COP15 negotiations, where I was a participant observer. This pragmatic hanging
together of the left reflects the growing recognition of the complexity of globali-
zation and power, as well as the multiple activist strategies needed to engage with
and ultimately transform both.
how we think of power may serve to reproduce and reinforce power struc-
tures and relations, or alternatively it may challenge and subvert them. It
may contribute to their continued functioning, or it may unmask their prin-
ciples of operation, whose effectiveness is increased by their being hidden
from view.
This perennial divide among activist camps has deep historical roots and robust
contemporary manifestations. Indeed, it has been a ubiquitous feature of ‘left’ or
progressive political philosophy and action for well over a century and cannot be
easily sutured. Socialist folklore reminds us that it was present at the birth of
modern transnational activism when Karl Marx himself, representing revolution-
ary communism, successfully manoeuvred to expel Mikhail Bakunin and his
anarchist ilk after the first Communist International for opposing Marx’s call to
54 Ruth Reitan
participate in parliamentary elections with an eye towards seizing state power.
Instead, the proverbial father of collectivist anarchism Bakunin (1873/1996)
advocated direct action on the part of workers to abolish the state and capitalism
simultaneously and, thus, presciently rejected the intermediate stage of the ‘dic-
tatorship of the proletariat’ on the grounds that it threatened to permanently
enslave the very workers it purported to free.
The second main fissure and ultimate schism to emerge early on was between
anti-capitalist revolution and social democratic reformism. It broke out in the
wake of the First World War and was exacerbated by the competing solidarities
between national citizen and international proletarian. The terms of this polemical
debate, as the story goes, were laid down by German Social Democratic Party
members Bernstein (1889/1993) arguing for the reformist path to socialism as
opposed to Luxemburg (1900/1973) advocating the workers’ revolution.
And so it continues today: These three tendencies have re-emerged everywhere
in the most recent cycle of contention. We find them in the variegated responses
to the US’s ‘war on terror’ (Reitan 2009). They are even more apparent in the
global backlash against the core state-allied corporate and financial interests in
their drive to construct a single integrated economy and international legal order
via neo-liberal globalization. These diverse activist tendencies are manifested in
the colour-coded blocs and diverse tactics of black (anarchists), red (socialists
and labour), green (ecologists) and pink (pacifists) ubiquitous at mass protests
around the world. They are embodied in the sometimes fractious encounters
between Venezuelan grassroots barrio activists and representatives of Chavez’s
state-led Bolivarian revolution – and in a different way in the muted response by
many social movements to Chavez’s call for a Fifth International. They are there
when urban autonomists and indigenous groups protest the ‘NGOization’ of the
World Social Forum (WSF) and its regional spin-offs, when they occupy spaces
within the Forums to protest their and others’ exclusion and when they self-
organize direct actions and meeting spaces simultaneously but ‘beyond the WSF’.
They are constantly competing in the WSF International Council over whether
the council’s proper role is that of a deliberative and representative body or
merely a facilitative one that cannot take decisions on the Forum’s behalf, as well
as how the Forum relates to political parties, government officials and armed
groups.
As will be seen later, these tensions are endemic in the emergent Climate
Justice Movement. The main divide here is between professionalized NGOs and
Green party members who lobby official negotiators and engage in the ‘Green
New Deal’ debate with state and corporate actors, versus direct action autono-
mists and a number of Global South-based movement actors, along with their
state and NGO allies, who demand radical change to the capitalist economic and
state-political systems.
Survey evidence gathered at the WSF by Reese and her colleagues (2006)
bolsters the above observations: When asked whether a single democratic world
government would be a favourable or feasible goal towards which to strive, par-
ticipants were roughly divided among those thinking it both feasible and worthy
Coordinated power in contemporary leftist activism 55
(about 30 per cent), desirable but not feasible (about 40 per cent) and those
opposed (roughly 30 per cent). The last group – the campers on la rive gauche in
our spatial metaphor – favours anarchist and autonomist solutions of local gov-
ernance, deep and radical democracy and community self-reliance. Furthermore,
although a large majority (nearly 85 per cent) wish to abolish international finan-
cial institutions, nearly 60 per cent seek their replacement with more democratic
ones. Just over half (54 per cent) want to abolish capitalism completely, while a
quarter of those surveyed oppose its replacement with any formal financial struc-
tures (see also Smith et al. 2008: 89–90). These results favouring both a world
democratic state and a renovated global financial architecture by nearly 70 per
cent and 60 per cent, respectively, reflect the prominence of modernist and
reformist ‘right-bankers’ within the spaces of the main social forum sites.
However it is likely that had surveys been administered in the autonomous spaces
running concurrently with the social forums as well as among youth camp par-
ticipants, the results would have been more evenly split.
What can be discerned from the above evidence are two dynamics, one cen-
trifugal and the other centripetal: Regarding the former dispersive dynamic, the
three historical leftist tendencies – social democratic reform, Marxist revolution
and autonomist–anarchist radicalism – have clearly re-emerged in the most recent
cycle of contention, which many mark as beginning with the Zapatista uprising
in Chiapas, Mexico, in 1994; but as to the latter inclusive dynamic, it is important
to notice that the three tendencies are still all there – debating, critiquing and
conflicting but also coordinating together – 15 years and counting into this cycle:
in the shared or parallel physical spaces at social forums, in the virtual spaces of
email list-serves where they debate and plan inside–outside strategies and future
mobilizations and in the inter-governmental conferences and street demonstra-
tions coordinating among various blocs and affinity groups. This combined fre-
quency, complexity, diversity, and longevity of transnational activist coordination
is arguably unprecedented.
Similarly, Marxist geographer Harvey (2009: n.p.; see also Harvey 2010)
argues the following:
This ‘other possible communism’ owes much of its dynamism to the resurgence
of anti-state and anti-capitalist anarchism and autonomism. Although reanimating
the classical debates and dichotomies between revolutionary Marxists and anar-
chists,7 the resurgence has also precipitated a truce of sorts between the two cur-
rents. Harvey (2009: n.p.) notes that this revival has tended to eschew commandist
strategies of seizing the state in favour of experimenting with networked social
organizational forms aimed at circumventing the market and capital, bringing
about ‘a convergence of some sort between the Marxist and anarchist traditions
that harks back to the broadly collaborative situation between them in the 1860s
in Europe’.
Returning to our earlier left and right bank analogy, it seems that the Marxists
have decamped to join the livelier party among the Bakunin clan on the other side
of the river, leaving their state-oriented, social-democratic Kantian brethren high
and dry in the process. this move has generated a creative ferment around
re-imagining power, the state, sovereignty and global governance, as witnessed in
the jazz-like fusions of neo- and post-Marxist, autonomist, operaist and anarchist
praxis. Among the first, most paradigmatic and widely resonant of these hybridiza-
tions are Hardt and Negri’s (2000, 2004) conceptions of the rhizomatic empire and
the counter-imperial multitude. Empire in their definition has co-evolved with the
global market and production circuits and is the new global order, form of sover-
eignty and collective ruling subject, heralding a new logic and structure of rule.
Empire is said to regulate global exchanges and transverse boundaries without
establishing a territorial centre of power. To the contrary, it is
ten years ago most of us thought that our real ideological victories could
produce concrete gains and change – radicalise unions, parties, etc. . . .
Meanwhile, the (Northern) masses remain passive. Perhaps they, or we, are
awaiting credible visions, and forms of organisation . . .?
Another activist involved in Reclaim the Streets and now the Climate Camp
movement in the United Kingdom similarly revealed the following:
Then my question was: how to network local activisms and facilitate global
exchange? Now my question is: how to forge a militant universalism and
construct a generic will? Organising perhaps not on the horizontal plane,
but on the diagonal?
(McLeish 2009: 7)
Hence, although Northern-based radicals have slowly come to recognize the need
for organization and engaging the state, it is not solely the revolutionary Marxist
left’s arguments that have led them to do so. It is also, and perhaps ever more so, due
to the growing knowledge of and networking with successful indigenous movements
in places such as Bolivia and Ecuador and more generally the rising tide of native
militancy across the Americas, which is itself articulating in novel and contentious
ways with the ‘pink tide’ of leftist parties coming to power in Central and South
America. Indigenous communities and rural social movements have played decisive
roles, for example, in pushing through radically new constitutions in Ecuador and
Bolivia, which recognize a ‘pluri-national’ state that is home to many autonomous
nations with distinct economic, political, legal and cultural forms.
In addition to disaggregating the legal fiction of the unitary and sovereign state,
these constitutions radicalize the notion of rights by guaranteeing the right to each
groups’ self-determination and, in the case of Bolivia, the rights of mother earth,
or pachamama (see Mignolo 2009). These developments, which are the culmina-
tion of centuries of struggle against Westernization and capitalism, at once
expand, collapse, and transcend the European leftist categories. By moving from
resistance to antagonistic engagement with the state, they have managed to fun-
damentally transform the very nature of the Western unitary state, its indivisible
sovereignty and its limited guarantees of liberal rights.
These communities have sustained unique social, political, cultural and economic
systems that pre-date colonialism, capitalism and the European state form. but rather
than promoting their autonomous models as universals to be exported pace
Christianity, Liberalism or Marxism–Leninism, these indigenous experiments –
along with the hybrid state forms and new categories of rights they are articulating
– are rather ‘an invitation to organise and re-inscribe communal systems all over the
world . . . erased and dismantled by the increasing expansion of the capitalist econ-
omy’ (Mignolo 2009). This is how the Northern, urban autonomist ‘blue indians’
may once again be converging with the ‘real indians [sic]’ in practicing Zapatismo
at home, which was at the heart of the now nearly defunct Peoples’ Global Action
(Reitan 2007: Chapter 6). As Mignolo (2009: 31) avers ‘the Zapatista dictum of the
need for “a world in which many worlds fit” springs to mind as we try to imagine a
planet of communal systems in a pluri-versal, not uni-versal, world order’.
Notes
1 I wish to thank the following for sharing their insights and critiques: Tord Björk, Nicola
Bullard, Shannon Gibson, Jennifer Hadden, Tadzio Müller, Thomas Olesen, Alexis
Passadakis, Janet Redman, Sidney Tarrow and Peter Waterman. All errors, omissions or
conjectures are solely the author’s.
2 I accept that it is colonialist, discursive violence to subsume indigenous movements in
this Western-derived tripartite system – see Mignolo (2009) for this thoughtful critique.
Coordinated power in contemporary leftist activism 69
However, they do share some affinities with the latter tendency, and so I have chosen to
include them provisionally herein. But ultimately, as will be argued later, they explode,
implode and transcend these categories.
3 It should be noted, however, that these same scholars argue that scaling up to the transna-
tional level remains secondary to, and embedded within, engagement in the domestic
political sphere (see Tarrow 1998: Chapter 11, 2005: Chapter 3; Sikkink 2005).
4 In Gramscian terms, this would be described as the terrain of ideological or hegemonic
power.
5 This CAN–CJN split somewhat mirrors – in issues and actors – that which occurred
within the Jubilee 2000 campaign and out of which Jubilee South was born (see Reitan
2007: Chapter 3).
6 CJN also strongly supported the Bolivarian Alliance for the Americas (ALBA) countries’
spokesman Evo Morales in his call for 49 per cent emission reductions. In addition, CJN
member the Third World Network provided expertise to a number of Southern govern-
ments, working with their under-staffed delegations long into the night to come up with
negotiating positions.
7 These are between cosmopolitanism versus localism, unity vs. diversity, the collective
subject vs. a multiplicity of struggles, strategy vs. practice/process, party formation and
organizing unions vs. autonomous direct action, counter-hegemony vs. anti-hegemony,
politics vs. anti-politics, resisting/smashing/seizing the state vs. refusal/withdrawal/crea-
tion of new social practices, political parties vs. loose associations, revolutionary vio-
lence vs. pacifism, delegate organizations vs. federations, strategic rationality vs.
spontaneous improvisation, command vs. affinity and discipline vs. love and rage.
8 A smaller, more radical anarchist group, Never Trust a Cop (NTAC), also staged direct
actions during COP15. Although not part of the other networks (having broken with CJA
in the lead up to Copenhagen and having no contacts with CJN or CAN), NTAC activists
were still indirectly linked to CJA via the Climate Collective, who coordinated housing
and information sharing for both.
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Part II
Introduction
In January 2008, coalitions of North American civil society groups issued a state-
ment demanding that the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) be
renegotiated.1 The coalitions represented a wide range of church, labour, women’s,
environmental, social justice, human rights, senior and student groups critical of
NAFTA as well as the efforts to deepen continental integration through the North
American Security and Prosperity Partnership (SPP). The four North American
coalitions – the US-based Alliance for Responsible Trade (ART), Common
Frontiers and Réseau québécois sur l’intégration continentale (RQIC), both of
Canada, and the Mexican Red Mexicana de Acción frente al Libre Comercio
(RMALC) – were renewing their struggle against continental integration that had
begun 20 years earlier during the negotiation of the Canada-US Free Trade
Agreement (CUSFTA). As an alternative to the neo-liberal framework that had
shaped North American integration, these coalitions sought to establish continen-
tal economic relations based on social justice and sustainable development and
called for greater transparency and enhanced civil society input into schemes for
deepening integration.
Targeting the heart of the US presidential campaign primary season and building
off of large and ongoing street mobilizations in Mexico and strong protests at the
August 2007 SPP North American Leader’s Summit at Montebello, Quebec, the
coalitions listed ten priorities for review and revision by the executive branch and
parliaments of the Canada, the United States and Mexico. In fact, with candidates
for the US Democratic Party presidential nomination also criticizing NAFTA, and
members of the US House of Representatives, the Permanent Commission of the
Mexican Congress and a Canadian Parliamentary Sub-Committee on International
Trade recommending a review of NAFTA, the political-economic environment
seemed susceptible to significant changes in continental trade policy. After two
decades of mobilizing, educating and disseminating information critical of conti-
nental integration, many of the groups at this moment of global economic crisis
hoped to influence the political debates and political processes in the three NAFTA
states to reform the neo-liberal economic model of free trade, deregulation and
privatization that had become so entrenched across North America.
76 Jeffrey Ayres
Power and transnational politics in North America
The coalitions involved in the campaign to renegotiate NAFTA and who opposed
the SPP certainly were not spontaneously reacting to acute and deteriorating eco-
nomic conditions across the continent during what would become the most
destructive recession since the Great Depression. Rather, these national coalitions
and cross-border networks were part of what had been a long term and still evolv-
ing pattern of North American contentious politics against continental economic
integration (Ayres and Macdonald 2009). Regional integration across North
America had been an attractive target of activists and had shaped forms and strat-
egies of collective action for over two decades. Anti-integration protests erupted
first as part of the movement against the CUSFTA in Canada in the late 1980s and
then expanded dramatically to draw together Canadian, US and Mexican opposi-
tion to NAFTA and then the SPP. This contentious activity reflected variations of
national-level or domestic-based coalition building and protest as well as the
cross-border types of organizing (e.g. diffusion of ideas, protest forms and tactics,
the cross-border exchange of strategies through People’s Summits, conferences
and collaborative protests and the development of cross-border coalitions and
networking). However, despite the impressive and expanding record of North
American contentious politics, the question remained as to whether power rela-
tions had changed across the continent? After all, the CUSFTA and NAFTA
remained fully entrenched as the models of continental trade policy, whereas the
living standards of a majority of lower- and middle-income citizens in the three
NAFTA states had declined.
This chapter suggests that North American civil society networks have
achieved much over the past 20 years in terms of creative mobilization cam-
paigns, but they have not gained much power to challenge the deeper neo-liberal
policy underpinnings of continental integration. On the one hand, there have been
notable achievements in terms of developing cross-border solidarities and the
creation of novel transnational networks around human rights, labour and envi-
ronmental issues. Opportunities for cross-border civil society collaboration have
abounded, furthering mutual understanding of the deteriorating economic condi-
tions for lower and middle-income citizens in Canada, the United States and
Mexico. New organizational forms have diffused across the borders, with US and
Mexican civil society groups modelling their coalitions after the groups engaged
in the earlier cross-country mobilization against the CUSFTA in Canada.
In addition, the national-level grassroots campaigns of many of these groups
have affected public discourse and raised doubts in the minds of North American
publics about the wisdom or desirability of deeper economic integration espe-
cially during this period of heightened economic anxiety. Although the claim by
many civil society groups that their campaigns were the decisive influence in
derailing the SPP is debatable, it is clear that civil society forces mounted a well-
publicized challenge to highlight the secretive and undemocratic character of the
SPP (Macdonald 2009; Trew 2009). Finally, political and business elites were
also put on the defensive and were forced to publically respond to criticisms of
both the NAFTA model and the plans for deepening North American integration
The limits of power and protest 77
that lacked transparency and legitimacy in the face of public scepticism. However,
the gap between creativity in cross-border organizational forms and tactical inno-
vations and the still clearly limited power these groups had to alter the neo-liberal
social contract raises serious questions about the efficacy of cross-border activ-
ism in North America.
Civil society groups normally lack the military or economic capacity to exert
hard ‘command’ or ‘control’ power to ‘get others to change their positions’ (Nye
2004: 5). In fact, some leading activists eschew this type of power, preferring
instead an understanding of power as ‘ability . . . the power that comes from within;
our ability to dare, to do and to dream; our creativity’ (Starhawk 2002: 6). What
activist groups do frequently attain in fact is soft power or ‘getting others to want
the outcomes that you want’ (Nye 2004: 5). The end of the Cold War, the onset of
globalization and the information technology revolution induced a ‘power shift’ and
a ‘novel redistribution of power’ coinciding with the rise of global civil society
(Mathews 1997) where power began to diffuse from states to an array of non-state
actors across the international environment. Organizations such as Keck and
Sikkink’s (1998) transnational advocacy networks and related non-governmental
organizations (NGOs) have gained soft power through cross-border activity, dis-
seminating information, framing issues, holding states or multinational corpora-
tions accountable for their behaviour and gaining leverage through aligning with
more powerful actors (Khagram et al. 2002; Smith et al. 1997).
However, a number of contradictions and challenges mark the mobilization
campaigns of groups that have exploited the global economic and technological
changes of the past two decades. Part of the challenge lies in the tendency to
idealize civil society and retain high expectations for the outcomes of transna-
tional organizing against neo-liberal globalization. Clearly, in the wake of the rise
and ongoing and varied campaigns of the alter-globalization movement and espe-
cially in the early years following the Seattle World Trade Organization (WTO)
protests and protests against the Free Trade Area of the Americas (FTAA), expec-
tations were high that transnational mobilization represented a major new coun-
tervailing force to challenge and successfully reshape institutions of global
governance (Florini 2000; O’Brien et al. 2000; Smith 2001; Starhawk 2002).
However, as Scholte (2002: 299) has pointed out, ‘we do well to balance enthu-
siasm for civil society engagement of global governance with due caution’ and
appreciate as Soderbaum (2007) notes the complex and frequently contradictory
character of civil society mobilizations today. As Macdonald (2009: 14) has
argued, reflecting on Soderbaum, ‘the terrain of civil society is extremely com-
plex and is not necessarily linked to progressive or counter-hegemonic move-
ments’, with the diversity of actors around particularly integration processes
reflecting a variety of democratic and progressive or reactionary and regressive
perspectives (Ahrne 1998; Kopecky and Mudde 2003). This diversity and unpre-
dictability became apparent in some of the most recent protests against North
American integration, as right-wing populist groups played a highly public role
in raising fears in the United States about a loss of sovereignty to a supposed
North American Union (Bow and Santa Cruz 2009; Corsi 2009).
78 Jeffrey Ayres
Moreover, beyond the diversity in actors in North America, it is difficult to
argue that continental civil society groups across North America have been suc-
cessful in achieving their major aims: the CUSFTA, NAFTA and generally the
neo-liberal underpinnings of the continental economy remain in place even under
the worst economic conditions witnessed for over half a century. Despite the
heated rhetoric of the US Democratic Party 2008 primary season, where NAFTA’s
benefits were debated by leading candidates for the presidency, the accord has
emerged unscathed in the new Obama administration. Again, it is true that the SPP
process has ground to a halt, a victim of changing administration priorities in the
United States, economic uncertainty, lost interest as well as public opposition
stoked by grassroots anger over the secretive and non-transparent character of the
SPP. However, at present, across Canada, the United States and Mexico, the
political opportunities and leverage do not exist for civil society networks to effect
sustained change in the economic policy directions of the three NAFTA states.
This chapter both provides an overview of the recent contentious political
activity in North America and seeks to illustrate how during this 20-year record
of mobilizations against continental integration, civil society groups have lacked
sufficient power to achieve their aims of changing the overarching neo-liberal
paradigm that has undergirded economic integration in North America. From a
political economy perspective, the balance of power across the North American
continent has continued to restructure in favour of capital, investors and allied
political elites, with asymmetries in economic well-being, political influence and
access to political power having only widened. From a political realist perspec-
tive, North American integration has failed to dilute the power or pool the sover-
eignty of the three-member states, with regional governance in North America
doing little to constrain the power of the United States while at the same time
creating limited access points for NGOs and civil society groups to effectively
participate in negotiations over the direction of integration. From the vantage
point of political opportunities, the past 20 years have witnessed a decline in
openings available either regionally or domestically for groups to successfully
influence the political processes and institutions of Canada, the United States and
Mexico. Relatedly, it has proved especially difficult, in the absence of any
regional institutions or widely shared sense of community, to establish a regional
collective action frame to mobilize and educate large numbers of the populations
of the NAFTA states to embrace a shared sense of purpose in altering the neo-
liberal trajectory of governance and trade policy across the continent.
Notes
1 See the websites of Common Frontiers Canada (www.commonfrontiers.ca), the Quebec
Network on Continental Integration (http://www.rqic.alternatives.ca/RQIC-eng.htm), the
ART (http://www.art-us.org/) and the Mexican Action Network on Free Trade (http://
www.rmalc.org.mx/index.shtml) for a review of the broad and diverse representation of
civil society organizations under the umbrella structure of these national coalitions.
2 See www.asc-hsa.org and review the Alternatives for the Americas.
3 ‘Statement by North American Networks on the Future of NAFTA’, 22 March 2005,
Common Frontiers, Canada, http://www.commonfrontiers.ca
4 ‘Legislators and Civil Society Groups of the North American Region Call for Halt to
Security and Prosperity Partnership and Replacement of NAFTA’, 6 June 2006, Common
Frontiers, Canada, www.commonfrontiers.ca
5 See http://www.iatp.org/tradeobservatory/library.cfm?refID=101027
6 http://canadians.org/integratethis/index.html
7 http://www.canadians.org/media/trade/2009/30-Oct-09.html
8 See http://teapartypatriots.ning.com and http://www.minutemanhq.com
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5 State power and the control of
transnational protests
Donatella della Porta and
Herbert Reiter
Introduction
Genova, July 2001, G8 counter-summit. In addition to installing high barriers to
protect the so-called ‘red zone’ around the summit meetings, the airport, railway
stations and motorway exits were closed, and suspected activists were taken back
to the city limits. The entire first day of the summit, events followed a similar
pattern: after the black bloc’s attacks, the police force responded by setting on
those in or near peaceful protests, including doctors, nurses, paramedics, photog-
raphers and journalists. Above all, the fight with the so-called ‘disobedients’,
encircled and repeatedly charged, started in this fashion. After the police charge,
some groups of demonstrators reacted by throwing stones, provoking the police
to use armoured cars. During one incursion, a carabinieri jeep got stuck, and its
occupants were attacked by demonstrators. One of the carabinieri inside opened
fire, killing a 23-year-old Genovese activist, Carlo Giuliani. Within the red zone,
the police used water cannon laced with chemicals against demonstrators from
Attac, left-wing and trade union groups, who were banging on the fences and
throwing cloves of garlic. On the evening of 21 July, the police burst into the Diaz
School, where the Genoa Social Forum (GSF, the coordination of social move-
ment groups that organized the protest), its legal advice team, the Indymedia
press group and a dormitory for protestors, were based, searching for weapons
and black bloc activists. The press described the behaviour of the police as par-
ticularly brutal – a description that certain members of Parliament who were
present concurred with. Of the 93 persons detained and arrested in the building,
62 were referred with varying medical prognoses. In the days that followed,
various testimonies were published recounting civilians’ mistreatment in the
Bolzaneto barracks, where a centre for identifying detainees had been set up.
Many witness statements, a large number of them from foreigners, described
physical and psychological assaults. Using teargas and truncheons, and forcing
detainees to stay on their feet for hours, police compelled those being held to
repeat fascist and racist slogans.
This is one example of the policing of transnational protests, defined as pro-
tests that mainly address international targets and involve a substantive number
of protesters from different countries. This type of protest has been characterized
92 Donatella della Porta and Herbert Reiter
by several instances of severe repression even in democratic countries. The sym-
bolically strongest form of power is the state’s control of legitimate force.
Globalization has challenged this myth in several ways: from the growing power
of the market (and even private forms of policing) over the state to the growing
competences and enforcing capacity of International governmental organizations
over national levels of governance. One specific aspect discussed in this chapter
is the challenge that transnational protests bring about to the state as a force
monopolist. Looking at the ways in which the state (in particular the police)
responds to transnational protest, the chapter discusses central issues related to
changing forms of power and democracy. If the police are in fact considered as a
main expression of the power of the state, protest is an essential aspect of democ-
racy, embodying the power of ‘surveillance’ by the citizens over the power hold-
ers that is widely considered part and parcel of liberal democracy (Manin 1995;
Rosanvallon 2006).
In several cases of intervention during transnational protests, the police prac-
tised ‘hard power’, through a meticulous regimentation of time, space and the
human body (Fernandez 2008). In these (and other) examples of transnational
policing, power was expressed through physical control, at some specific
moments, of some spaces, as ‘police departments carefully select and map out the
material environment before and during a protest’ (Fernandez 2008: 93). In addi-
tion, hard power was exercised through the categorization of demonstrators as a
dangerous group. As a police officer, teaching a course in the psychology of mass
behaviour, stated, ‘[w]e try very much to prevent the feeling of anonymity’, for
example, through checkpoints: ‘It is all about letting them know we are watching
them’ (Fernandez 2008: 120). The power is exercised on the human bodies, as the
aim is ‘[t]o contain, isolate and separate activists so that the disturbance does not
spread like a disease’ (Fernandez 2008: 130) by ‘confining people into relatively
small, fenced off areas that police have established for control purposes’
(Fernandez 2008: 132). In what follows, we look at the way in which power is
used in the control of transnational protests, singling out and explaining some
general trends.
Protest policing
Social movements do challenge the power of the state, establishing a (temporary)
counter-power. They, in fact, do not limit themselves to ask for specific policy
changes: relying mainly on protest as a means to put pressure on decision-makers,
they challenge the power of the state to impose the monopoly on the use of
legitimate force. Taking into the streets, often forcing their presence beyond the
legal limits to get their voices heard, they directly interact with the police that are
supposed to defend law and order. In their interventions, police forces, therefore,
have to realize an uneasy balance between the defence of state power through the
implementation of law and regulation and the recognition of demonstration
rights. The intervention of the police in case of violations is not, however, auto-
matic; in public order, indeed, many minor violations are tolerated to avoid major
State power and the control of transnational protests 93
disorders. Although sometimes the government sends specific orders (or at least
signals) about the type of intervention required (or desired) at political demon-
strations, the police enjoy broad margins of discretionality at different hierarchi-
cal levels, as most decisions are taken on the spot and determined by the
assessment of the specific situation as well as by interactive dynamics. In fact,
quantitative research, often based on broad cross-national comparisons, has sin-
gled out the causal determinants of police styles (e.g. in terms of violation of
human rights or misconducts) (Davenport 1995; Poe and Tate 1994; Poe et al.
1999). Ethnographic research and case studies have, on their side, allowed us to
understand the motivations for the different styles the police use towards different
social and political groups (e.g. Waddington 1992, 1994; Critcher and Waddington
1996; Waddington and Critcher 2000; Waddington et al. 1989).
The way in which the government and the police use the power to repress
protest has relevant effects on the protest (Lichbach 1987; Opp and Roehl 1990;
Gupta et al. 1993; Francisco 1996; Moore 1998). Increasing the costs of protest-
ing, it might reduce individual motivation to participate. However, the sense of
injustice as well as the creation of intense feelings of identification and solidarity
can increase the motivation to participate (Davenport 2005; della Porta and
Piazza 2008; Francisco 2005). Police control tends to impact on the repertoires of
protest through a reciprocal adaptation (or sometimes escalation) of police and
demonstrators’ tactics (della Porta 1995), and it might also influence the organi-
zational forms used, for instance, by spreading a sense of mutual mistrust through
the use of infiltration (e.g. Fernandez 2008; Starr et al. 2008).
The forms that state power take have a clear impact on the policing of protest.
If repression is much more brutal in authoritarian than in democratic regimes (e.g.
Sheptycki 2005 on Latin America; Uysal 2005 on Turkey), even authoritarian
regimes vary in the amount of protest they are ready to tolerate, as well as in the
forms in which they police the opposition. Moreover, variations also exist in
democratic regimes, with some countries traditionally considered more consen-
sual, others more exclusive. In both types of regime, the police strategies in
addressing demonstrations reflect some more general characteristics of state
power. In this sense, it is to be expected that the transformation in the balance of
state powers related with the various phenomena usually understood under the
fuzzy label of globalization has an impact on the styles of protest policing. In
particular, the wave of transnational protests that marked the turn of the millen-
nium seems indeed to have challenged some well-established police strategies
and structures (e.g. della Porta et al. 2006a).
Even if in a selective way, and with frequent inversions, the policing of protest
in democratic regimes has been characterized by trends towards growing alloca-
tion of the function of public order control to public (vs. private) forces, nation-
alization and demilitarization. First of all, the task of policing is at the core of the
definition of a Weberian state power that claims the monopoly of force. Second,
the process of state building brought about the transfer at the central state of the
control of public order. Even if the degree of centralization in police structures
clearly varies, and local police bodies often keep specific profiles and styles (see
94 Donatella della Porta and Herbert Reiter
e.g. Wisler and Kriesi 1998 on Switzerland and Winter 1998 on Germany), there
has been a progressive orientation of protest and its policing towards the national
level. Third, there has been a development towards a transfer of public order
control from the military to the police, albeit with certain cross-country differ-
ences. Especially since the 1980s, research on the policing of protest in European
democracies and the United States has identified a reduction of strategies of con-
trol based on an escalation of force (i.e. hard form of power), with low priority
given to the right to demonstrate, low tolerance for emerging forms of protest,
limited negotiation between police and protestors and frequent use of (even ille-
gal) means of coercion. A shift was instead noticed towards soft forms of power,
based on a negotiated control, with recognition of the right to demonstrate, toler-
ance for (even disruptive) forms of protest, frequent communication between
protestors and the police to insure a peaceful evolution of events and a limited use
of coercion (della Porta and Fillieule 2004; McPhail et al. 1998: 51–4).
If we look at the evolution of protest policing today, with particular attention
to the control of transnational protests, these trends seem to have encountered
some inversions. If public order policing had never been exclusively under public
control (e.g. not only private policing on university campuses or in factories but
also the use of organized crime to intimidate unionists and protestors), the priva-
tization and semi-privatization of spaces such as shopping malls as well as the
outsourcing of police functions to private companies (e.g. in the airports) has
recently increased and made more visible the role of private police bodies in the
control of protest. In addition, the control of an increasing number of transna-
tional protests in recent years has brought about a growing coordination of police
units from different countries. Furthermore, in the last few decades, processes of
militarization of public order have been noted even in countries such as Great
Britain, once considered as an example of ‘citizens’ policing’. This militarization,
including equipment, training, organization and strategies, has been tested in the
fight against organized crime, also street crime and football hooliganism, now
migrating to the control of protest. Finally, negotiated strategies have not been
consistently implemented in the control of transnational protests, with priority
often given to security concerns (della Porta et al. 2006a). Escalations in the
interactions between demonstrators and protestors have developed from the use
of coercion against demonstrators, with the use of fences and no-go areas to iso-
late diplomats and heads of government from protests.
In the preamble, the ‘events’ were specified as ‘sporting events, rock concerts,
demonstrations and road-blocking protest campaigns’ (Official Journal 1997
L 147/1). The Schengen Information System (SIS), introduced as a compensatory
measure for abolishing internal border checks, significantly widened the possi-
bilities for the exchange of information between police forces and intelligence
services (Mathiesen 2000; Peers 2000: 209ff.). Its purpose as stated in Article 93
of the Schengen convention (‘to maintain public order and security, including
State security’) appears, in fact, very broad and comprehensive.
Within this framework, a European level of protest policing developed,
which already before the Genoa G8 became visible above all in the efforts to
prevent violent activists (or those presumed to be so) from reaching the city
hosting the summit (Reiter and Fillieule 2006). The challenge posed by the
100 Donatella della Porta and Herbert Reiter
violent incidents surrounding the EU summit in Gothenburg led to swift
action by the European Council. At a meeting of the Council for Justice and
Home Affairs on 13 July 2001, conclusions on security at meetings of the
European Council and other comparable events were adopted, largely centred
on greater collaboration among the various national police forces to ensure
the peaceful holding of the summits.4 The conclusions foresee extensive
information exchange, calling for ‘the use of all the legal and technical pos-
sibilities for stepping up and promoting rapid, more structured exchanges of
data on violent trouble makers on the basis of national files’. The exchange
of information is closely connected with the application (‘if it proves essen-
tial’) of Article 2(2) of the Schengen Convention, that is, its temporary sus-
pension. In the same context, implementation of expulsion measures and
cooperation in the repatriation of expelled demonstrators were discussed.
Finally, according to the same conclusions, direct cooperation between judi-
cial authorities was to be facilitated, with the aim of prosecuting and trying
‘violent trouble makers . . . without undue delay and in conditions guarantee-
ing a fair trial’. The Council conclusions recall the importance of a construc-
tive dialogue between the organisers of public demonstrations and the
authorities, elaborating, however, exclusively on measures designed to keep
activists presumed to be a danger to public order and security away from the
country hosting the summit. In its efforts, it demonstrated little respect for the
protection of personal data and the individual quality of the right to free
movement within the European Union.
Above all, the purely intergovernmental character of EU police cooperation
greatly complicated the citizen’s ability to single out those politically and juridi-
cally responsible for restrictive measures and to find redress. In the case of two
Welsh football fans detained and deported by the Belgian police on the basis of
erroneous information supplied by British authorities (who in turn had received
their names from Luxembourg), it took a 6-year campaign (with the help of
Liberty, a British NGO) lobbying a dozen national and international bureaucra-
cies to get their names removed from Belgian, British and Schengen records
(Peers 2000: 188). This 1992 experience was not an isolated event, limited to
football hooligans. Stephanie Mills, a Greenpeace activist from New Zealand,
was denied access to the entire Schengen area on 25 June 1998 because the
French government had entered her name into the SIS system – as indeed it had
previously entered those of a number of other Greenpeace staff (Peers 2000: 224).
After the Gothenburg incidents, about four hundred names are said to have been
added to the SIS (Hayes and Bunyan 2004: 260). These and similar measures of
police cooperation have to be seen against the background of the general develop-
ments in the field of justice and home affairs within the European Union, charac-
terized by deficiencies in democratic accountability and limited involvement of
national parliaments and the European parliament, largely restricted to a merely
consultative role (Denza 2002; Peers 2000; Walker 2003).5
On the basis of the Watson report of the European Parliament committee on civil
rights and freedoms, justice and home affairs, the parliament’s recommendation to the
State power and the control of transnational protests 101
Council voted by the plenum on 12 December 2001 stressed ‘not a few short-
comings’ in Member States’ responses to the Nice, Gothenburg and Genoa dem-
onstrations.6 It recommended inter alia against blocking frontiers or denying
entrance to individuals or groups seeking to take part peacefully in legitimate
demonstrations, against any new type of ‘blacklist’, against the use of firearms
and against the disproportionate use of force, with national police forces instead
instructed to keep violence under control and safeguard individual rights even in
cases of mass confusion where violent criminals mingle with peaceful, law-
abiding citizens. Other recommendations – to adopt a joint definition of a ‘dan-
gerous individual’ and dangerous conduct that might justify preventive measures;
to avoid any sort of discrimination between nationals and European citizens in
the event of arrest or legal proceedings, guaranteeing defence by an advocate of
one’s choice even in the event of summary proceedings – bring out the fact that
the existence of comparable internal standards is not regarded as sufficient to
guarantee the new quality of exercise of the citizens’ right to demonstrate and
protest Europe-wide.
However, in this context, the limited ability of European institutions to assure
democratic accountability in the field of transnational protest policing must be
underlined. As already stressed, the maintenance of public order falls under the
exclusive competence of the member states. At the EU level, the European
Parliament’s recommendations seem not to have been given any great consideration
by the Council. The ‘Security handbook for the use of police authorities and services
at international events such as meetings of the European Council’ of 12 November
2002 – called for by the Council conclusions of 13 July 2001 – was produced by the
Police Co-operation Working Party without reference to the European Parliament
recommendations, which had also suggested such a document.7 The Handbook,
approved by the Council at its meeting on 28 and 29 November 2002, suggests that
future revisions be discussed only by the Police Chiefs Task Force and the commit-
tee of experts foreseen in Article 3 of the Joint Action of 1997 and approved by the
Article 36 Committee (a coordinating committee of senior officials in the field of
police cooperation and judicial cooperation in criminal matters). If, on the one hand,
the Handbook underlines the importance of actively pursuing dialogue and coopera-
tion with demonstrators and activists, on the other hand, it indicates Article 2(2) of
the Schengen Convention (which allows for the temporary reintroduction of border
controls ‘where public policy or national security so require’) as a ‘useful instru-
ment’ of prevention, without considering the observations of the European Parliament
on this point.8 The Schengen Borders Code agreed on between the Council and the
EU Parliament in June 2005 – since 1 May 2004 the parliament enjoys co-decision
powers for measures concerning the crossing of EU external and internal borders –
seems to constitute only limited advances in assuring accountability, transparency,
proportionality and information of the public.9
As far as the European Council is concerned, an Italian initiative led to a reso-
lution on the security of Council meetings and similar events passed on 29 April
2004, aimed at ‘limiting inconveniences’ in the application of Article 2(2) and at
assuring more effective, better coordinated cooperation at European level.10 It
102 Donatella della Porta and Herbert Reiter
called, among other things, for targeted information exchange, making possible
intelligence-led checks on
Police knowledge
• Mistrust of demonstrators and forms
of protest
• Sensitivity to political input
Conclusion
In sum, the policing of transnational protest in recent years has been characterized
by police brutality and a show of force attitude, with massive, highly visible
police presence resembling the escalated force style, although with adaptations to
new protest repertoires, police frames and technologies. Also striking in several
cases of transnational protest policing is the ‘fortification’ of summit sites.
Technical innovations have allowed for a broad increase in surveillance. In gen-
eral, we noted a return to massive use of force, especially oriented at temporary
incapacitation, with protestors forced at the margins, far from the places of power.
Negotiations take place, but they tend to start late and trust between negotiators
of the two sides remains low, partly because of the uncompromising messages
sent by the police with other interventions aimed at protection and prevention
during the period leading up to the demonstrations. Finally, there are clear
attempts at ‘intelligence-led’ policing, with much emphasis given to massive col-
lection and frequent exchange of information.
These characteristics certainly constitute a departure from the negotiated man-
agement model, with its ‘demonstration-friendly’ protest policing philosophy,
which had been dominant in several Western democracies in the 1980s and 1990s.
The right to demonstrate seems to be recognized selectively in more than one
way: weakly protected for foreigners and with the exclusion of direct action pro-
test repertoires defined as illegal and violent. In the ultimate analysis, the protest
policing strategies applied seem to negate the right of citizens to determine or to
co-determine where, when, and how to express their political opinions, arrogating
instead to the police the right to ‘shape’ the protest arena by unilateral, if need be
preventive and coercive intervention.
State power and the control of transnational protests 107
Notes
1 All components of the mobile divisions deployed at Genoa had been authorized to use
hand-held spray cans with irritant CS gas to immobilize possible ‘antagonists’ (Hearing
5/9/01, 75).
2 This technique was also used during the London May Day protests in 2001, when dem-
onstrators were kept penned in for up to 7 hours (Atkinson 2001). In Germany, the
illegality of this police technique has been repeatedly affirmed by administrative courts,
on the basis of a constitutional court decision.
3 These misjudgments seem to consist not only of faulty evaluations of the political posi-
tions of certain protest groups but also of miscalculations about the effects of intelli-
gence-led and proactive interventions against certain groups in the global justice
movement as a whole.
4 Available at register.consilium.eu.int/pdf/en/01/st10/10916en1.pdf, accessed January
2006; see also Griebenow and Busch (2001: 64ff.).
5 The objective of EU policy in constructing the ‘area of freedom, security and justice’ is
defined in Article 29 of the Amsterdam Treaty as ‘to provide citizens with a high level
of safety’.
6 The Watson Report is available at http://www.europarl.eu.int/omk/sipade3?PUBREF=-//EP//
TEXT+REPORT+A5-2001-0396+0+DOC+XML+V0//EN&L=EN&LEVEL=
0&NAV=S&LSTDOC=Y (accessed January 2006).
7 Available at www.statewatch.org/news/2003/jul/prothand12637-r3.pdf (accessed January
2006). On the uncertain legal and constitutional status of the Police Chiefs Task Force, see
Bunyan (2006).
8 According to a Statewatch research conducted in February 2003, during the two preced-
ing years the Schengen treaty had been suspended 26 times, at least 16 times in the
occasion of political demonstrations (Hayes and Bunyan 2004: 274).
9 The text of the borders code is available at www.statewatch.org/news/2005/jun/9630.05.
pdf. Member States retain the right to reintroduce internal border controls (see Articles
20–6) ‘when there is a serious threat to public policy or internal security’. In cases requiring
urgent action, they may do so immediately. The notification and consultation procedure
established for foreseeable events (to organize cooperation and examine proportionality)
involves only the member state reintroducing border controls, the Council and the
Commission. The European parliament shall be informed ‘as soon as possible’, but the
member state shall report to parliament, if requested, only after the third consecutive pro-
longation of the measure. Only after the lifting of controls is a report presented to the
European parliament, the Council and the Commission, outlining, in particular, the opera-
tion of the checks and the effectiveness of reintroducing border control.
10 Available at register.consilium.eu.int/pdf/en/03/st13/st13915.en03.pdf (accessed January
2006).
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6 China and the limits of transnational
human rights activism
From Tiananmen Square to the Beijing
Olympics
Caroline Fleay
Introduction
The Chinese Communist Party (CCP) was instrumental in bringing an end to the
brutal occupation of the Japanese in China, but CCP rule in China since 1949 has
included various government campaigns that also inflicted human rights abuses on
its citizens, including arbitrary detentions, the use of torture and executions.
However, it was not until the Tiananmen Square massacre in June 1989 that there
was any significant international criticism of such abuses in China. In the wake of
the massacre, international human rights organizations, some domestic and exiled
Chinese human rights actors and various UN human rights agencies continued to
investigate and report on human rights abuses in China. Some of the efforts of
these non-governmental organizations (NGOs) and UN human rights agencies,
particularly in the first year after the massacre, led to many liberal democratic
states being critical of China’s actions and imposing largely symbolic sanctions
and supporting resolutions on China at the UN Commission on Human Rights
(UNCHR).1 Thus, in the aftermath of the Tiananmen Square massacre, this trans-
national network of human rights actors had proven powerful enough to define
what were the most important human rights abuses in China and to secure expres-
sions of condemnation of the Chinese government from many other states.
China responded to this transnational activism by refuting the criticism but
increased its engagement with international human rights discussions, made con-
cessions such as releasing high profile political prisoners and passed legislation
that it argued was consistent with international human rights norms. By 1998,
however, most of the liberal democratic states had largely abandoned the public
forms of criticism inherent in multilateral human rights approaches and instead
adopted China’s preferred mode of raising human rights concerns – the bilateral
dialogue approach, characterized by private meetings between government offi-
cials and the funding of technical cooperation programs on human rights and
legal reform. It seemed that the power the transnational human rights actors had
exercised less than a decade earlier to influence other states to pressurize China
through multilateral forums on these rights had waned. The decision of the
International Olympic Committee (IOC) to award the 2008 Olympics to Beijing
ushered in another opportunity for human rights activism as the decision was
112 Caroline Fleay
accompanied with the argument that it would lead to human rights improvements
in China. Greater international attention was once again placed on particular
rights abuses in China and international and domestic human rights actors mobi-
lized to pressurize the Chinese government to change its human rights practices.
There are numerous explorations of the impacts of transnational human rights
activism on China. A number of the most comprehensive focus on the socializa-
tion of the Chinese government according to international human rights norms.
From a constructivist perspective, socialization is understood as processes a state
may experience as a result of interacting with other agents, such that key actors
within the state change the way they ‘understand, process, interpret and act upon
lessons that are “taught”’ by other agents’ (Johnston 2001: 492). The state’s
engagement with these socialization processes can lead to changes in its identity,
interests and behaviours consistent with the norms promoted by other agents
(Risse and Sikkink 1999). Both Foot (2000: 256–72) and Kent (1999: 242) argue
that there is evidence to suggest that the Chinese government had become some-
what socialized according to international human rights norms in the decade fol-
lowing the Tiananmen Square massacre, as well as shown its ability to influence
some of the enforcement mechanisms of the international human rights norms.
Examining a similar time period, Wan (2001: 2, 13) argues that the Chinese
government’s responses to the pressures placed on it by its external human rights
critics indicate adaptive rather than cognitive learning about the importance of
human rights, primarily reflecting the Chinese government’s understanding that
Western governments had the power ‘to back [their] moral claims’. Thus, Wan
argues that realism is a better explanation of Chinese government’s responses to
its external human rights critics than constructivist and institutionalist approaches,
that is, the Chinese government’s responses to its Western critics are primarily
seen as the results of rational calculations about how China’s power and security
are best promoted in the anarchical international system.
Despite the varying theoretical bases of their conclusions, Foot, Kent and Wan
argue that the Chinese government has primarily responded to its human rights
critics in an instrumental sense, that is, the Chinese government’s responses to its
critics were motivated by instrumental or material concerns such as bringing an
end to the sanctions and public criticisms of its human rights record. Realist
explanations of these instrumental responses would consider them evidence of
the calculations of the Chinese government according to the economic and mili-
tary power of the Western governments to support their human rights criticisms.
However, realist explanations fail to adequately account for the extent to which
the Chinese government was willing to engage with its human rights critics over
human rights norms and their enforcement mechanisms, particularly given that
most of the diplomatic and economic sanctions imposed by the liberal democratic
governments in the aftermath of the Tiananmen Square massacre were lifted by
the end of 1990. In contrast, constructivist explanations suggest that this engage-
ment is evidence of socialization according to international human rights norms.
Building on the above research, I have argued elsewhere that the socialization
processes outlined in the earlier phases of Risse et al.’s (1999) constructivist
China and the limits of transnational human rights activism 113
spiral model theory provide a useful explanation for the Chinese government’s
responses to its domestic and international human rights critics (Fleay 2006).
Risse et al.’s five-phase spiral model seeks to explain how a transnational net-
work of domestic and international human rights actors (including NGOs, UN
human rights agencies and states) may be able to influence a target state’s iden-
tity, interests and behaviours through particular socialization processes (Risse and
Sikkink 1999).2 The authors limit the application of the spiral model to two core
rights – the right to life, or freedom from extrajudicial execution and disappear-
ance, and the right to freedom from torture, arbitrary arrest and detention (Risse
and Sikkink 1999: 2).3
According to the spiral model, if there is enough sustained domestic and inter-
national human rights advocacy on these core rights, a target state may engage in
socialization processes that increasingly modify its identity, interests and behav-
iours according to these human rights norms. The earliest socialization process
expected by the spiral model is instrumental adaptation in which the target state
responds to its critics by making some human rights concessions to reduce or
avoid such attention (Risse and Sikkink 1999: 12). Although the target state’s
response is not considered to necessarily imply acceptance of the human rights
norms, or the validity of the accusations, it is considered to reflect the target
state’s concern about its international reputation in relation to human rights (Risse
and Sikkink 1999: 23–4). This suggests an acceptance that human rights are a
legitimate international issue.
If pressure by the transnational network of domestic and international human
rights actors can be maintained, the target state may feel compelled to make fur-
ther concessions and engage increasingly in the deeper socialization process of
argumentative discourses. In this process, the target state and its critics engage in
argumentation and persuasion, with the target state participating in repeated dis-
cussions on the validity and meaning of international human norms (Risse and
Sikkink 1999: 16). The expectation is that this increasingly affects the target
state’s identity or the way that it defines itself compared with other states. With
the continued advocacy of the transnational human rights network, the target state
may ultimately engage in the socialization process of institutionalization and
habitualization whereby international human rights norms are no longer contested
by the target state but increasingly enshrined in domestic law, policies and prac-
tices (Risse and Sikkink 1999: 31–4).
Drawing on the responses of the Chinese government to its domestic and inter-
national human rights critics from the time of the Tiananmen Square massacre to
2003, I earlier argued that the Chinese government had engaged in the socializa-
tion process of instrumental adaptation and was beginning to engage in the deeper
socialization process of argumentative discourses (Fleay 2006). In the wake of the
2008 Beijing Olympics, it is now time to further examine these conclusions. This
chapter will review the findings of the earlier explorations of transnational human
rights activism and China that focus mostly on the time period from 1989 to the
turn of the century and their conclusions that the Chinese government’s responses
to its critics were predominantly instrumental. The human rights activism in the
114 Caroline Fleay
era from the awarding of the Olympics to Beijing in 2001 until the end of the 2008
Olympics will then be examined to explore the nature of this activism and the
Chinese government’s response to it. The Chinese government argued in its bid for
the 2008 Olympics that awarding the event to Beijing would further promote
human rights in China (Clarey 2001). Has the awarding of the Olympic Games to
Beijing led to the Chinese government’s deeper engagement with international
human rights norms, or does the government continue to respond to its human
rights critics in primarily an instrumental sense? If the Chinese government has
continued to respond to its critics in an instrumental sense, does this indicate its
engagement in a socialization process according to international human rights
norms, or does it primarily reflect the calculations of the Chinese government of
its own economic and military power in comparison with its critics? In other
words, to what extent can we consider international human rights norms and their
advocates have exercised power in relation to changing the Chinese government’s
identity, interests and behaviours?
Conclusion
In the aftermath of the killings in Beijing in 1989, the transnational network of
international and domestic human rights actors exhibited enough power to define
China and the limits of transnational human rights activism 125
what were the most important human rights abuses within China. International
human rights NGOs and UN human rights agencies disseminated information and
lobbied the liberal democratic states to pressurize China to cease its rights abuses
of the killing of civilians, arbitrary arrests and detention, the use of torture, death
sentences, trials that failed to reflect international standards, suppression of dis-
senting groups and restrictions on religious, expression and media freedoms. The
lobbying of these organizations and the strength of these human rights norms
were powerful enough to persuade many of the liberal democratic states to sup-
port resolutions critical of China’s human rights practices until the late 1990s.
These actions, in turn, persuaded the Chinese government to offer concessions in
attempts to stop the public criticisms and engage in international human rights
forums.
Given China’s growing economic and strategic power in comparison with its
state critics, a realist expectation of the Chinese government’s responses to its
critics would have been much less engagement with international human rights
forums and discussions. The Chinese government’s level of engagement is, thus,
better explained by constructivist approaches that account for some level of
socialization, such that the Chinese government had been persuaded by interna-
tional human rights norms and their advocates that human rights were a legiti-
mate international concern. Limits to this socialization, however, reflect the
growing importance of China to other states, both in an economic and strategic
sense, such that by the late 1990s, it was clear the Chinese government had been
able to exercise enough power to affect the policies of some of its human rights
critics, in particular most of the liberal democratic states. The Chinese govern-
ment had also effectively interrupted the mobilization of any significant internal
opposition to CCP rule through its repression. The awarding of the 2008 Olympics
to Beijing, and the greater attention to human rights in China that it brought, did
not significantly alter this.
In the aftermath of the Beijing Olympics, the Chinese government continues to
engage in human rights discussions and forums. However, it also continues to
hold considerable power over how it will interpret human rights norms and their
priorities, as well as how and when it will choose to make human rights conces-
sions. Given its continued growth in economic importance to many states and as
a regional military power, and strategic importance as a permanent member of the
UN Security Council, this power is likely to be maintained in terms of its rela-
tions with other states (Black and Bezanson 2004). It does not appear likely at this
stage that any other states will significantly support the calls of international and
domestic human rights actors for further civil rights improvements in China, as
many did in the aftermath of the Tiananmen Square massacre. This is despite the
continued calls of some within China for civil and political rights improvements,
such as those that signed Charter 08, and the ongoing attention of international
human rights NGOs such as Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch and
Human Rights in China to human rights abuses in China. Thus, there is little
expectation at this time that the Chinese government will engage in deeper social-
ization processes as expected by the spiral model, given that continued pressures
126 Caroline Fleay
from international and domestic human rights actors, including states, are needed
for a target state to become increasingly compelled to make further concessions
and ultimately caught up in its own rhetoric (Risse and Sikkink 1999: 28).
However, perhaps the more important area of focus should be China’s chang-
ing civil society and state–civil society relations. Developments in this area may
provide the necessary changes to the dominance of the top leadership in policy-
making to ultimately improve the civil rights abuses promoted by international
human rights organizations. Further research into this area would help to illumi-
nate the implications of these developments on human rights practices in China.
A greater understanding of the different factions, organizations and actors within
the Chinese government, the complexities of socialization processes within and
between these various actors and their interplay with civil society actors would
also add further depth to the explorations of human rights in China.
Notes
1 The liberal democratic states that were publicly critical of China’s human rights abu-
ses after the Tiananmen Square massacre included the United States, United
Kingdom, Japan, Australia, Norway, the Netherlands, Canada and the countries of the
European Community (later becoming the European Union) as a collective (Foot
2000: 115–29).
2 For an expanded discussion of the spiral model in relation to China, see Fleay (2006).
3 Risse and Sikkink (1999: 2) argue that this focus recognizes the general universal
acceptance of these core rights. It also reflects that these rights have primarily been
the focus of international human rights NGOs such as Amnesty International and
Human Rights Watch up until recent years, and the subject of much of the sustained
international criticism of China’s human rights record since the killings in Beijing in
June 1989.
4 Even after Amnesty International’s mandate was altered in 2001 to include a focus on
social, economic and cultural rights as well as civil and political rights, the majority of
focus of the NGO’s annual reports on China continued to be on civil and political
rights abuses. The annual reports of Asia Watch (later Human Rights Watch) on China
have provided more of a focus on social, economic and cultural rights abuses than
Amnesty International, but since 2005 their reports have increasingly focused on civil
and political rights. See the annual reports of both Amnesty International (found at
http://www.amnesty.org) and Human Rights Watch (found at http://www.hrw.org/en/
node/79288).
5 The White Paper outlined the Chinese government’s human rights priorities, in particu-
lar, that the right to subsistence was the most important right that needed to be realized
before other rights could be considered (Information Office of the State Council of the
People’s Republic of China 1991: 11–2).
6 See the annual Amnesty International reports from 1992 to 1998, the annual Human
Rights Watch reports on China from 1991 to 1998 and Wan (2001: 20).
7 The White Papers can be found at http://www.china.org.cn/e-white/index.htm
8 See the annual reports of Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch from 2001
to 2008.
9 This was confirmed in an interview with Joshua Rosenzweig, Dui Hua Foundation, in
Hong Kong, 11 June 2009.
China and the limits of transnational human rights activism 127
10 Indeed, in an interview with an official from the All-China Women’s Federation
(ACWF), one of the mass organizations set up by the Chinese government in 1949, it
was clarified that the ACWF now sees itself as an NGO independent of government,
despite receiving some of their funds from the government. Interview with ACWF
official, Beijing, 3 June 2009.
11 This observation was confirmed in interviews I conducted with NGO workers in
Beijing in June 2009.
12 This was confirmed in an interview with a legal aid NGO in Beijing, 9 June 2009.
13 Other aspects worthy of focus include the continuing experiments with elections in
some villages and townships (see Shi 1997; Pei 1998).
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7 State-led social boundary change
Transnational environmental activism,
‘ecoterrorism’ and September 11
Shannon Gibson
Introduction
The September 11, 2001, attacks on the United States have been widely chris-
tened as so profound that social and political life around the world would never
be the same again. Social movement theorists were quick to jump into the post-
September 11 fray assessing and criticizing how the US government’s response
and a resurgent brand of unbridled American patriotism might negatively affect
domestic and international activists, specifically those a part of global anti-war or
social justice movements. Much of these early works tended to focus on political
opportunities, sometimes in the context of static political opportunity structures,
other times as changing political environments. Utilizing global radical/revolu-
tionary environmental activism as a case study, this chapter aims to contribute to
assessments of the latter by injecting analyses of cultural and strategic elements
within the changing post-September 11 political environment. Furthermore, in
conjunction with the overarching focus of this volume on power relations, its
purpose is not to simply recognize that political opportunities did close for activ-
ists in the United States and abroad following the terrorist attacks. Rather, it aims
to deconstruct the mechanisms by which the United States (and subsequently
European states) were able to utilize fear and uncertainty to (1) construct and
impose social boundaries between ‘good’ and ‘bad’ environmental activists, (2)
broaden and impose existing definitions of ‘terrorism’ after the attacks, (3) trans-
pose the ‘terrorist’ identity and its legal consequences on sectors of the environ-
mental movement that engaged in anti-establishment rhetoric and protest and (4)
provide incentives to reformist environmental organizations for maintaining the
dichotomy between themselves and radical sectors.
In general, it seeks to trace how multiple social boundaries were newly con-
structed for the purposes of imposing and maintaining top-down order over soci-
ety. Theoretically, this work seeks to integrate post-structural accounts of foreign
policy-making with strands in social movement theory, which urge the blending
of political and cultural analyses in relation to transnational mobilization. Finally,
this work does not purport that the events of September 11, 2001, were the sole
causal factor of increased repression and persecution of global environmental
activists (indeed, as I shall review, many actions were well underway before
September 11 towards achieving that end); however, what it does establish is that
State-led social boundary change 131
since September 11 the mechanisms towards solidifying new social boundaries
that lump certain environmental activists and organizations in with terrorists have
strengthened and spread transnationally. Indeed, this work also delineates how
other countries, specifically in the European Union, began to monitor, detain and
prosecute environmental and animal activists under the auspices of domestic
terror and extremism laws in the post-September 11 era.
Where social movement studies have tended to focus on the stake that activists
in movements have in developing strategic frames for supporting alternative pro-
grams, they have had less to say about the active role states take in creating new
identities and counter-frames. However, the field of International Relations (IR),
with its more state-centric focus, provides a different viewpoint. Particularly,
advances from French structuralism and post-structuralism, critical security studies,
the Frankfurt School’s Critical Theory and individual contributions from social
theorists such as Habermas, Foucault, Bourdieu, and Touraine have helped to insert
agency (on behalf of the state and dissenters) into models previously dominated by
structures and functions. For example, writing while imprisoned in the 1920s,
Antonio Gramsci suggested that Fascist Italy was able to maintain its control not
solely through violence and coercion but also ideologically by constructing a ‘cul-
tural hegemony’ whereby capitalist and bourgeoisie values became the ‘common
sense’ of all. This cultural consensus helped to maintain the status quo and stave off
revolt as the working class came to identify the bourgeoisie’s interests with their
own. Similarly, Derrida (1976) focused on the ‘deconstruction’ of ideas and con-
cepts to reveal the power and hierarchy, which supported them. The point of this
‘social constructivist’ logic was twofold. First, in its benign form, it was meant to
challenge those aspects of society that social scientists had come to take for granted
as constant or unchangeable (i.e. states’ interests, causes of war etc.). Second, in its
more critical form, it was meant to deconstruct oppressive ideologies (i.e. cultural
hegemony) created by states so as to reveal the power and interests behind their
creation. From this perspective, ‘culture can be seen as an element of strategy and
power, a site of contestation as much as a source for social unity (and when it is a
source for unity, this is because elites deploy it to that end)’ (Jasper 2007: 71).
These contributions from IR, particularly those focusing on the relationship
between identity and foreign policy, provide a unique lens from which to analyze
state actions regarding social boundary creation and global activism. Critical dis-
course or post-structural accounts argue that foreign and domestic security policy-
making is a discursive practice. Rather than viewing the state as a static structure
through which protest is channelled, post-structural accounts argue that the state is
not simply moderating by virtue of its institutional structure. Instead, the state is
continually trying to identify and quell dissenters or enemies to maintain its status.
For example, in effort to re-establish a hegemonic discourse, states may seek to
identify a ‘radical other’ as a means of solidifying its own national character and
identity (Laclau 1996). Through the declarative act of ‘othering’ – the ability to
present things or people as alien, sick or perverse – or articulating others as a
source of danger to national interests, politicians are continually creating and but-
tressing state identity (Campbell 1992). In this manner, foreign policies define
134 Shannon Gibson
‘who we are’ and ‘who they are’. These policies can run the gamut from illicit drug
policy to anti-terrorism legislation and can define both internal and external
threats. For example, in analyzing the ‘War on Drugs’ under the George H. Bush
administration, Campbell (1992) examines how race was utilized as a category
within drug use reports to determine ‘dangerous’ and ‘criminal’ drugs from those
that were ‘acceptable’ and even encouraged. Further within the realm of foreign
policy construction, post-structural accounts argue that the state has the ability to
not only identify ‘threats’ but also to move particular referent objects on and off
the security agenda. Through the process of ‘securitization’, security is socially
constructed by those figures that have the authority to legitimately declare an issue
a security threat via ‘speech acts’ (Buzan et al. 1998). The act of securitizing a
particular act or threat (i.e. environmental protest or violence) to a certain referent
object (in our case, society) is in itself a political and social act and exercise of
power (see also the volume’s introductory chapter).
The commonality among these post-structural accounts in IR is that they recog-
nize the role that symbolic resources (i.e. conceptual distinctions, cultural tradi-
tions, political discourse) have in creating and maintaining institutionalized social
differences (i.e. class, race, citizen–non-citizen, friend–foe). Jasper (2007: 61)
argues that culture and strategy can serve as powerful tools for explaining political
action. Although much work has been done to integrate cultural aspects into the
study of social movements, these studies are often done with the focus being on
the agency of the activists or movement organizations. This analysis attempts to
reverse that viewpoint and look from the top-down to trace how states via a dis-
tinct set of discursive and tactical mechanisms have set out to establish new social
boundaries between environmental activists and terrorists, thus extending govern-
mental monitoring and policing powers over radical environmental activism.
Encounter
Social boundaries are often formed at the point in which two previously separate
or indirectly linked networks enter into or encounter one another in the same
shared social space. In this case, the encounter mechanism is closely related to
research on movement–counter-movement or opposing movement interaction
(see Andrews 2002; Dixon 2008; Meyer and Staggenborg 1996). Theoretical
conceptualization of counter or opposing movements arose in the 1960s as schol-
ars recognized the emergence of leftist progressive movements and then the
proliferation of reactionary opposition movements (Meyer and Staggenborg
1996). In general, those entering existing distinctive relations, such as an interest
group or activist movement interacting with or confronting institutionalized poli-
tics, usually find themselves on the fringes of the insider–outsider boundary
(Elias and Scotson 1994). Thus, they begin at a marginalized position. Furthermore,
as interaction between opposing movements intensifies, boundaries between
them become more significant (Tilly 2004). Although Charles Tilly does not go
into detail on this point, theorizations of opposing movements lend a hand in
pointing out that the existence or encountering of opposing movements then sets
the stage for them to influence one another directly or indirectly by altering the
136 Shannon Gibson
environment in which each operates (i.e. altering political opportunity structures).
In the case of environmentalism, the global environmental movement has a long
and often glorified history. Indeed, it has been declared as ‘the most comprehen-
sive and influential movement of our time’ (Castells 1997: 67). However, devel-
opments in and since the 1960s highlight a significant change in the composition
and mobilization of the broader movement. Specifically, the political and coun-
ter-culture ferment spawned by global social protests of the decade spurred inter-
est in the greater critique of consumer capitalism and its effects on the
environment. This fresh political space opened up by the New Left provided the
impetus for the emergence of the environmental justice movement (EJM). Even
as a new ‘sort’ of environmental movement, the EJM is not a monolith either.2 For
all intents and purposes, this chapter deals primarily with those sectors identified
by Reitan (this volume) as ‘radical’ and ‘revolutionary’ (R/R).
These sectors are those most often singled out as ecoterrorists.3 Differing in both
discourse and tactics from conservation focused or reformist environment move-
ments, R/R environmental activists claim that questions of environmental degrada-
tion could no longer be separated from critiques of state power, corporate overreach
and neoliberal capitalism (Gottlieb 1993; Rootes 2004). Thus, these activists tended
to reject inclusion in institutionalized politics often coveted by reformist organiza-
tions. Rather than be co-opted, R/R environmental activists set out to directly chal-
lenge the underwriters of the capitalist power structure, which they felt had caused
most global environmental injustices. Dissatisfaction with the social conservatism
and timidity of established environmental organizations gave rise to new organiza-
tions, which recognizing the global character of environmental issues and the
shortcomings of reform organizations sought to be transnational in reach and revo-
lutionary in demands (Rootes 2004). For example, activist David Bower left the
Sierra Club, to found Friends of the Earth, an organization that seeks to challenge
neoliberal globalization and consumer capitalism while promoting environmentally
sustainable and just societies (Reitan 2005). Beyond adopting more radical discur-
sive frames, some groups, more autonomous and anarchist in nature, grew out of a
need for tactical radicalism. Arguing that in today’s capitalist economy, the destruc-
tion of industrial infrastructure (i.e. corporate buildings, cars equipment) is more
effective than negotiation, Earth First! originated in the 1970s to pursue direct action
and civil disobedience tactics initially pioneered by Greenpeace (Scarce 2006).
These tactics are often referred to as ‘monkey wrenching’ or ‘ecotage’ (ecological
sabotage). This introduction of a spin-off to the reformist environment movement
with distinctly different discursive and tactical aims is certainly not a state-driven
mechanism in this case. However, this manifestation sets the stage for states to
simultaneously engage in borrowing and then imposition so as to begin labelling and
separating ‘good’ environmental activists from the ‘bad, radical’ ones.
Incentive shift
The process of social boundary activation often creates a system of risks and
incentives depending on how actors choose to position themselves around the
newly constructed identity boundary (Tilly 2004: 220). With relation to global
social movements, this mechanism is clearly linked to debates in social move-
ment theory relating to divisions and competition between transnational advocacy
networks and direct action networks (Bennett 2005), insider and outsider move-
ments (see Sikkink 2005; Smith and Korzeniewicz 2007; Tarrow 2005) and
reformist and R/R movements (Reitan, this volume). For example, it has been
argued that a broad ideological span within a given movement may serve to ben-
efit or provide a ‘positive radical flank effect’ for reformist movements (see
Haines 1984; McAdam et al. 1996, 2001; Tarrow 1998). McAdam (1992, quoted
in Gupta 2002) explains:
138 Shannon Gibson
the existence of radicals makes moderate groups in the movement more
attractive negotiating partners to the movement opponents. Radicalness pro-
vides strong incentives to the state to get to the bargaining table with the
moderates in order to avoid dealing with the radicals. In addition, financial
support flowing to moderate groups in the movement increases dramati-
cally in the presence of radicals.
It has been charged by some that police forces and state governments often try
to take advantage of these ideological variations for the purposes of splitting the
movement. Indeed, pundits have publicly struck out at reform movements for not
actively assisting the government in their search for ecoterrorists providing fur-
ther anti-environmentalist sentiments. Syndicated columnist Boland (2001)
writes, ‘Where is the outrage from our respectable environmental groups? Do we
get any tips from the Sierra Club or Greenpeace people concerning former dis-
gruntled members who may have struck out on their own?’ Taken together,
mechanisms of encounter, borrowing and incentive shift set the stage for bound-
ary change activation.
Boundary relocation
As a mechanism, relocation – the alteration of major boundaries – is produced by
the combination of two or more other constitutive mechanisms and leads to the
activation of new boundaries and the deactivation of others. In our case, inscrip-
tion and site transfer combine resulting in relocation. The scenario goes some-
thing like this: Inscription heightens differences on either side of a social
boundary. Site transfer maintains an established boundary but shifts the location
of persons and social sites with respect to constructed differences. With regard to
R/R environmental activism in the post-September 11 environment, inscription
and site transfer combine to effectively transpose a broadened ‘terrorist’ concept
and the legal mechanisms attached to it onto environmental defendants.
Post-September 11 inscription – the heightening of differences between estab-
lished social boundaries – initially occurred as the United States set out to thicken
the boundary between terrorists and the rest of civilized society. Specifically, the
State-led social boundary change 139
United States constructed the notion of ‘terrorism’ in juxtaposition to its long-held
self-image of American society being the beacon of freedom and justice for the
world. Conducting critical discourse analysis on more than 600 speeches by
President Bush from September 2001 to May 2003, Nabers (2009) argues that the
Bush administration and speechwriting team deliberately constructed ‘America’ as
synonymous with ‘freedom’ and ‘good’ while portraying terrorists and those who
support them as ‘evil’ or ‘lacking in freedom’. Furthermore, the administration
promulgates a homogenous, peace-loving construction of American society (as
opposed to the heterogeneous description it commonly goes by, i.e. ‘melting pot’).
A national discourse is pursued that claims that American society is a homogenous,
moderate, peaceful society and, thus, serves to quiet domestic dissent. Because of
course following an attack of such magnitude, it would be ‘unpatriotic’ to protest
one’s own government. Furthermore, the long-term exposure of citizens to this sort
of discourse contributes to emotional dispositions among policy makers and society
to support repression (Maney et al. 2005). As this discourse becomes routinized,
taking on a hegemonic status (in the Gramscian or Laclauian sense), it opens further
opportunities for the state to codify this notion and expand anti-terror laws as well
as the definition of what constitutes a terrorist. Thus, discourse begins to take effect
on all aspects of life including political institutions, conventions, ideologies and
laws (e.g. via the enactment of the USA PATRIOT Act; see below for details).
Beyond the discursive deepening of the boundary between ‘terrorists’ and the
rest of society, there was a subsequent broadening or site transfer of who and what
constituted the ‘terrorist enemy’. Rather than drawing a distinct line, narrowly
focused on a singular terrorist threat following the recognition that 19 Al-Qaeda
terrorists were responsible for the attacks, George W. Bush set out to portray this
enemy as global, ubiquitous, beyond rationality and beyond restraint (Debrix and
Barder 2009). In 2005, Bush stated that the terrorist enemy was ‘as brutal an
enemy as we’ve ever faced. They’re unconstrained by any notion of our common
humanity or by the rules of warfare’. But who is ‘they’? Record (2003) argues that
US threat conflation essentially made the Global War on Terror (GWOT), a war
on an enemy of overwhelming variety in terms of number of entities (by focusing
on terrorist organizations and terrorist states), types (non-state entities, states and
failed states) and geographic loci (the need for a ‘global’ war). Furthermore, the
GWOT is not only a war against ‘terrorists’ but also against the phenomenon and
violent tactics of terrorism itself. The goal is the elimination of both terrorists and
the method of violence they employ. Bush states:
Indeed, we must use the full influence of the United States to delegitimize
terrorism and make clear that all acts of terrorism will be viewed in the
same light as slavery, piracy, or genocide: behavior that no responsible
government can condone or support and all must oppose.
(White House 2003: 22–3)
Certainly, the September 11 attacks at the World Trade Center and the Pentagon
were not the first the world had heard of terrorists. In fact, the concept of terrorism
140 Shannon Gibson
as a tactic or strategy dates back to the French Revolution (Booth and Dunne 2002:
8; Halliday 2001: 72; Jarvis 2009), and as early as 1937, the League of Nations had
coined a definition for it. However, in the current GWOT, terrorism is a definition
that appears to have lost its way in a semantic quagmire. Even within the US gov-
ernment, different departments and agencies use varying definitions. For example,
the Department of Defense (DOD 2009) defines terrorism as the ‘calculated use of
unlawful violence to inculcate fear; intended to coerce or intimidate governments
or societies in pursuit of goals that are generally political, religious, or ideological’,
whereas the White House’s National Strategy for Combating Terrorists (NSCT;
2003) states that terrorism is ‘premeditated, politically motivated violence perpe-
trated against non-combatant targets by subnational groups or clandestine agents’.
Furthermore, the FBI (Federal Bureau of Investigation) defines terrorism as ‘the
unlawful use of force and violence against persons or property to intimidate or
coerce a government, the civilian population, or any segment thereof, in further-
ance of political or social objectives (Code of Federal Regulation, 2009)’. Each of
these definitions initiates important critical questions. The DOD definition does
little to preclude the very acts of the United States following September 11 (i.e.
intervening militarily in Iraq despite lack of international consensus to overthrow
its leader to spread democracy). The NSCT definition calls into question what
constitutes a non-combatant target? Could this include corporate assets? What
about Internet hactivism? Finally, the FBI definition indicates the ‘unlawful use of
force’, and it has been argued based on this definition that ‘force’ should also
include actions that restrict movement such as sit-ins, marches and roadblocks.
Terrorism expert Lacqueur (1999) has found more than 100 definitions for terror-
ism and argues that the only similarity amongst them all is ‘that terrorism involves
violence and the threat of violence’. Unfortunately, this lone definitional element
does little to separate terrorism from civil war factions or even conventionally
accepted forms of political protest. However, in these early days following
September 11, the imposition of a broadly constructed terrorist identity would later
serve as a justification for applying post-September 11 anti-terror surveillance,
detainment and prosecution measures on global environmental activists who
threatened the interests of state governments and corporate institutions.
Boundary activation
Activation of boundaries occurs when social divisions begin to actively manage
social relations on either side of the divide. Deactivation is a decline in a bound-
ary’s importance. Inscription and activation often operate simultaneously to
reinforce the maintenance and pervasiveness of a new social boundary. According
to Tilly (2004: 223), ‘Inscription heightens the social relations and representa-
tions that comprise a particular boundary, while activation makes that same
boundary more central to the organization of activity in its vicinity’. Following
September 11, the newly expanded definition of terrorism was buttressed by
political statements, media coverage and reinvigorated anti-terror laws around the
globe and eventually used to prosecute disruptive environmental activism.
State-led social boundary change 141
Globally, the most immediate reaction to terrorism was the limitation of rights in
the countries affected or threatened by terrorism (Reitan 2003). Shortly after
September 11, and without much debate, US Congress enacted the USA PATRIOT
(Uniting and Strengthening America by Providing Appropriate Tools Required to
Intercept and Obstruct Terrorism) Act, which granted unprecedented powers to home-
land security agencies to obtain telephone and Internet service records as well as
search medical, financial, rental car and library and bookstore records without having
to produce individualized evidence and with no judicial oversight. The implementa-
tion of the PATRIOT Act and its renewal was one of the most far-reaching institution-
alizations of the ‘war on terror’ discourse and the post-September 11 American
identity (Nabers 2009). The application of the USA PATRIOT Act has become a seri-
ous threat to activists engaged in disruptive protests. First, the PATRIOT Act expanded
the legal definition of ‘terrorism’ to include attacks on inanimate objects. Specifically,
the act describes terrorism as any action that
This has led several in the environmental movement to argue that the renewed
focus on radical environmentalism as a form of terrorism in the post-September
142 Shannon Gibson
11 era has amounted to what they refer to as the ‘Green Scare’ (alluding to the
anti-communist Red Scares of the 1940s and 1950s). Of the new government
tactics, PETA (People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals) Attorney Jeffrey
Kerr said, ‘It’s the newest brand of McCarthyism, because lies and half-truths are
being spewed forth by people in the pockets of industries’. One of the most well-
known cases of the application of ‘terrorism enhancement’ penalties came in the
2005 roundup and indictment of 11 activists for a string of politically motivated
crimes (none of which harmed humans) committed in the 1990s, known as
Operation Backfire.5 Following the arrests, Attorney Alberto Gonzalez pro-
claimed this a decisive victory in the War on Terror stating, ‘Today’s indictment
proves that we will not tolerate any group that terrorizes the American people, no
matter its intentions or its objectives’ (FBI 2006). Then, in 2006, the Animal
Enterprise Protection Act of 1992 was expanded into the Animal Enterprise
Terrorism Act (AETA) that punishes, with harsher penalties than its predecessor,
any politically motivated actions that result in the damage or loss of property or
profit associated with animal enterprise, thus, specifically targeting elements of
the environmental and animal rights movement. This new law was used to effec-
tively indict seven Stop Huntington Animal Cruelty activists (commonly known
as the SHAC 7) who ran a controversial website that publicized legal and illegal
actions against their targets as ‘animal enterprise terrorists’. As of 2007, the
American Legislative Exchange Council began to push a newly expanded Animal
Rights and Ecological Terrorism Act to expand ‘terrorist enhancement’ penalties
to those harming natural resource enterprises (ALEC 2009).
Over the past several years, ecoterrorism has consistently ranked at the top of
the FBI’s domestic terror threat list. The persecution of ecoterrorists under the
auspices of anti-terror laws is not solely relegated to the US government. Similar
actions have occurred in Europe. In response to Climate Camp actions in the
United Kingdom, the United Kingdom began branding protest by animal and
environmental rights movements as ‘domestic extremism’ and began utilizing its
National Extremism Tactical Co-ordination Unit and its National Domestic
Extremism Team ‘to gather, assess, analyze and disseminate intelligence and
information relating to criminal activities . . . where there is a threat of crime or
to public order which arises from domestic extremism or protest activity’ (Evans
et al. 2009). Although ‘extremism’ is discursively different from terrorism, it
would seem the two are being blended. In 2009, border patrols utilized anti-terror
legislation to prevent climate justice activist, Chris Kitchen, from traveling to
Denmark where he was to attend an activist mobilization meeting (Lewis 2009).
All told, the implications of this selective coding of what constitutes a ‘terror
threat’ clearly amount to a global strategic campaign to link environmentalism
with terrorism.
direct action is a powerful tool, but like a chainsaw it’s not the tool you
want in every situation. Direct action points a spotlight on an issue, can
directly interfere with an unjust group or situation and delegitimize an
institution or policy. Used at the wrong moment or without a strong base of
support, it risks legitimizing the very institutions we seek to undermine.
(Starhawk 2001)
In the years after September 11, the manner in which this boundary has been
activated has also had serious implications for those in the environmental movement
144 Shannon Gibson
engaging in even the most basic of protest tactics. Similar to most social movements,
environmentalism has its legal and illegal aspects. Where some activists lobby gov-
ernments and conduct letter-writing campaigns, others engage in sit-ins, chain them-
selves to trees, block roadways or break into and vandalize coal plants. Since its
introduction into the public lexicon, the term ecoterrorism has been utilized strategi-
cally to blur the difference between two distinct forms of direct action, ecotage (e.g.
tree spiking to prevent logging) and ‘civil disobedience’ (e.g. tree sitting to prevent
logging) and to conflate the two as posing domestic terror threats. For example,
adversary of the US environmental movement Ron Arnold has argued that civil
disobedience that involves ‘imposing physical impediments preventing persons
from going where they ordinarily have a right to go’, far from being peaceful, con-
stitutes ‘an act of physical coercion, an act of violence against another, regardless of
how passively performed’ (Arnold cited in Long 2004: 6). Furthermore, in a 2002
Board of Supervisors meeting, County Supervisor Delgaudio (2002) had the follow-
ing to say of Greenpeace’s acts of civil disobedience:
There is a gray zone between the violent environmentalists and the nonvio-
lent ‘Greens’. Greenpeace, the self-professed non-violent protector of land
and sea, has made a name for itself by destroying crops, encouraging the
chopping down of forests grown with genetically modified seeds, and
engaging in dangerous confrontations with fishing, shipping, and nuclear
test vessels on the high seas. Greenpeace calls itself ‘nonviolent’. But in
fact all of the above-named activities, which have raked in hundreds of
millions of dollars for the organization over the years, are based on FORCE –
on stealing or destroying property, or of compelling behavior by a confron-
tation which gives the other side no choice. . . . In the old days, any
self-appointed high seas kamikaze was given a proper name – PIRATE –
and was hunted down by the Royal Navy and hung without benefit of trial,
making the high seas a safe place.
Encounter
Boundary Inscription Boundary
Borrowing Relocation
Imposition Site Transfer Activation
Incentive Shift
Many of the chapters in this collection could be divided on the basis in which
they conceptualize power – as hegemonic (state power from above), counter-he-
gemonic (collective action from below) or representative (relational power
between various non-state actors). This chapter approaches the notion of power
from a top-down perspective by tracing the mechanisms inherent in state-led
social boundary imposition and activation with regard to the blurring of distinc-
tions between R/R environmentalism and global terrorism – into ecoterrorism –
before and after the September 11, 2001, terror attacks (Figure 7.1). In the case
study examined previously, we see the following progression:
• Spurred by the global social protests of the 1960s, a new brand of environmen-
talism that is more radical, revolutionary in their discourse, demands and tactics,
emerges and encounters the same social space occupied by established, reform-
ist environmental organizations (encounter in this instance is not state-led).
• Social boundaries between reformist and R/R environmentalism are further
initiated as states around the world simultaneously began borrowing and
imposing the pre-existing term ‘terrorism’ to sectors of the environmental
movement to establish social binaries where they did not previously exist.
• This division is further buttressed as reformist groups receive incentives for
distancing themselves from radical environmentalism.
• Boundary activation is solidified when inscription and site transfer simulta-
neously lead to relocation – the transposition of the post-September 11
broadened ‘terrorist’ concept and the legal mechanisms attached to it onto the
R/R environmental movement and those who associate with it.
What this means for global activism is that social boundary change strongly
affects the likelihood, intensity, scale and form of mobilization (Tilly 2003).
Furthermore, boundary imposition and activation frequently occur when
authorities attempt to establish new systems of top-down control (Caplan and
Torpey 2001; Scott 1998; Tilly 1999). In the post-September 11 era, the discursive
146 Shannon Gibson
broadening of the term ‘terrorism’ has made it, as Gearty (2002: 36) explains,
‘the rhetorical servant of the established order’. Changes in social boundaries,
such as those relating to terrorist identities, produce serious consequences for a
wide range of social relations. Although many see the erosion of civil liberties
as a justified trade off in the GWOT, Jasper (2007) reminds us to always look
to ascertain the power behind cultural and discursive resources wielded by
decision-makers. Particularly, as anti-terror laws and surveillance mechanisms
continue to be implemented in such a way that it, as Representative Dennis
Kucinich of Ohio said of the AETA bill, has ‘a chilling effect on a specific type
of protest’.
Notes
1 Also referred to as the ‘transnationalist research program’ (see McAdam et al. 1997), the
classic social movement agenda is a blend of rational, cultural and structural approaches
to study social movements that lays emphasis on three sets of factors in analyzing the
emergence and trajectories of social movements – political opportunities, mobilizing
structures and framing processes (McAdam et al. 1996: 8, 2001: 17).
2 Reitan (this volume) argues that the broader Global Left, of which the EJM is a part ,
consists of three strands – reformist social democracy, revolutionary Marxism–Leninism
and radical autonomism and anarchism. Members from all three sectors (and now even
corporations and government officials) often self-identify themselves as being for or a
part of the environmental justice movement, a fact that has become highly contested
within the movement itself (Bjork 2009).
3 The 2008 DHS ‘Universal Adversary Dynamic Threat Assessment’ specifically identifies
‘biocentrism’, ‘deep ecology’ and ‘anarcho-primativism’ as the key ideologies buttress-
ing the ecoterrorist movement and identifies the movement’s tactical goals as being
‘anarchist and antisystemic in nature’.
4 Later Arnold would be called to testify at the 1998 ‘Hearing on Acts of Ecoterrorism
Committed by Radical Environmental Organizations’ before the US House Judiciary
Subcommittee on Crimes, an event devised by US Representative Frank Riggs after
Earth First! Members organized a non-violent protest against his support for logging by
dragging a huge tree stump into his office.
5 Operation Backfire was a multi-agency criminal investigation of several animal and
environmental rights activists believed to be a part of the Earth Liberation Front and
Animal Liberation Front led by the FBI during 2004–2006. The 65-count indictment
handed down in 2006 alleged the defendants committed acts of domestic terrorism
between 1996 and 2001 in Oregon, Wyoming, Washington, California and Colorado.
Charges included arson, conspiracy, use of destructive devices and destruction of an
energy facility. No individuals were injured in the perpetration of the accused crimes.
Several defendants choose to accept plea bargains, whereas others such as Daniel
McGowan and Briana Waters pled innocent and refused to cooperate with grand juries.
Each were convicted and are currently serving 7 and 6 year sentences, respectively.
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8 National origin and transnational
activism
Sarah Stroup
Introduction
Existing scholarship on transnational activism has persuasively demonstrated that
global campaigns and programmes run by non-state actors can substantially alter
global politics. The next step is to better understand when and how these actors –
particularly international non-governmental organizations (INGOs), the organiza-
tional building blocks of transnational civil society – have this power. In this
chapter, I argue that substantial diversity among INGOs – created, in part, by fac-
tors in each INGO’s home country – fragments global activists and can make some
more effective than others.
Much work on transnational activism is based on an underlying assumption
that these individuals and groups share fundamental norms and practices. For
example, in their seminal work on transnational advocacy networks, Keck and
Sikkink (1998) identify cosmopolitan norms of basic human rights that unite
local and global actors (for examples from outside the human rights realm, see
Florini 2000). A large group of scholars draw on sociological institutionalist and
political economy approaches to argue that INGO interaction at international
institutions, uncertainty among INGOs and donors over how to measure perform-
ance and outcomes, and competition among INGOs for international funds create
convergence on a narrow set of practices (Boli and Thomas 1999; Cooley and
Ron 2002).1 However, it remains to be proven whether cosmopolitan norms,
international fora or international donors are the primary point of reference for
INGOs. INGOs are governed by the laws of their home state and of those host
states in which they operate. In addition, most of the large INGOs today began as
national NGOs with an interest in foreign affairs; thus, for example, they started
as French or American charities before they aspired to become global NGOs
(Lindenberg and Bryant 2001). Although sociological institutionalism usefully
describes how the surrounding environment creates isomorphic pressures on
INGOs, the primary environment is the national, not the global, one. If transna-
tional actors such as INGOs are ‘rooted cosmopolitans’ (Tarrow 2005), we need
a better understanding of those roots.2
Among the many factors shaping INGO strategies and structures, legal regula-
tions at home and financial support from the home state are two of the most impor-
tant. This chapter offers a brief look at the relationship between the state and the
152 Sarah Stroup
INGO sector (specifically international relief and development organizations) in
three countries – the United States, France and Japan. The United States and France
are home to numerous INGOs but have long employed very different approaches to
these organizations.3 In Japan, the INGO sector has historically been almost non-
existent but has seen substantial growth since the early 1990s. Each state has created
different regulatory structures (including registration requirements, tax privileges
and limitations on political activity), political opportunities and types of financial
support for charities in general and INGOs in particular. These factors shape two
fundamental features of each nation’s INGOs – size and advocacy strategies.
Although the picture offered here is fairly general,4 the evidence is quite suggestive
of the importance of national origin in shaping INGO practices. The differences
among INGOs are not mere parochial baggage to be shed by ever-more-global
actors; instead, these various strategies and structures have proven to be enormously
successful in each INGO’s home environment and are thus likely to endure.
There are at least four implications to this argument. First, the diversity of prac-
tices among INGOs worldwide challenges the idea of a global civil society – that
is, a ‘social sphere . . . above and beyond national, regional, or local entities’
(Anheier et al. 2001: 3). Popular usage of the term ‘global civil society’ suggests
a cooperative and coherent group sharing norms and practices, but this group is,
in fact, fragmented and often competitive, with different groups bringing diverse
assets and worldviews to the international table. Second, building on a growing
literature that questions the prevalence and durability of transnational campaigns
in this global associative realm, the evidence here offers an explanation for why
it might be so difficult to build successful transnational advocacy networks.
INGOs in each country have distinct relationships with their home governments,
and these patterns of relating to authorities are carried over into the international
work of these groups. Third, national origin is not only a constraint but also a
source of power. Private and public actors in each INGO’s home country generate
material resources and political support to be wielded in the international realm.
Thus, the evidence presented here offers insight into when certain INGOs are
likely to be more successful in changing the behaviour of other global actors.
Finally, the continued salience of the home country environment in shaping
INGO practices challenges the notion (evident in the concept of a global civil
society and elsewhere in the international relations literature) of the transformative
power of globalization. NGOs whose reach may be increasingly global have been
influenced but not transformed by the global environment, and states retain sub-
stantial power vis-à-vis global civil society actors. Still, the evidence presented
here does not support the conclusion that INGOs are merely tools of their home
government. The influence of state policy on INGOs can be incoherent, indirect
and inadvertent, and officials looking to use INGOs as an ‘arm of the government’
are often frustrated.5 Although INGOs may remain independent of particular for-
eign policies of their home states, they are nevertheless deeply marked by the ways
in which their home state interacts with domestic civil society.
In the following pages, I first describe the incentives and constraints facing
charities in the United States, France and Japan. The second section describes
National origin and transnational activism 153
variation among American, French and Japanese INGOs in terms of size and
advocacy and offers an account of how national origin shapes these outcomes.
Finally, I offer a few thoughts on the interaction of national origin and transna-
tional activism.
France
Although the French reality does not uniformly or consistently conform to the
étatist ideal, the associational realm in France has long been stymied by the
National origin and transnational activism 155
power of the state. Today, despite an explosion of membership in civic associa-
tions (and growing scholarship on French associational life), French non-profits
struggle to enter policy-making circles and attract assistance from private and
institutional donors. The INGO sector is unusually prominent in France, but it
remains small, internally divided and dominated by a small handful of organiza-
tions (Fagnou 2004).
The strict regulation of charities in France reflects a much greater suspicion
(relative to the United States) of private associations. Independent associations
were outlawed until 1901 and continued restriction limited the size of the asso-
ciative sector (Archambault 2001). New social activism beginning in the 1960s,
combined with decentralization of state authority beginning in the 1980s, has
created meaningful interest in and space for charitable groups, yet the civil soci-
ety sector remains weak (Levy 1999). All associations must register with the
state, and several powerful regulatory bodies (including the Cour des comptes
and the Inspection générale des affaires sociales) regularly inspect very promi-
nent charitable groups.
Although tax benefits for charities have become more generous over the past
20 years, the law surrounding tax exemption remains complicated. Associations
receive a reduced value-added tax (VAT) rate on certain goods and generally are
exempt from commercial taxes. To be eligible for tax exemption for charitable
donations, organizations need to either register as ‘general interest’ associations
or apply to the Conseil d’Etat for designation as a public utility association (asso-
ciation reconnaissance d’utilité publique [RUP]), a status that is difficult to
achieve but that affords important additional tax privileges. Changes in the tax
code in 2003 were meant to further encourage private donations, but the formula
is still complex, with individual donors receiving tax relief on 60 per cent of the
value of the donation up to a maximum 10 per cent of the donor’s earnings
(Dehne et al. 2008).
In stark contrast to the United States, the French government is quite permis-
sive of political activities by charities. Regulations place essentially no limit on
the ability of associations to engage in political activities (excluding only those
lobbying actions that would result in private benefit for the individual director of
an association). The only explicit limitation is that specially recognized RUP may
not primarily engage in political action (Council on Foundations 2008a).
Although the law may allow for political action in theory, the political oppor-
tunities available to INGOs are very limited in practice. The foreign policy-
making process in France is relatively centralized (though complex) and largely
closed to private social actors (Lancaster 2007). The primary points of contact for
INGOs can be found at the foreign affairs ministry and the main aid agency, the
Agence Française de Développement (AFD). In addition, several interministerial
consultative structures have been created over the past two decades, and the gov-
ernment has made several recent pledges to increase cooperation with and finan-
cial backing of INGOs.8 in the end, although French NGOs today receive greater
consideration than in the past, meaningful cooperation remains limited and
NGO–government dialogue does not translate into substantive policy change
156 Sarah Stroup
(OECD 2000: 1–25, 2008). Tellingly, a 2001 French foreign affairs ministry
publication claimed that
In other words, NGOs are only used by those governments whose bureaucratic
agencies are too weak to handle the task of foreign aid distribution.
The disregard of French authorities for the NGO sector is visible also in the
low levels of government financing of INGOs. France has long ranked last among
European nations in its support for NGOs as a share of all foreign aid – around 1
per cent compared with an OECD average of 6 per cent (OECD 2008: 46).
Although the number of INGOs receiving funds from French authorities has
increased from 133 in 1998 to 266 in 2006, the size of government grants remains
low (Commission Coopération-Développment [CCD] 2005: 6; Potevin 2001).
Two thirds of government financing for French INGOs is provided by a special
office within the foreign affairs ministry, whereas the leading foreign aid minis-
try, the Agence Française de Developpement, channels very little aid through
INGOs (€6.5 million, or about US$8.2 million, in 2006) (Ministère des Affaires
Étrangères et Européennes [MAEE] 2006). From 2001 to 2005, support from all
French governmental sources accounted for less than 9 per cent of the total
income of all French INGOs (CCD 2008: 13–6; Fagnou 2004).
Compared with the United States, France is a more challenging environment
for charities, even for the domestically popular INGOs. The strict regulation of
private associations reflects a suspicion of action outside the state that might
contravene the ‘general will’, and whereas recent reforms have sought to encour-
age charitable donations, raising funds from private and institutional donors
remains difficult. French charities are given almost free reign to engage in politi-
cal action, but they tend to be excluded from decision-making circles.
Japan
The charitable sector in Japan has seen a flurry of activity over the past decade. In
the mid-1990s, the size of the Japanese non-profit sector was well below the
developed-country average, accounting for 3.5 per cent of total employment (com-
pared with 7.8 per cent in the United States and 4.9 per cent in France) (Yamauchi
et al. 1999: 247). For over a century, charitable organizations in Japan had been
largely governed by the Civil Code of 1896, but major reforms in the 1990s aimed
to create a more hospitable environment for charities (although the seemingly con-
stant process of reform since then has created significant uncertainty). Importantly,
the growth of Japanese civil society, including INGOs, has come about through the
National origin and transnational activism 157
state’s re-evaluation of the role of private actors and an intentional move by the
state to reduce regulatory barriers and increase financial assistance.
According to Pekkanen (2006: 16), Japanese NGOs historically faced ‘perhaps
the most severe regulatory environments in the developed world’, and this system
remained virtually unchanged through the twentieth century. Registration as a
legal entity was very difficult and subject to the discretion of the relevant govern-
ment ministry; the many groups that chose not to acquire this legal standing could
not open bank accounts or hire staff (Auger 2003: 172). Today, there are two basic
types of legal status relevant to a discussion of INGOs. First, the 1998 non-profit
organization (NPO) law created a much lower threshold for legal recognition, and
by March 2008, more than 34,000 groups had been newly registered as NPOs
(‘Giving Nonprofits Their Due’ 2008). In addition, organizations have also long
been able to apply to the relevant ministry to be recognized as ‘public interest
corporations’ (PICs), a status that comes with greater benefits but is difficult to
attain. Today, a few prominent Japanese INGOs have achieved PIC status, includ-
ing Cooperative for Assistance and Relief Everywhere (CARE) Japan, Japanese
Organization for International Cooperation in Family Planning (JOICFP), and
Plan Japan (Hirata 2002: 41). As of December 2008, all PICs are required to
re-register within the next 5 years under a new legal system (Japan Center for
International Exchange [JCIE] 2007a: 4). Many civil society organizations,
including INGOs, remain unincorporated, lacking legal status but free from
administrative discretion.
Favourable tax treatment is also difficult to acquire and requires a separate set
of applications to the tax authorities. For PICs, non-profit activities are exempt
from corporate income taxes. Charitable donations to PICs are only tax-deductible
if the group has obtained special designation; as of August 2007, fewer than 1,000
of Japan’s 25,000 PICs had successfully obtained this status (compared with over
1 million groups in the United States eligible to receive tax-deductible contribu-
tions) (JCIE 2007: 4; Pekkanen 2006: 68). The 1998 law allowed more civil
society groups to attain legal status, but it did not grant NPOs exemption from
corporate income taxes. Tax reform in 2001 and 2003 allowed certain NPOs to
apply to receive tax-deductible contributions from individuals and corporations.
Of 16,000 NPOs existing in July 2004, only 24 had been granted this status
(Pekkanen 2006: 71). For individual donors, deductions can only be claimed on
half the value of the donation, in an amount not to exceed 2.5 per cent of the
donor’s annual income (Dehne et al. 2008).
Administrative oversight complicates the regulation of charities’ advocacy, with
wide variation in the treatment of different kinds of groups (Pekkanen 2006: 72–4).
Legally, political activity (excluding explicit support of a candidate or political
party) by registered non-profit groups is allowed (Council on Foundations 2008b).
However, in practice, bureaucratic discretion over non-profit groups affects the
initial decision to register and later decisions on political activities. Many advocacy
groups expect to be denied legal status and thus do not register (including 90 per
cent of internationally oriented groups), whereas the state ‘often seeks to co-opt, or
supervise, the groups that do get legal status’ (Pekkanen 2006: 74–5).
158 Sarah Stroup
Political opportunities for Japanese INGOs are changing. Historically, the foreign
policy-making process had been closed to the INGOs that officials viewed with con-
descension and disdain, but, as Reimann (2003) persuasively argues, the Japanese
state began to deliberately engage Japanese INGOs in the late 1980s in response to
international trends supporting state–NGO partnerships. In the 1990s, the government
created a series of consultative fora that were institutionalized within the Ministry of
Foreign Affairs (MOFA), the Ministry of Finance, and elsewhere (Lancaster 2007:
122). Regular meetings between NGO representatives and MOFA officials began in
1996, and the Japan International Cooperation Agency (JICA), Japan’s lead aid
agency, began meeting with NGOs in 1998 (JICA 2008: 6). Although private sector
groups are given greater consideration today, the most recent OECD review of
Japan’s foreign aid found that NGO relations with the relevant government bodies
were ‘cordial, but yet too complicated and slow’ (OECD 2003: 49).
The major area in which the state–INGO relationship has changed is in the area
of financial support. Beginning in the late 1980s, several different government
agencies created funding opportunities for Japanese INGOs, including a subsidy
programme at MOFA (1989) and a postal savings scheme (1991). The collabora-
tive ‘Japan Platform’ brings together MOFA, corporate donors and NGOs to
provide several million dollars in emergency humanitarian assistance (JCIE
2005). In the late 1990s, MOFA moved beyond funding particular projects at
Japanese NGOs and offered greater provision for developing the core administra-
tive capacity of these groups (JICA 2008: 6). Still, data from 1992 to 2003 sug-
gest that, despite a shift in official policy in favour of sustaining the NGO sector,
the share of Japanese official development assistance (ODA) channelled through
NGOs has remained fairly constant and low (around 2–3 per cent) (Agg 2006).
From 2000 to 2006, grants to Japanese NGOs increased but still averaged only
US$7.03 million (MOFA 2007). Some NGOs complain that the MOFA subsidy
programme requires lengthy application for single-year projects (MOFA 2005). A
recent survey of 277 Japanese INGOs found that an average of 3.36 per cent of
Japanese INGO income comes from Japanese government agencies, and only
about 10 per cent of Japanese INGOs receive support from MOFA (JICA 2008:
32–9). Although the government’s position towards INGOs may be changing
relative to the 1960s and 1970s, in a comparative sense, the Japanese state still
offers only limited resources to its young INGO sector.
The profiles above suggest three very different approaches to INGOs in the
United States, France and Japan. Table 8.1 offers a summary of these variations
in each state’s regulations, political opportunities and direct financial support of
INGOs. The importance of these differences in state practices can be seen in how
they shape the size and advocacy efforts of INGOs in their home country.
countries. Although these groups may claim to be global citizens, decisions are
made not by global headquarters but instead by the national offices – particularly
by the national office where the organization was originally created.9 Those
national offices, and the broader subsectors of INGOs, have been fundamentally
shaped by their domestic environments.
Size
If data on individual INGOs are difficult to come by, gathering comparable data
on the subsector of internationally oriented charities in each country is a nearly
impossible task. A recent report from the Urban Institute offers excellent detail on
the American subsector based on tax forms filed by all non-profits, but the best
data from France and Japan are gathered by umbrella groups (the CCD in France
and the Japan NGO Center for International Cooperation (JANIC) in Japan) that
survey member organizations, which can exclude many smaller INGOs. With that
caveat, even imperfect data from each country suggests wide variation among the
three countries in the size of the INGO sector.
The American INGO sector includes more than 4,000 organizations with a
combined income of US$15.7 billion in 2003.10 This figure includes many large
160 Sarah Stroup
organizations, including 449 groups that reported revenue of more than US$2
million. Two of the largest American INGOs, CARE and World Vision US,
reported incomes of US$600 million and US$962 million in 2006, respectively.
In France, INGOs are somewhat less numerous and much smaller. The most
recent CCD (2008: 7) survey estimated the total INGO population at several
thousand; the 400 survey respondents reported a combined income of US$1.24
billion in 2005. The sector is dominated by a few large organizations: the com-
bined income of the four largest French INGOs accounts for a third of the sec-
tor’s total income (Fagnou 2004: 60). Finally, the Japanese INGO sector is quite
small but growing. JANIC reported only 59 members in 1980, but there were
more than 400 INGOs by 2007 (Hirata 2002: 34; MOFA 2007: 3). An official
survey of almost 300 of these groups reported a combined income of ¥28.6 bil-
lion (or US$265 million) in 2004. However, many Japanese INGOs are barely
international: although half have overseas offices, 70 per cent of those have
offices in only one country, and only six have offices in ten or more countries
(JICA 2008: 25). As in France, the Japanese INGO sector is dominated by just a
few groups: the combined budgets of the top ten organizations account for 57
per cent of the total sector’s income (JICA 2008: 32). Finally, many of the larg-
est INGOs in Japan (including the three largest – Plan Japan, World Vision Japan
and MSF Japan) are the local offices of INGOs established elsewhere (JICA
2008: 31).
Patterns of state–INGO relations help us understand these differences. In the
United States, the ease of legal registration both enables the growth of organiza-
tions and reflects a deeper social acceptance of the legitimacy and importance of
private charitable organizations. With the most generous regulations of tax
exemptions on charitable contributions, the United States helps its charities,
including INGOs, and offers attractive incentives to potential donors. Finally, the
substantial volume (in both absolute and relative terms) of foreign aid channelled
through American INGOs helps account for the substantial size of these groups.
In the end, many American INGOs have been able to attract enormous amounts
of both public and private dollars, and ‘private sources of support appear compat-
ible with or even attract public support rather than crowding out public dollars’
(Reid and Kerlin 2006: 23).
In France, both private and public fundraising is much more difficult. Although
basic registration is not terribly onerous, complex legal regulation of charitable
donations makes private fundraising difficult. Although private donations account
for the majority of income for most French INGOs, these donations are hard-won.
In France, charitable donations account for only 0.32 per cent of GDP, compared
with 1.85 per cent in the United States (Salamon et al. 2004), despite regulatory
changes meant to encourage more charitable giving. The dearth of government
funds in France has pushed many French INGOs to look to supranational institu-
tions such as the European Union for funding, but EU funds still accounted for
an average of only 17 per cent of income in 2003 (CCD 2005). Fortunately, for
the INGO sector, international assistance is one of the most popular charitable
causes in France, allowing groups such as MSF and Handicap International to
National origin and transnational activism 161
grow at impressive rates. Still, MSF, the largest French INGO, is still only about
a third of the size of its American counterparts CARE and World Vision.
The Japanese state’s policies have limited the size of the Japanese INGO sector,
though changes in these policies may result in significant expansion in the future.
The greater ease of registration after the 1998 NPO law has resulted in a drastic
increase in the number of Japanese INGOs. Still, these groups remain small. The
inability of most Japanese INGOs to offer private donors tax breaks on charitable
contributions has limited the ability of INGOs to ‘carve out a strong, independent
position vis-à-vis the state and made them increasingly reliant on state funds for
growth’ (Reimann 2003: 315). However, these state funds, although increasing and
more abundant than in France, are still scarcer than in the United States.
Advocacy
A second major area of substantial variation among INGOs is in the prioritization
of and approach to advocacy. Although some major relief and development
INGOs have recently created advocacy offices, political activity by American
INGOs is quite low and is generally limited to insider strategies of negotiation
and lobbying, whereas high-profile and confrontational campaigns remain the
exception rather than the rule. In 2003, only 2 per cent of American INGOs
reported any lobbying expenditures, a rate consistent with the American non-
profit sector as a whole (Reid and Kerlin 2006: 16). Although this figure may not
capture other forms of advocacy to influence public opinion and public policy, it
remains incredibly low. Although many leading American INGOs have Washington
offices, their efforts focus on maintaining contact with donors and following
congressional activity on narrow aspects of international affairs (Lancaster 2007:
240; Stoddard 2006: 60–3). According to CARE (personal interview, CARE
staffer, April 26, 2006), a leading American INGO, it has a ‘fairly open door’ with
the US government, but it avoids overt confrontation:
Some organizations don’t share our agenda, or they don’t manage their rela-
tions with the Administration or Congress; they act in an uncomfortable man-
ner, and we’re not interested in joining with them. . . . Sometimes those
organizations can say things and do things that we can’t do – they push the
envelope. This doesn’t mean that we don’t want them to say or do those
things, but they are pushing instead of keeping the door open or not being
constructive. We don’t work that way . . . we wouldn’t be accusatory, we
wouldn’t be rude, we wouldn’t be pointing fingers. For example, in Iraq, other
CAREs wanted to use CARE International to ‘get to’ the US government, but
CARE USA didn’t want that to happen.
The small budgets of Japanese INGOs keep most organizations from hiring
professional policy staff or developing political expertise (Hirata 2002: 42). Still,
NGOs have had some success in pressuring MOFA to change particular aid proj-
ects, and some Japanese INGOs have begun to lobby Diet members on foreign
affairs issues (Hirata 2002; Lancaster 2007: 140). The above-mentioned survey
found that advocacy is receiving new attention among Japanese INGOs, with 26
National origin and transnational activism 163
Table 8.2 Variation in INGO structure and strategy
per cent reporting some advocacy work (although advocacy is defined here as
only ‘making constructive proposals’ and excludes ‘criticism of the government’)
(JICA 2008: 12). Over its short history, cooperation in formal consultative forums
(which can involve both criticism and co-optation) has marked the INGO sector’s
approach to its government (Hirata 2002: 141).
Again, national origin sheds light on the origin of these differences (summa-
rized in Table 8.2). Legal regulations and the political opportunity structure have
discouraged advocacy work by American INGOs. The law on lobbying is strict,
and regulation of more general political activity (education and campaigning) is
vague. In addition, many groups rely on government funding, and in the United
States, ‘it is common for nonprofit executives and board members to believe that
accepting government funding legally restricts their political activity more than it
actually does’ (Chaves et al. 2004: 297). At the same time, the fragmented nature
of political authority makes it difficult to achieve broad policy change, which
lowers the payoff of very public campaigns. Equally important, the state’s open-
ness to collaboration with INGOs encourages INGOs to focus their political work
on achieving narrow policy changes in a cooperative rather than confrontational
manner (Stoddard 2006).
Legal regulations in France allow for the very public and vocal criticism of
state policy. Because state officials remain distrustful of the capacity and
importance of INGO activities, however, there is little incentive or opportunity
for cooperative work on developing specific policy changes. Although several
prominent INGO leaders, including Bernard Kouchner, have risen to powerful
positions in the state, this does not appear to have translated into significantly
greater openness to the INGO community. Laws and opportunities, as well as a
basic belief in the appropriateness of state leadership, drive French INGOs to
use their public statements to call states (both in France and elsewhere) to fulfil
their responsibilities. Importantly, however, the French case demonstrates that
it is not only state policies that determine INGO strategies. a greater number of
state–INGO consultative structures in France do not seem to have diminished
the desire among French INGOs themselves to remain independent of public
authorities.
164 Sarah Stroup
Although Japanese INGOs are young, their existence is made possible by
bureaucratic authorities with significant oversight of their affairs. As in France,
foreign policy authority is more centralized and less accessible to social groups
than in the United States, and private charitable associations lack the public
legitimacy accorded to the state. In fact, one INGO director ran a recent campaign
with funding from Oxfam, because there ‘were no possible sources of funds in
Japan for advocacy in Japan’ (JCIE 2007b). Still, the Japanese state has signalled
a greater willingness to collaborate with Japanese INGOs than its French coun-
terpart. Given this development, it is likely that as the Japanese INGO sector
grows and expands its global activities, it will attempt insider collaboration with
political authorities rather than employ public and confrontational campaigns.
Conclusion
This chapter suggests that two of the most important aspects of relief and develop-
ment INGOs – the size of their resources and their approach to advocacy – are
deeply shaped by the policies and practices of their home state. The above profiles
of American, French and Japanese INGOs speak directly to the theme of transna-
tional activism in this volume. The ability of these groups to engage in transna-
tional activism is dependent on the resources at their disposal – and some INGOs
are more numerous and larger than others. Most basically, the number and size of
American INGOs are unmatched, allowing them an extensive transnational reach,
whereas on the other end, Japanese INGOs focus on relief and development in
Asia. In addition, the ways in which INGOs engage in transnational activism are
highly determined by how these groups initially began to interact with authorities
in their domestic environments. Legal limitations on advocacy work and a porous
policy environment reward insider, cooperative strategies in the United States,
while almost the reverse holds in France. Although any participant at the World
Social Forum would recognize that there are many ways to engage in transnational
activism, an explanation is needed for why those varied practices exist. National
origin may be a powerful explanation.
The varied practices of these INGOs affect their power as transnational activ-
ists in two ways. First, at least in the relief and development sector analyzed here,
transnational activists are highly fragmented because of divergent understandings
of what advocacy does and should involve. In their analysis of leading relief and
development INGOs, Lindenberg and Bryant (2001) report that INGOs involved
in advocacy find the process of building consensus both within and among
INGOs daunting, because other groups have different approaches to advocacy,
and the final position might be bland or watered down (202–4). These divisions
impede the ability of INGOs to speak with a single voice (a fact well recognized
by practitioners themselves), perhaps reducing the power of the INGO sector as
a whole vis-à-vis state actors.
In addition, the varied practices of INGOs become sources of power for indi-
vidual organizations. In service delivery, the substantial resources of American
National origin and transnational activism 165
INGOs may make them more appealing partners for development in the field than
their French counterparts. In advocacy, INGOs are more likely to succeed when
their approach is well received by their target. One international example comes
from the World Bank: staffers express more willingness to cooperate with NGOs
that provide information and expertise; an INGO whose political repertoire con-
sists of protest strategies is, thus, unlikely to gain access to key World Bank
decision-makers (Nelson 2000). At the national level, anecdotal evidence sug-
gests that American INGOs used to quiet cooperation with governments may
have a difficult time in France, where most French INGOs engage in vocal protest
(CARE 2004). In sum, the power of any INGO in a particular context is deter-
mined, in part, by factors related to its national origin.
The focus of this analysis has been the relationship between INGOs and their
environments. This approach echoes sociological investigations of social move-
ments, in which it has been widely recognized that external resources and
political opportunities shape the strategies and ultimate success of social move-
ment actors (McAdam et al. 2001). Although the global civil society literature
posits that globalization has opened up an entirely new set of international
opportunities, it has yet to be proven that such a global environment is now the
primary point of reference for internationally active groups. the international
environment may expand the range of strategic choices for INGOs but national
governments remain the targets of transnational activists (Tarrow 2005). The
ability of INGOs to change these state policies depends on being well received
in these domestic political arenas. Outside the home country – including both in
the ‘field’ where services are being delivered and in other developed countries
– an INGO’s strategies may not fit the expectations and practices of local actors.
Of course, there are a few limitations to the above analysis. First, the available
data on INGOs may not capture many of the smaller and more radical organiza-
tions, particularly in Japan and France where the data are gathered by umbrella
groups conducting surveys of member organizations. Because many of these
more radical groups also tend to be less formal in their organizational structure,
it is hard to know what is being left out of the above analysis. Ultimately, we need
much more information about both individual organizations and entire sectors
within the INGO community.
In addition, the organizational practices of any single INGO are shaped by a
variety of factors, including individual leaders, international opportunities and
the issue area in which the INGO works. National origin needs to be added to
this list as an important and enduring influence on organizational practice, but
the short profiles here are perhaps overly static. States change their policies
towards the charitable sector, sometimes mimicking other states (as the case of
Japan often illustrates), and INGOs occasionally adopt the practices of other
organizations (as can be seen in the current enthusiasm for advocacy throughout
Western INGOs). Further research is needed to understand how national origin
interacts with these other variables to produce such substantial diversity within
the INGO community.
166 Sarah Stroup
Notes
1 The approach of Cooley and Ron (2002) emphasizes materialist factors; sociological
institutionalism not only incorporates these factors (as coercive mechanisms) but also
examines the role of social norms. This chapter focuses on materialist factors, but
domestic normative pressures are also important in shaping INGO practices.
2 The popular boomerang model (Keck and Sikkink 1998), for example, has generated
many studies that examine how local political structures affect transnational coalitions,
but the focus of this work is on local politics in the developing world rather than in the
developed countries where the world’s leading INGOs were initially formed and from
where they continue to operate.
3 In a ranking of countries based on the number of INGO headquarters, the United States
is first and France is fourth. See UIA, ‘Figure 2.1.8 (c) Geographic distribution’,
Yearbook of International Organizations 2003: column I.
4 For INGO case studies across different issue areas, see Stroup 2008.
5 For example, Andrew Natsios’ 2003 comment to the INGO community set of a firestorm
of indignation. Andrew Natsios, Closing Remarks, InterAction Forum Closing Plenary
Session, May 21, 2003 (available at www.usaid.gov, accessed January 14, 2010).
6 Although these exemptions can only be claimed by those who itemize their tax returns
(approximately 30 per cent of the population), non-itemizers give at levels often excee-
ding those of the very wealthy (Congressional Budget Office [CBO] 2002).
7 These figures include spending through for-profit contractors, which are included in the
category of ‘private voluntary organizations’ used by USAID. The term ‘aid’ here is
shorthand for ODA.
8 The major consultative structures include the Commission Coopération Développement
(created in 1983), and the Haut Counseil de la Coopération Internationale (1999). In July
2001, a non-binding Charter was signed between the state and representatives of civil
society in which the state pledged to increase its financial support, promote charitable
giving and allow for greater participation by NGOs in the policy-making process. A 2008
OECD review of French aid reports that French officials aim to double the share of ODA
channeled through NGOs (from 1 per cent to 2 per cent) (OECD 2008: 46).
9 Within the CARE International (CI) confederation, for example, only three national
offices actually run field programmes, and CARE USA accounted for more than 80 per
cent of all CI revenue in 2004. MSF International is a less cohesive confederation –
Johanna Simeant suggests treating MSF France and MSF Belgium as different
INGOs – but MSF France still retains the international leadership role within MSF
International.
10 This number is only for international development and assistance organizations (not
cultural or academic groups). This category does include some types of organizations
(such as human rights groups) that may not be counted in the French or Japanese sur-
veys, although this is difficult to assess because JANIC and CCD do not list respon-
dents. The two narrow categories of ‘international relief’ and ‘general assistance’
organizations from the Urban Institute report include 2,066 organizations with a com-
bined income of US$9.2 billion (Reid and Kerlin 2006: 8).
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Suppress Nonprofits’ Political Activity?’, American Sociological Review, 69: 292–316.
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de solidarité internationale, Paris: Ministère des Affaires Étrangères.
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‘Giving Nonprofits Their Due’, The Japan Times, May 14, 2008.
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Part III
Representation and
discourse
9 The representational power of
civil society organizations in
global AIDS governance
Advocating for children in global
health politics
Anna Holzscheiter
Introduction
The ever-increasing influence of civil society organizations (CSOs) in the very
formulation of global standards and public policies, rather than only their role as
contesters, promoters or implementers of global norms, stands out as one of the
most remarkable features of the changing nature of global politics in the early
twenty-first century.1 In this chapter, I will discuss one particular facet of the pri-
vate authority embodied by CSOs in international politics (Cutler et al. 1999; Hall
and Biersteker 2002; Knill and Lehmkuhl 2002; Ruggie 2004): representational
power. Although new structures of global governance involving private actors (not
for profit and for profit) have come under particular scrutiny in terms of their
legitimacy and accountability, the critical exploration of representational power is
often neglected. Therefore, I focus on the politics of representation and the critical
role that CSOs occupy in the representation of the interests and fates of vulnerable
and weak population groups. As I will argue, it is particularly population groups
whose status as fully fledged citizens is questioned – such as children – that see
their interests, needs and rights in many cases being misrepresented in advocacy
practices of globally operating CSOs (Hahn and Holzscheiter 2005).
CSOs – particularly those whose activities can be subsumed under the broad
umbrella term ‘advocacy’ – must be considered the class of private actors in
global governance that is most directly involved in representational practices of
disenfranchised population groups. By discussing the consequences of CSOs’
representational practices in a particularly intense terrain of global governance –
HIV/AIDS control – and a particularly critical group of subjects being commonly
targeted in advocacy efforts – children – this chapter will illustrate the benefits as
well as the dangers of representation through CSOs. In a first step, I will argue
that CSOs are taken to be the main source for closing representational gaps in
global governance. Rather than showing how and when they close this gap, I will
discuss the problematic nature of representation and, as a consequence, argue that
representational functions entail a power that is easily abused with detrimental
effects on the constituency on whose behalf CSOs are acting.2 It is claimed here
that the relationship between CSOs and other institutions in global health
governance (GHG) can both enhance and undermine public accountability and
174 Anna Holzscheiter
representative democracy in global public policy-making. Studies on the delib-
erative potential of global governance have sought to demonstrate that more civil
society means fairer representation of interest and a greater level of democracy
(see e.g. Ellis 2002; Payne and Samhat 2004). Broadly speaking, these studies
depart from a state-centric perspective and, as such, value any kind of civil soci-
ety involvement in intergovernmental affairs as a significant step towards greater
inclusivity and accountability. In contrast, this chapter shares the critical focus on
the public legitimacy of CSOs evident in many contemporary debates on the
democratic nature of global civil society (see e.g. Cullen and Morrow 2001; Piper
and Uhlin 2004). It will be shown that in global public policy-making, it is often
a few powerful CSOs that participate in a multiplicity of different governance
frameworks. As such, on closer inspection, the diversification of interests and
perspectives through CSOs turns out as largely illusory.
In a second step, this chapter will consider the particular case of children
affected by HIV/AIDS and advance the claim that they are an especially interest-
ing and, at the same time, problematic case in terms of representation of interests
and fates through third parties in global governance. Out of the estimated 2.5
million persons newly infected with HIV in 2007, 420,000 were children below
the age of 15 years (i.e. 16 per cent).3 If one applies the global definition of child-
hood as the age span up to 18 years, thereby including the high-risk group of
adolescents between the age of 15 and 18 years, these numbers multiply. Thus,
children and adolescents constitute a large group of those affected most strongly
by the epidemic.
In this chapter, children will be defined as all persons up to the age of 18 years,
the common definition that has been enshrined in the 1989 UN Convention on the
Rights of the Child (CRC). The traditional perception of children in international
politics and law has been determined by their immaturity, dependence and vulner-
ability, placing the responsibility for the well-being of children predominantly in
the hands of adults (Holzscheiter 2010). However, with the CRC, the status of the
child in international law was profoundly transformed. The CRC stipulates that
every child has the right to participate in any decisions that affect his or her life
(Article 12). Children, thus, are no longer solely portrayed as the beneficiaries of
adult charity and care but seen as social agents who are (according to their evolv-
ing capacities) able to voice their interests and opinions in matters that are of
direct relevance to their lives. Despite the ‘participatory turn’ that has inspired
governmental and non-governmental policies towards children since 1989, for
many children and especially those living on the margins of their societies (street
children, orphans, internally displaced children, unaccompanied refugees or, in
fact, children living with or affected by HIV/AIDS), the right to be seen as an
active social agent rather than a passive victim remains an illusion. As I will argue
below, the current ambiguity in representational practices of global CSOs – oscil-
lating between promoting empowerment and rights-based approaches (RBAs) on
the one hand and perpetuating global discourses on victimization and suffering on
the other hand – adds to the neglect of children’s agency through meaningful
participation in policy-making processes that affect them directly.
The representational power of civil society organizations 175
This chapter makes a case for the need to link the participatory principles of
the CRC (a human rights treaty that enjoys near universal ratification4) with
greater visibility and input of children into CSOs’ programmes and policies.
However, it does neither claim that children of any age should automatically be
considered fully capable to voice their interests nor that any decision-making
process on behalf of children’s well-being must necessarily be accompanied by
children’s input. However, in cases in which CSOs portray themselves as legiti-
mate representatives of children’s interests and see this representational function
as their primary raison d’être, I argue that the mechanisms and philosophies
through which they remain accountable towards this group of persons should be
carefully scrutinized.
Providing evidence on how CSOs participate in the global governance of HIV/
AIDS, I will present two findings that are at odds with a full realization of the
participatory principle of the CRC. First, even in child-related programme and
policy areas, those who are endowed with representational authority are fre-
quently neither child-specific agencies nor agencies actively promoting participa-
tion of children or direct accountability towards children. Second, within those
child-specific global CSOs operating in the field of HIV/AIDS, the popularity of
traditional discourses on vulnerability, victimhood and ‘salvation’ sits uncomfort-
ably with more progressive perspectives on children as social agents. These
CSOs’ need to portray themselves as legitimate representatives of marginalized,
mute and suffering groups, thus, stands in stark contrast to the accountability
mechanisms and emancipatory norms they promote. Evidently, the dynamics of
representational power described in this chapter do not automatically apply to any
CSO that contributes in one form or another to GHG. The organizations discussed
in this chapter are mainly very large, established advocacy non-governmental
organizations (NGOs) with very dispersed and heterogeneous constituencies. As
such, challenges towards a balanced representation of interests are much greater,
and the potential to abuse representational power much higher than for smaller,
more grassroots-oriented actors.
This chapter will develop its argument in three steps: first, I will discuss the
relevance of CSOs’ representational power from a general point of view, high-
lighting the main facets of such an understanding of power. Second, I will briefly
locate CSOs’ advocacy activities within the vast landscape of global AIDS gov-
ernance, looking specifically at their efforts to advocate for children affected by
the epidemic. In a final step, this chapter will apply the concept of representa-
tional power to the activities of five influential CSOs that claim to represent
children’s interests in global AIDS governance, discussing both who represents
children and how their views are being represented.
Conclusion
Claims for justified and legitimate representation of interests and fates of indi-
viduals are easier to uphold in cases in which these individuals do not have the
intellectual capacity to act in their own interests (infants and young children) or
are supposed to be mute and defenceless human beings without the capacity or
opportunity to speak up for themselves.22 Although foreign representation of
interests and fates of children affected by HIV/AIDS through CSOs is a vital
ingredient in securing their rights and access to health interventions and services
as well as social and economic benefits, it is important to emphasize a certain
dilemma with regard to advocating for such ‘silenced groups’: If advocacy for the
vulnerable and voiceless is their main source of authority and legitimacy, CSOs
might tend to sustain discourses on vulnerability and protection rather than eman-
cipation to justify their own role in the policymaking process. As such, they
potentially run the danger of contributing to the perpetuation of discourses of
victimization and vulnerability and fortify the identities of children as a particu-
larly weak, defenceless population group.
The struggle for legitimacy among CSOs often leads them to buy into powerful
imaginaries – such as the emblematic AIDS orphan – which promise strong reso-
nance with the media and, as such, access to the public sphere. It is barely surpris-
ing that advocacy CSOs themselves do not reflect publicly on the representational
power dynamics described in this chapter – if they did, they would be undermin-
ing their own legitimacy and self-destructively challenge perhaps the strongest
rationale for their access to global governance institutions.
Although the literature on (global) governance emphasizes the importance of
CSOs in terms of enhanced opportunities for citizens to participate and voice
186 Anna Holzscheiter
their concerns, one should also ask how the voice of those persons that are seen
and treated as ‘half-citizens’ or ‘not-yet-citizens’ is included and represented
through CSOs in GHG. It seems warranted to further investigate the representa-
tional practices of CSOs in GHG and to inquire into their ethics of representation
by critically investigating how more direct and meaningful involvement of those
persons, such as children, who are commonly taken to be dependent, immature
and voiceless is ensured in processes of standard setting, policy-making and
policy implementation. Ultimately, thus, looking at the authority that CSOs wield
over how to represent such groups in powerful global governance institutions and
networks is an important aspect in critical studies on the contemporary character
and future prospects of an ever-expanding global civil society.
Notes
1 An earlier version of this chapter was presented at the 2007 Peter Wall Summer Institute
for Research ‘Civil Society Organizations and Global Health Governance’, London,
6–7 October 2007. I am grateful to the participants of the workshop as well as to Kelley
Lee and Klaus Dingwerth for their valuable comments on the paper. Research on the
subject of this paper would not have been possible without the support of the German
Research Council (DFG).
2 For other critical studies on advocacy and representation see Hesford and Kozol (2005)
and, specifically on children’s rights, Hertel (2006).
3 Unite for Children, Unite Against AIDS campaign, ‘Global Overview’, at http://www.
uniteforchildren.org/about_globaloverview.html (accessed 20 August 2010).
4 Only the United States and Somalia have not ratified the treaty so far.
5 For similar arguments with regard to political representation of the Southern poor
through CSOs see Nyamugasira (1998).
6 During its six rounds of funding, the Global Fund has disbursed 68 per cent of its
finances to governments, 19 per cent to NGOs/Private Sector and 13 per cent to multi-
lateral institutions, see Global Fund, ‘Distribution of funding after 7 rounds’, http://
www.theglobalfund.org/en/distributionfunding/?lang=en (accessed 10 July 2009).
7 Declaration of Alma-Ata, International Conference on Primary Health Care, Alma-Ata,
USSR, 6–12 September 1978, available at http://www.who.int/hpr/NPH/docs/declara-
tion_almaata.pdf (accessed 10 July 2009).
8 See UNAIDS on partnerships with civil society, available at http://www.unaids.org/en/
GetStarted/CivilSociety.asp (accessed 10 July 2009).
9 Among the most well known of these partnerships targeting children as a specific group
are the Global Alliance for Vaccines and Immunizations (GAVI Alliance), in which
the International Paediatric Association is the leading civil society partnering body, the
Global Alliance on Improved Nutrition (GAIN), the Roll Back Malaria Initiative, the Stop
TB Partnership, and the Partnership for Maternal, Newborn and Child Health.
10 See Global Fund, Board Members, available at http://www.theglobalfund.org/en/about/
board/members/ (accessed 10 July 2009).
11 In Somalia, for example, World Vision is one of the two principal recipients of the GFATM
grant; see http://www.theglobalfund.org/en/savinglives/somalia/tb2/?part=part3 (accessed
20 August 2010).
12 These organizations are Bernard van Leer Foundation, CARE, Hope for African
Children Initiative, Save the Children and World Vision. See http://www.unicef.org/
aids/files/Framework_English.pdf (accessed 10 July 2009).
The representational power of civil society organizations 187
13 Unite for Children, Unite against Aids Campaign, http://www.uniteforchildren.org/
about.html (accessed 20 August 2010).
14 The ‘best interests’ principle is a generally recognized principle in international law,
enshrined in Article 3(1) of the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child: ‘In all
actions concerning children, whether undertaken by public or private social welfare
institutions, courts of law, administrative authorities or legislative bodies, the best inter-
ests of the child shall be a primary consideration’; U.N. Doc. A/Res/44/25, 20
November 1989.
15 The Child’s Rights Information Centre (CRIN) database lists 481 organizations that
specifically focus on children living with HIV/AIDS; see http://www.crin.org/organizations/
index.asp (accessed 10 July 2009). Among the most influential advocacy organizations in
terms of children’ rights and HIV/AIDS are Save the Children, Human Rights Watch,
Amnesty International, the Bernard van Leer Foundation, Healthlink Worldwide or Terre
des Hommes.
16 Médecins sans Frontières (MSF), Fact Sheet: Paediatric HIV/AIDS, June 2005,
available at: http://www.who.int/hiv/paediatric/MSF_fs_paediatric.pdf (accessed 10
July 2009).
17 See members list at http://www.who.int/pmnch/about/members/en/index.html (accessed
10 July 2009).
18 International HIV/AIDS Alliance on ‘Orphans and vulnerable children’, see http://
www.aidsalliance.org/sw10212.asp (accessed 10 July 2009).
19 See for example, a World Vision publication on the ‘voices of Zambian children and
their families’ (World Vision 2005).
20 Previous research into discursive clashes between advocacy CSOs on the one hand and
organizations of child workers and sex workers on the other has attempted to demon-
strate what happens in case those that are being represented in transnational forums
begin to organize themselves and, potentially, to advance discourses and interests that
diverge drastically from those embraced by Northern advocacy organizations; see Hahn
and Holzscheiter (2005).
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Hesford, W. S. and Kozol, W. (2005) Just Advocacy?: Women’s Human Rights, Transnational
Feminisms, and the Politics of Representation, Toronto: Rutgers University Press.
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The representational power of civil society organizations 189
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10 Global justice movements and
the mass media
Conceptual reflections and empirical
findings1
Dieter Rucht
Introduction
This chapter focuses on media strategies and media coverage with regard to
Global Justice Movements (GJMs).2 Which media-related strategies do these
movements apply to make their voices heard? Which aspects of their protest
campaigns are covered by the mass media, which are ignored – and if so, why?
The first section discusses the linkages and interactions between social move-
ments and mass media in a conceptual perspective. The second section aims at
providing an empirically grounded picture of two aspects. First, I want to typify
and illustrate the basic strategies employed by GJMs to get media coverage and
support. Next, the effects of these attempts will be documented by looking at how
German newspapers covered five campaigns taking place in different countries
between 1999 and 2007. In addition, I will compare the coverage of one of these
campaigns in German and Czech newspapers. The final section summarizes the
main findings and stresses the difficulties of GJMs in improving GJMs’ media
coverage.
1 In contemporary democracies, the mass media are a system in its own right
that can be influenced, yet only partially controlled, from an external posi-
tion. This is why the mass media are sometimes dubbed the fourth power
beside the legislative, executive and juridical branches. Considering the mass
media as a power is justified insofar as they are operating as ‘moulders’
rather than being only passive ‘mirrors’ of reality (Rosengren and Windhal
1972). In following their own logic and needs, the mass media serve as filters
for what comes on the agenda, who has standing and which positions and
claims are supported or criticized in which way (Bennett and Entman 2001).
Global justice movements and the mass media 191
Thereby, they have an impact on people’s minds and opinions. They legiti-
mize or delegitimize certain actors, viewpoints and interests and affect peo-
ple’s behaviours, last but not least electoral behaviour. In rare occasions, the
mass media are even conducive in toppling political leaders. Accordingly,
those who win the media’s attention and support have tapped a resource that
ultimately may result not only in policy change but also in a new power
constellation. Gaining influence on the media is equal to potentially gaining
political power, although not the tangible power of the holders of political
offices.
2 Getting the attention and support of the mass media is especially difficult for
political outsiders such as social movements who typically challenge the
status quo. Many other actors, including critics of or opponents to the move-
ments, also seek to influence the mass media. Accordingly, movements are
entering a field of fierce competition for scarce public attention (Hilgartner
and Bosk 1988). GJMs are aware of this fact. They also know that the mass
media are indispensable to them. After all, these movements have extremely
ambitious aims and try to reach large audiences not only within but also
beyond the confines of a nation-state. To be sure, enlarging the scope of
conflict is not the movements’ ultimate goal. Rather, it helps them to reach
masses of people who, based on the aggregate effect of many individual
changes or via the impact of mass publics on political decision-makers, even-
tually contribute to changes in society and politics. This makes it interesting
to study the relationship between social movements and mass media in
detail. Moreover, media coverage is also relevant in terms of representational
power. After all, citizens in a viable democracy are expected to make
informed choices. To this aim, the media should give voice to the whole
spectrum of political actors and arguments, including GJMs who fiercely
oppose the political mainstream.
3 Contrary to most other big collective actors, social movements lack a central
apparatus that organizes internal communication. Instead, social movements
are decentralized networks of groups in and between which communication
flows ‘from many to many’ are prevalent. This is especially true for the GJMs
that for the most part embrace the principles of grassroots democracy, ‘hori-
zontality’ and self-induced activity (Nunes 2005). This organizational logic
contrasts with that of established mass media characterized by communica-
tion flows from ‘few to many’ and mostly passive recipients. No wonder that
relationships between social movements and mass media are often marked by
tensions and mutual misunderstandings.
On the one hand, social movement actors, especially when being novices
in dealing with the mass media, expect the journalists to convey their mes-
sages in a non-reductionist and authentic form. When this does not happen,
movement actors tend to be frustrated, blaming individual journalists or the
established media as a whole for purposively neglecting, distorting or betray-
ing them. However, they may also revise their media strategies, trying to do
a better job when informing the media. On the other hand, those journalists
192 Dieter Rucht
who have scarce knowledge on social movements tend to treat these like
formal organizations such as political parties, public administrations or cor-
porations, expecting the movements to have bosses, spokespeople, offices
and programmes. Confronted with the relative absence of such features,
journalists are tempted to rely on their own vague impressions or on informa-
tion from outsiders and even opponents of the movements, characterizing
social movements as opaque if not chaotic.
4 Although journalists, when having difficulties in accessing social move-
ments, can simply resign and turn to easier and more tangible topics, social
movements, because they depend on the resonance and support from the
broader public, cannot simply give up their efforts to reach this audience. In
other words: ‘Movements are generally much more dependent on media than
the reverse . . .’ (Gamson and Wolfsfeld 1993: 116). Thus, save for some
exceptional situations, it would be wrong to characterize the relationship
between media and movements as symbiotic, as some researchers have done
(e.g. Imhof 1996; Wolfsfeld 1984). In addition, a symbiotic relationship
would not be compatible with the ethos of ‘professional’ journalists who are
expected to avoid a one-sided and bluntly partisan view. Even when sympa-
thizing with a movement, these journalists try to keep some distance in their
reports (although not in their formally designated commentaries). Also, to
the extent that they are ideologically distant or even opposite to the move-
ments, but feel in line with the population at large and the political elites,
they may portray movements in a derogative way. Therefore, the mass media
are generally far from being a ‘natural’ ally of social movements.
5 Confronted with this structural constellation, social movements may arrive at dif-
ferent strategic or behavioural conclusions that, in another article (Rucht 2004),
I have termed the ‘quadruple A’: apathy, attack, adaptation and alternative.
As long as social movements, based on negative experiences with the
mass media, do not resign and fall into apathy, they have three basic options.
First, they can start to criticize the media for not adequately portraying them
and their activities, hence shift towards attack. A soft version would be a
critical letter to the editor or a press conference in which the media are
blamed for misrepresenting a movement actor or activity. A hard version
would imply confrontational actions by occupying an editorial office, threat-
ening a journalist or blocking the delivery of newspapers. Movement activ-
ists may even resort to burning trucks of press houses as it happened in the
context of the German and Italian student revolt in 1968 (Hilwig 1998).
Second, social movements can opt for a strategy of adaptation by taking
into account the mass media’s needs and mechanisms to get their message
across. This, for instance, might consist of learning to write a professional
press release, organize a press conference, designate a speaker or a press offi-
cer, establish sustained contacts with selected journalists or stage a media-
savvy protest spectacle.
Third, social movements, particularly when the strategies of attack and
adaptation bear little fruit, may create an alternative to the established press
by establishing and maintaining media that are produced and controlled by
Global justice movements and the mass media 193
actors from or very close to the movements. It is important to stress that, in
this context, the term ‘alternative’ does not necessarily imply the use of
means of communication that technically differ from those of the mass
media. The point is to create media that operate independently from the con-
ventional and for the most part commercially oriented mass media. Such
activities range from the distribution of leaflets and posters, internal newslet-
ters, brochures, books and videos to the production of newspapers and the
operation of radio stations. More recently, the Internet has been used to serve
the needs of various kinds of movements and make their views widely and
quickly accessible.5 It allows movements to circumvent the conventional
mass media and their selectivity. In a few cases, the Internet was crucial in
making a movement known and politically influential, as exemplified by the
Zapatista movement.6 The Internet can also become an important tool for
individual and collective dissenters in authoritarian regimes, as recent devel-
opments in China and Iran have shown.
Obviously, the three last mentioned strategies are not mutually exclusive.
Moreover, some activities inherently combine two strategies. For example,
US movement activists set up the journal Lies of Our Times in the 1990s,
which aimed at identifying and correcting wrong information provided by
the established press, thereby representing both the strategies of attack and
alternative. By the same token, the Internet can be used to combine these two
strategies.
Apart from the fact that, in principle, each of the three basic strategies has
its own strengths and weaknesses, their potential power also depends on the
specific context in which a social movement is embedded. Also, one should
bear in mind that these strategies designate broad orientations but are not
identical with the range of specific tactics that can be subsumed under each
strategy. For example, the strategy of adaptation may imply different means
such as linking the movement’s cause to the broader culturally recognized
values or a symbolically loaded historic event, appealing to journalists’ pro-
fessional ethics and, thus, reducing the risk to be portrayed in a distorting
way or hiring a professional journalist for a movement organization’s public
relation activities.
6 When looking at social movements over the past few decades, it is obvious
that they tend to professionalize in the way they mobilize resources (for the
United States, see McCarthy and Zald 1973) as well as in their media-related
strategies (Rucht forthcoming). Although in the 1950s and 1960s, most
social movements hardly cared about how to design and present their activi-
ties to attract media attention, today such a disengaged attitude is the excep-
tion rather than the rule. Handbooks for social movement actors and
non-governmental organizations advise how to deal with mass media.7 Also,
there are groups, most prominently Greenpeace, whose strategic rationale is
to maximize media attention.
Other groups, including those with few resources, try to copy such a model
or to develop their own media strategies. This trend is not only restricted to
middle-class movements dominated by well-educated and well-articulated
194 Dieter Rucht
activists but also includes workers movements and movements of marginal-
ized groups such as the French sans-papiers migrants. By the same token,
religious fundamentalists and right-wing extremists sometimes use provoca-
tive symbols, images and slogans to attract media attention, yet in other times
seek to appeal to the mainstream audience by presenting themselves as ‘ordi-
nary’ and ‘responsible’ citizens.8 Also, these groups have learned their lesson
in using modern, computer-based technology (see, e.g. Chroust 2000).
7 Even when social movements raise problems that transcend national borders,
target international institutions and/or mobilize cross-nationally, they con-
tinue to address basically national audiences in their respective languages,
although possibly in a more concerted way than in the past. Therefore, public
discourses, media strategies and media coverage still have to be mainly
studied and understood in their national contexts. These contexts provide
different cultural resonance boards, offer different discursive opportunities
(Koopmans 2004) and different mobilization structures even when the same
issue, for example, whaling or the war on Iraq, is on the agenda. Accordingly,
in an empirical perspective, it makes sense to look at media strategies and,
even more so, media coverage with regard to one or several specific coun-
tries instead of aiming for sweeping generalizations.
a network of collectively run media outlets for the creation of radical, accu-
rate, and passionate tellings of the truth. We work out of a love and inspira-
tion for people who continue to work for a better world, despite corporate
media’s distortions and unwillingness to cover the efforts to free humanity.9
Indymedia spreads quickly across the globe but, as it can be seen from Table 10.1,
recently ceased to grow.
Apart from its primary role as a tool of critique addressed to the public (see
below), Indymedia also serves as a platform for internal communication, for
example, to document internal debates and to announce forthcoming meetings to
activists.
Attack: Social movements, once dissatisfied with the mass media, do not nec-
essarily withdraw to create their own media. Instead or in addition, they may
employ a strategy of attack. To the extent that self-produced media aim at offering
196 Dieter Rucht
Table 10.1 Distribution of Indymedias
Region 2002 2003 2004 2005 2006 2008 2009
(June) (June) (June) (June) (June) (June) (June)
USA 39 46 53 56 61 60 54
Canada 11 11 12 13 12 13 9
Latin 9 14 15 17 17 18 18
America
Europe 20 31 40 41 47 66 67
Asia 3 5 8 8 12 10 10
Africa 2 3 5 5 5 6 6
Oceania 5 7 8 12 8 8 11
Total 89 117 141 153 162 181 175
Source: Web searches by various research assistants.
information that is neglected and/or distorted by mass media, the very creation of
alternative media can be interpreted as part of such a strategy, as exemplified by
Indymedia, MoveOn, GetUp, Avaaz, Campact and so on. These groups’ reports
on specific issues or events may explicitly address omissions or misperceptions
by the established media. Because this counter-information is open to everybody,
also journalists of the established media can inform themselves about the alleged
shortcomings in their coverage.
The strategy of attack was also applied in other settings. In Heiligendamm, for
example, several press conferences as well as radio reports were devoted to criti-
cize the mass media for spreading wrong information or relying on one-sided
information provided by the press officers of the police and public administrators.
A noteworthy action was undertaken by the Clandestine Insurgent Rebel Clown
Army that, in colourful disguise, entered an official press conference to disrupt a
live broadcast by shouting ‘we want an objective press’.
Adaptation: Although alternatives and attack can be seen as variants of a
counter-strategy vis-à-vis established mass media, adaption is an attempt to
instrumentalize these media by playing, at least to some extent, to the rules of
their game. In this regard, some of the GJMs act quite professionally and sophis-
ticated. They have learned that established media want to have quick reactions,
easy access to interviewees, designated speakers or press officers, reliable infor-
mation, handy sound bites, noteworthy citations and colourful if not spectacular
images. Also, they know what a press release should look like and where to dis-
tribute it, how to organize a press conference and in which way to establish and
maintain contacts with selected journalists. Professional public relations work,
however, sometimes conflicts with the principles of ‘horizontal’ movement structure
and the attempts to avoid roles of leadership and spokespeople, as the example of
the ESFs has shown (Lévêque 2005; Mosca et al. 2009), More generally, it is
difficult to raise public attention for such meetings that essentially serve the inter-
nal communication of GJMs. By contrast, protest activities that are spatially and/
or temporally related to large official summits tend to receive ample coverage. On
these occasions, hundreds or even thousands of journalists are present anyway.
Global justice movements and the mass media 197
Bored by the official routine or in search of a balanced view on the official event,
these journalists tend to pay some attention at least to the protest activities.
Surprisingly, in the case of the G8 meeting in 2007, significantly more space was
devoted to the protests than to the official event (Rucht and Teune 2008a).
Although the radical branches of the GJMs are likely to prefer the strategies of
attack and alternatives, they also pursue an implicit strategy of adaptation. while
the established media generally condemn radical groups, these can still count on
the news value of conflict and violence (see Murdock 1981), as the media’s fas-
cination with the so-called black block shows. Threatening outfit and postures as
well as violent actions are not simply an expression of anger but also elements of
a deliberate strategy to attract media attention and to remind about the groups’
existence.
Apart from large or confrontational protests, creative forms also help to attract
public attention. The local Attac group in Hamburg, for example, installed a small
inflatable toy island with a palm tree in the middle of a large water basin close to
the city centre in May 2002. Under the eyes of invited journalists, rowing boats
brought loads of fake money to the rubber island to scandalize the widespread
practice of money laundering in tax havens. This relatively small activity got
considerable coverage in the established media and beyond.
Some groups do not rely entirely on the spectacle of protest but proactively
seek to build contacts with journalists from established media. A striking case is
Attac Germany, which, on the eve of the Genoa protest in July 2001, practised a
kind of ‘embedded journalism’. The then largely unknown group invited press
people to travel, together with Attac activists, by bus to Genoa. In addition, they
offered these journalists information on the spot via mobile phones and direct
contacts (Kolb 2005). This initiative, together with the massive protests in Genoa,
triggered a series of articles and helped to make Attac known to a broader public
in Germany.
Unlike many pre-existing GJM groups, Attac Germany spent considerable
energies in continuously influencing the established media. Already in their early
period of existence, Attac designated an unpaid press speaker and, from a later
period onwards, an employed press officer. In addition, in their so-called Summer
Academy, they offered workshops to instruct activists on how to deal with the
mass media. Attac Switzerland even devoted its whole Summer Academy in 2007
to the ‘Power of the Media’. The emphasis on conventional public relations can
be also seen by the frequencies of Attac Germany’s press releases since 2000 (see
Figure 10.1, continuous line). The second and dotted line in this figure indicates
the number of articles mentioning Attac in the left-alternative tageszeitung. As it
can be seen, only in the first years, the increase of press releases was paralleled
by an increase of articles. Later on, the number of articles declined, even though
the number of press releases continued to grow.
Although Attac Germany is an example of an intense adaptation strategy, it would
be wrong to assume that the group uncritically adapts to the expectations and rules
of established media in an attempt to maximize coverage. Over time, the group had
mixed experiences in dealing with the media, as a report of their current press officer
198 Dieter Rucht
140
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120
100 300
80
200
60
40
100
20
0 0
2000 2001 2002 2003 2004 2005 2006 2007 2008
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ideologically close to them, they hardly received the kind of coverage they would
have wished for. Nevertheless, the official event was not celebrated by the media
as expected by its organizers and hosts.
Despite some resistance as exemplified by the protests in Berlin in 1988, neo-
liberal policies remained the dominant paradigm in Western countries until the
late 1990s. Only then did it come under increasingly widespread attack as exem-
plified by major protest campaigns of which five have been studied in detail with
regard to their media coverage (see Table 10.2). In the following, some results of
the content analysis will be presented.
For each event, the coverage in the same nine German newspapers with a nation-
wide distribution (six dailies and three weeklies) was coded.10 The investigated
period for each case spanned from 10 days before the beginning to 8 days after the
end of the official event. Because the duration of the events varied between 3 and
5 days, the periods of coded newspaper coverage varied accordingly.
The investigated events spread unevenly over the time period from late 1999 to
Summer 2007, which, generally speaking, was the period of the rapid rise and sub-
sequent consolidation of the GJMs across the globe. The five protest campaigns
have to be seen against the backdrop of the general discussion about the pros and
cons of globalization. This latter term became a buzzword in the second half of the
1990s and has remained on the public agenda ever since.11 Figure 10.2 displays the
frequencies of this term and other derivations of ‘global’ in the left-alternative
German newspaper die tageszeitung. As it can be seen, the occurrence of these
terms is relatively stable throughout the period from January 1999 to the end of
2007, although at a somewhat lower level until mid-2001 and after mid-2007. The
vertical lines in Figure 10.2 indicate the position of the five events in time.
Interestingly, the protests in Seattle did not result in an increase of the theme of the
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Figure 10.2 Globalization and related topics in the newspaper die tageszeitung.
202 Dieter Rucht
globalization. To the contrary, mentions of global even declined during and imme-
diately after the event before rising again in Spring 2000. On the other hand, the
events in Prague, Gothenburg (to a lesser extent), Genoa and Heiligendamm (most
significantly) were all accompanied by an increase of the globalization theme in die
tageszeitung. Generally speaking, the thematization of globalization issues remained
at a high level in the period from Fall 2001 (after the Genoa campaign) to the advent
of the G8 summit in Heiligendamm in 2007. The high peak related to Heiligendamm
definitely mirrors the paper’s support of the protests. Beyond its regular coverage,
die tageszeitung issued a daily special section during the hot phase of the protest.
Some of the short peaks in the observed period are obviously caused by particular
events such as the G8 meeting in Gleneagles (Scotland) in July 2005.
The five events attracted different levels of attention in the German newspapers
(Table 10.3). The meeting in Gothenburg, although having mobilized almost three
times as many protesters as the meeting in Prague, received least coverage, whereas
Heiligendamm leads the ranking by far. In addition to the much larger number of
articles, also the average length per article is much higher. The outlier position of
Heiligendamm reflects to a large extent that German newspapers have more interest
in an event that takes place in Germany than in a similar event abroad.
Journalists have the discretionary power to give or not to give voice to certain
actors, to highlight or omit certain thematic aspects of an issue and to present both
thematic aspects and actors in a positive, negative or more neutral fashion. Table
10.4 displays the relative weight of thematic foci in reports on each of the five
conflicts.12 As it can be seen, there is considerable variation. The official summit
was the main focus of more than half of the articles on the Seattle event but only
13 per cent of the articles on Heiligendamm. Aspects of police/security were
marginal in reports on Seattle (1.4 per cent) but quite significant in Heiligendamm
(18.8 per cent). Not surprisingly, police violence was relatively prominent in
reports on the Genoa conflict (13.7 per cent) where action culminated in a nightly
police ambush on demonstrators sleeping in a school house (see della Porta and
Reiter, this volume). Violence enacted by protesters was covered by the highest
proportion of reports on Gothenburg, which, by the way, hardly reflected the
actual level of violence when compared with the other conflicts. For the coverage
of all five conflicts, arguments of the protesters played only a marginal role,
whereas variation is greater in the case of arguments of officials, which stand out
in the coverage of the Prague event with a share of almost 15 per cent.
Table 10.5 gives a detailed view of the frequency of various aspects of the five
events in the newspaper articles. Here, unlike for the focus of each article, coding
was not restricted to one topic per article, so that the column percentages can add
to more than hundred. Interestingly, the relative weight of general opposition to
liberalization or globalization was highest in the first two events but later
decreased. This could indicate that the critique of globalization became more dif-
ferentiated and specific over time. Environmental protection is relatively mar-
ginal in the Prague conflict but significant in the four remaining cases. Labour
protection is most prominent in the Seattle conflict that was marked by a strong
presence of trade unions that mobilized about two thirds of the demonstrators
(Lichbach and Almeida 2001). In Heiligendamm and even more so in Gothenburg,
aspects of labour protection were marginal, thus reflecting the low engagement of
trade unions in the protest mobilization.
Activists from various social movements, both on the political right and left,
often blame the mass media for marginalizing them. One specific complaint is
that the media, when reporting about the protesters, concentrate more on side
204 Dieter Rucht
Table 10.5 Mentioning of aspects of globalizationa by conflict in German newspapersb (in
per cent)
aspects (such as their outfit) than on their motives and arguments. Various case
studies confirm this impression (e.g. Halloran et al. 1970; Rucht 2005a). Also,
looking at the conflicts investigated here, the newspapers focus on the arguments
of officials rather than of the protesters (5.9 vs. 1.5 per cent, see Table 10.4). This
difference, however, is not surprising, given the fact that officials have the power
to make binding decisions that affect people’s lives. When comparing the space
devoted to the demonstrators’ motives and reasons across conflicts, Seattle
clearly ranges on top whereas the four remaining conflicts exhibit little varia-
tion.13 This may have to do with the standing and credibility of the protesters in
Seattle where the trade unions were prominent and even President Bill Clinton
signaled his partial understanding for the protesters’ reasons.
Figure 10.3 shows both the mean and the variance for the evaluation of the pro-
testers with regard to each of the five conflicts. In line with relative weight of the
protesters motives (see above), evaluation was most favourable in Seattle and least
so in Gothenburg. On the whole, however, the differences between the cases are
small. All five mean values are within the range from −1 to +1. In other words: When
considering all papers, the aggregated evaluation is relatively neutral. When looking
Global justice movements and the mass media 205
Heiligendamm
Gothenburg
Genoa
Prague
Seattle
−3 −2 −1 0 1 2 3
at the individual newspapers, however, the differences are significant, thus reflecting
different ideological lines of the papers. For example, in the Heiligendamm conflict
for which a detailed analysis (including two local papers) is available, the tabloid
Bild evaluated the protesters most negatively (around −1.7) and the police by far
most positively, whereas the left and liberal papers, and even more so the two local
newspapers, evaluated the protesters more positively (Rucht and Teune 2008a: 67).
On the whole, the newspaper coverage of the five conflicts is far from being
uniform. This applies to the space devoted to each conflict, the foci of the articles,
the relative weight of various thematic aspects of the conflict, and the standing
and evaluation of different kinds of actors. Also, differences between the various
German newspapers are significant. However, when comparing the aggregate
patterns of reporting across the five conflicts, it remains unclear whether differ-
ences can be primarily attributed to the journalists’ perceptions and judgements,
to differences in the public relation activities of various actors or rather to the
‘objective’ differences of the cases, for example, the different levels of violence
enacted by the protesters. A partial answer to this question can be given by look-
ing at the same event but comparing newspapers from different countries. This,
for example, could reveal whether geographical proximity to the event is an
important news value.
On the basis of the coding of the Prague conflict in both German and Czech
newspapers14 for the same time period, we can look for nation-specific patterns.15
As one would expect with regard to the proximity factor, many more articles were
206 Dieter Rucht
Table 10.6 The foci of German and Czech newspaper articles on the Prague event
(in per cent)
published in the Czech (N = 469) than in the German papers (N = 113), even
though less newspapers have been examined in the Czech case. More interesting,
however, are the different patterns of coverage in the two countries. On the one
hand, aspects of the event such as the summit in general, the protest in general,
globalization in general and the arguments of the officials are to a much greater
proportion the foci of articles in Germany than in the Czech Republic. On the
other hand, the Czech papers put more emphasis on matters of police/security in
general, violent actions by the police, violent and non-violent actions by demon-
strators as well as demonstrators’ arguments. Although general information on the
summit is the single most important category in the German papers, it is demon-
strators’ violent actions in the Czech papers. Again, it is presumably the factor of
physical closeness to the event that results in a greater concern with aspects of
security and violence in the host country when compared with Germany. This
assumption is supported by a more refined analysis of the space devoted to dif-
ferent thematic aspects in the newspapers (no table is displayed here). Although,
for example, the aggregate space for the protesters’ claims is slightly larger in
German than in Czech papers, space devoted to police activities is much larger in
the Czech papers than in the German papers (Table 10.6).
Also, when investigating more closely the coverage of the actions of the police
and the demonstrators, some cross-national differences can be observed (quanti-
tative data are not displayed here). For example, formal restrictions of the protest
and the use of specific forms of police violence are mentioned to a greater propor-
tion in German newspapers, whereas the opposite holds true for border restric-
tions, physical blockade/removal as well as arrests of demonstrators. With regard
to demonstrators’ actions, vandalism of local shops and public property as well as
violence against the police was proportionally more prevalent in the Czech
papers. After all, before the protests, the Czech authorities had prepared the
Global justice movements and the mass media 207
population as if civil war was to be expected. For example, they recommended
storing food and medicine, closed the schools in the city, advised the locals not
to talk to the protesters and speculated that protesters might ‘kill if possible’
(Prague Post, August 2, 2000, cited in Scholl 2009).
In a nutshell, significant differences in media coverage can be found not only
when comparing different conflictual events in the same set of newspapers but
also when comparing how newspapers from different countries cover the same
event. The amount of coverage seems to be strongly influenced by the spatial
proximity to the event, the number of protesters and the forms of protest, espe-
cially the expectation and actual occurrence of violence. Moreover, the way of
reporting is influenced by the political line of the respective newspaper. Not sur-
prisingly, left and liberal papers are more sympathetic or neutral to the GJMs’
activities, whereas conservative papers are highly critical. There is, however, a
general tendency to devote more space to the activities of both protesters and
police than to the protesters’ motives and arguments.
Conclusion
Getting public attention and support is a source of power because it helps to
legitimize or de-legitimize certain claims and to exert pressure on political deci-
sion-makers. Public attention and support is especially crucial for social move-
ments, which generally lack other resources. GJMs are no exception from this
rule, as it has been shown in this chapter. They engage in various kinds of media-
related strategies – alternatives, adaptation and, probably to a lesser extent, attack
– to advance their cause. Over time, GJMs have become more professional and
sophisticated in pursuing similar strategies. This, however, does not necessarily
mean that they are more effective when compared with their forerunners because
their opponents, too, have learned their lesson in public relations. Unfortunately,
no systematic empirical data are available to investigate the impact of media-
related efforts on media coverage, let alone action mobilization, across different
generations or types of social movements.
Regarding five significant protest campaigns in German newspapers from
1999 to 2007, it becomes clear that they attracted considerable media attention.
In the campaign against the G8 meeting in Heiligendamm in 2007, the protesters
even got much more coverage than the official meeting. In the aggregate of all
newspapers investigated, the evaluation of the protesters was relatively neutral in
all five cases but varied between individual papers, which, by and large, followed
their general political line when portraying the protesters. Not surprisingly, left
and liberal papers were more sympathetic to the movements and more critical to
the officials and the police, whereas the opposite holds for conservative papers.
On the whole, however, evaluation of the protesters was supposedly less ideo-
logically driven than, say, of the New Left in the 1960s that was met with much
more suspicion if not flat rejection by the majority of the press.
Generally speaking, the patterns of reporting across the five conflicts differ
considerably. This may well reflect the actual differences between these cases,
208 Dieter Rucht
for example, the varying extent of violence by the protestors and/or police.
However, even when comparing newspaper coverage of the same conflict (the
IMF/World Bank meeting in Prague in 2000) in German and Czech papers, strik-
ing differences could be observed, for example, regarding the attention paid to
aspects of police/security and destruction of property. It seems that these varia-
tions can be attributed to a large extent to differences in journalists’ perceptions,
which in turn depend on political leaning, on news values such as proximity to
the event and on cultural backgrounds such as more or less experience with
radical protesters.
Extensive coverage and even more so positive evaluation of GJMs’ activities
are by no means guaranteed even when these groups intensify their externally
oriented media-related strategies and stay within the boundaries of legal and
peaceful protest. A first important reason for this is the inflation effect. Repetition
eventually results in disinterest by established media. This may be the main rea-
son why, for instance, mass media coverage of ESFs has declined from 2002 to
2007 (Teune 2009), and Attac Germany, despite its growing investment in public
relations, did not receive increased media coverage (see Figure 10.1). Moreover,
a positive evaluation trend may provoke maverick journalists to move into the
opposite direction by emphasizing problematic aspects of a group. This hap-
pened, for example, to Greenpeace in Germany and the Netherlands after mass
media had applauded the group for its courageous actions for many years.16
Finally, the GJMs are raising so many issues and launching so many calls for
action that it is difficult for an outsider to keep track.
Second, there is the competition effect. Also, rivals and opponents of the
movements intensify their media-related strategies and sharpen their framing.
Therefore, one can expect that the struggle for attention and support continues
in an upward spiral of investing more and more resources to get a competitive
advantage. In light of this, all other things being equal, also the use of the
Internet to which both GJM activists and sympathetic observers attach so many
hopes17 is unlikely to change the existing constellation of power. The potential
of the Internet, including its impressive carrying capacity and huge number of
potential addressees, should not be confused with its actual uses and effects in
the realm of politics. After all, despite the increasing use of the Internet, neither
there is evidence that social movement activity in general and GJMs protest in
particular are on the rise in the past few years nor is it clear that increasing
online protest, usually based on a mouseclick, is impressive for the general
audience. This is why some Internet-based groups such as MoveOn in the
United States and Campact in Germany have begun to combine online activity
with street protest.
Conventional mass media, although increasingly related to and co-present in
the Internet, are losing some of their market share, especially among the younger
generation. Still, they continue to be the key source of information for the general
public and the political decision-makers. From a normative viewpoint, the gen-
eral tendency of newspapers to focus on the GJMs actions (and especially the
possibility and actual occurrence of violence) at the expense of their motives and
Global justice movements and the mass media 209
arguments is problematic because, on the whole, the audience hardly gets a full
picture to make an informed judgement. GJMs try to compensate for this by
strengthening their own media, creating their own public spaces and increasingly
using the Internet. However, even with these means the movements hardly reach
out beyond their immediate constituency.
To overcome this limitation, they have two options. First, they could rely on a
strategy of attacking the mainstream media. This, however, is not very promising
because, with the exception of violence, it is largely ignored by these media.
Second, the GJMs could move, and actually are driven, towards an adaptation
strategy. Not accidentally, such a strategy is only acceptable to the more moderate
parts of the movement. This not only leads to an underrepresentation of the radi-
cal movement segments in mass media but is also likely to increase tensions
and conflicts between the moderate and radical branches of the movements. To
conclude, there is no ideal single strategy.
Notes
1 I am grateful to Wolfgang Stuppert who has done most of the calculations, tables and
figures for this article. He, other members of our research group as well as Lance
Bennett and Thomas Olesen provided useful comments on earlier versions of this
chapter.
2 These are understood as a network of loosely coupled groups and movements with a
predominantly left-wing orientation that tend to mobilize across borders and connect
issues such as human, political and social rights, peace and environmental protection.
On a more general level, they promote a master frame which, negatively defined, is
resistance against neo-liberalism and, positively defined, the struggle for global justice
and solidarity.
3 See, for example, Altheide and Gilmore 1972, Gamson 1988; 2004; Gamson and
Wolfsfeld 1993; Gitlin 1980; Kielbowicz and Scherer 1986; Molotch 1979; Neidhardt
2004; Neveu 1999; Rucht 2004; Turner 1969.
4 For example, Cardoso and Neto 2004; Paterson 2000; Rucht 2005a; Rucht and Teune
2008b; Van Zoonen 1996.
5 See Almeida and Lichbach 2003; Ayres 1999; Baringhorst et al. 2009; Downey and
Fenton 2003; Geser 2000; Myers 1998; Rucht 2005b; van den Donk et al. 2004.
6 See Olesen 2005; Schulz 2007.
7 See Bray 2002; Pertschuk 1997; Ryan 1991; Salzman 1998; Wallack et al. 1999.
8 The German neo-Nazi party Nationaldemokratische Partei Deutschlands (NPD) forbids
its followers to consume alcohol during demonstrations organized by the party.
9 http://www.indymedia.org/en/static/about.shtml (accessed 8 October, 2009).
10 The dailies are die tageszeitung (circulation about 60,000, left-libertarian orientation),
Frankfurter Rundschau (circulation about 175,000, left-liberal), Süddeutsche Zeitung
(circulation about 420,000, liberal), Die Welt (circulation about 265,000, conservative),
Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung (circulation around 420,000, conservative) and Bild
(circulation about 4,375,000, conservative tabloid). The weeklies are Die Zeit (circula-
tion about 440,000, liberal), Der Spiegel (circulation about 1,000,000, political maga-
zine, center) and Focus (circulation about 780,000, magazine, conservative). Numbers
on circulation date from around 2004 as a proxy for the observed time span from 1999
to 2007.
210 Dieter Rucht
11 This can be clearly shown by an electronic search of terms including the core term
‘global’ in the German newspaper die tageszeitung. The core term was almost absent
until the early 1990s and began to rise sharply in the second half of the 1990s to become
present in almost one thousand articles in the early 2000s.
12 The coders were required to identify the main focus of the overall article.
13 On the basis of the values on a scale from 0 (no space) to 6 (total space) in the article
to be coded, the average value is 1.56 for Seattle, 0.81 for Prague, 0.76 for Genoa, 0.74
for Gothenburg and 0.72 for Heiligendamm.
14 The coded Czech papers are Lidové Noviny (daily, center-right, circulation 82,000 in
1999), Právo (daily, center, circulation 249,000 in 1999), Mladá Fronta (daily, center-
right, circulation 354,000 in 1999), Blesk (daily, circulation 360,000 in mid-2002),
Týden (weekly political magazine, liberal, circulation 21,000 in 2001) and Respekt
(weekly, circulation around 30,000 in 2001).
15 See also the newspaper analysis of Beyeler and Kriesi (2005) who compared how news-
papers in seven countries covered various GJM events. Bennett et al. (2004) have
analyzed the coverage of protests against the World Economic Forum (WEF) meetings
in the United States.
16 In Germany, criticism of Greenpeace mounted in 1991 with a cover story of Der Spiegel
(September 16) and subsequent reports in various major newspapers and public television.
17 For a more skeptical view see, for example, Kavada 2005 and Rucht 2005b.
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11 Taming of the shrew?
International women’s NGOs,
institutional power and the United
Nations
Jutta Joachim
Introduction
How do the rules and practices of international organizations affect non-govern-
mental organizations (NGOs)? Thus far, we know rather little about the impact
the transnational organizing has on the involved actors because the majority of
studies have primarily been interested in demonstrating the agency and influence
of NGOs. To this end, scholars have examined the role of civil society organiza-
tions in agenda-setting processes (e.g. Corell and Betsill 2001; Friedman et al.
2005; Gordenker et al. 1995; Joachim 2007; Locher 2007) or the emergence and
enforcement of norms (e.g. Burgerman 2001; Clark 2001; Hawkins 2003; Keck
and Sikkink 1998; Klotz 1995; Price 1998; Risse et al. 1999). Referring to them
as ‘magic bullets’ (Edwards and Hulme 1996) or ‘entrepreneurs’ (e.g. Keck and
Sikkink 1998; Price 1998), a great number of studies have sought to demonstrate
how NGOs contribute to changes in the global politics by drawing on their moral
authority, expertise and by engaging in strategic framing processes.
In comparison, the ‘structuring’ effects of the institutional environment, in
general, and that of international governmental organizations, which NGOs use
as platforms to mobilize support for their concerns, in particular, have been of
much less concern. This is not to say that scholars have not addressed the influ-
ence of structures and institutions. However, they have accounted for them in a
rather limited fashion, acknowledging the opportunities they create for or the
constraints they impose on civil society actors and the impact they have on the
outcome of their campaigns or their numerical growth. The power that interna-
tional organizations exert and the ways in which they affect the inner organiza-
tional life of NGOs have, for the most part, been ignored.1
More recent work departs from this trend and suggests that multilateral institu-
tions affect not only the behaviour of NGOs but also the very understanding they
have of themselves, as well as the interests they pursue. In their study on the issue
of climate change, Gough and Shackley (2001: 329), for example, assert that the
NGOs working inside the United Nations moved from being ‘outside critical
agents demanding issue recognition and action, to [being] partners in developing
workable frameworks and principles for implementing action’. Adopting a ‘top-
down’ view, Reimann (2006) suggests that two aspects of globalization help to
explain the rapid growth of NGOs: increased funding and political access, on the
Taming of the shrew? 215
one hand, and the rise of a pro-NGO norm, on the other hand (see also Joachim
and Locher 2008: 172). Furthermore, students of European integration have
examined whether and to what extent social movements and civil society organi-
zations at the domestic level adjust their campaigns and organizational structures
because of the opportunities for political engagement at the European level (e.g.
Cram 2001; Marks and McAdam 1996; Tarrow 1994/1995).
Building on this type of research, this chapter aims at a better understanding of
the influence that formal and informal rules of intergovernmental organizations
have on civil society organizations. Employing the concept of institutional power
developed by Barnett and Duvall (2005) as part of their power taxonomy and
focusing on international women’s NGOs across time, I illustrate how the institu-
tional arrangements in the United Nations influenced questions of representation,
contributed to the professionalization of involved women’s NGOs, affected the
framing of issues and precipitated conflicts between them. I show that contrary to
coercive power, institutional power is less direct and deliberate. Instead, it flows
from the logic of how institutions work, that is, the formal and informal rules on
which they rest.
The chapter is structured as follows: In the first section, I distinguish institutional
power from other forms of power, namely compulsory, structural and productive
power. In the second section, I discuss the arrangements within the United Nations
that have been defined to regulate the interactions with civil society organizations.
The third section specifies the effects that these institutional arrangements have on
NGOs. It is informed by both my own research of two international campaigns –
violence against women and reproductive rights and health – and secondary sources
regarding the history of the international women’s movement. In the concluding
section, I draw out some of the implications for future research when shifting the
focus from the NGOs to the institutions and the power they exert.
Representation
Many NGO scholars have noted the catalytic function of UN conferences for
transnational organizing (e.g. Friedman et al. 2005; Reimann 2006; Willetts
1996). In the case of women’s NGOs, the UN Decade for Women (1976–85) and
the three UN World Conferences for Women held during it in Mexico City
(1975), Copenhagen (1980) and Nairobi (1985) were particularly critical and
contributed to greater representation of women at the international level. The
conferences as well as the preparatory governmental meetings provided opportu-
nities to network, exchange information and inspired women to found new orga-
nizations (see Chen 1995; Fraser 1987; Stienstra 1994; Zinsser 2002). They were
accompanied by NGO forums, which took place in the same location and around
the same time as the official conferences, and were attended by an increasing
number of individuals and NGO women. Although close to 6,000 women took
part in the first NGO meeting in Mexico City, their number had already risen to
8,000 in Copenhagen (Ashworth 1982: 141) and once again to nearly 15,000 in
Nairobi (Stienstra 1994: 130). The conference series of the 1990s had similar
Taming of the shrew? 221
effects. Close to 30,000 women participated in the parallel NGO forum of the
Fourth World Conference on Women in Beijing in 1995 (Timothy 2004: 34).
In addition to affecting the numerical representation of women’s NGOs, the
conference rules also influenced who could speak to governments. At the first UN
women’s conference, for example, NGOs had no direct access at all. Instead,
NGOs presented their petitions to the Secretary General of the Conference, Helvi
Sipila, who in turn conveyed them to the delegates (Stienstra 1994: 113). At the
mid-decade conference in Copenhagen, still only a few NGOs were given permis-
sion to be present at the governmental conference, yet, close to 250 enjoyed
access to the official meeting in Nairobi. However, because these organizations
were larger ones that had held consultative status with ECOSOC already before
the UN conferences, other organizations attending the NGO forum questioned
their representativity (Timothy 2004: 34).14
By the time of the Beijing women’s conference, access had significantly broad-
ened. A total of 2,100 accredited NGOs with more than 5,000 individual repre-
sentatives were admitted to the official conference (Finke 2005: 86). Moreover,
these NGOs faced far fewer restrictions. They were able to move around freely
in designated UN buildings, observe and present oral or written statements in all
of the official meetings and sometimes even had access to informal meetings as
a result of being included on governmental delegations. Also, these organizations
made ample use of email and internet to inform NGOs from around the world
about developments over the course of the proceedings and to solicit their input.
Nevertheless, similar to the decade conference, questions arose regarding repre-
sentation because a few select organizations emerged as the primary link between
governments and NGOs: WEDO at the UNCED in Rio de Janeiro, the Center for
Women’s Global Leadership (CWGL) and the International Women’s Tribune
Center (IWTC) at the Human Rights Conference in Vienna and the International
Women’s Health Coalition (IWHC) at the ICPD in Cairo.
Finally, UN conferences also illustrate how the choice of location affects NGO
representation. Although women from the South constituted still a small group at
the Mexico City and Copenhagen conferences,15 their representation increased
dramatically when the meeting took place in Nairobi (Allan et al. 1995: 39). Of
the 13,504 registrants, 60 per cent were from the developing world and more than
1,000 from Kenya alone (Stephenson 1995: 148). The decision to hold the Fourth
World Conference on Women in Beijing, China, too, influenced NGO participa-
tion. Many women’s organizations failed to acquire consultative status for the
conference or a visa to enter the country. The Chinese government, for example,
rejected groups favouring self-rule for Tibet or separate status for Taiwan or ones
opposed to its human rights policies (Timothy 2004: 35).
Although accreditation was particularly controversial before the Beijing con-
ference, the politics associated with consultative status are, however, nothing
new. At the height of the Cold War, for example, Western countries used their
voting majority in ECOSOC to prevent the Women’s International Democratic
Federation (WIDF) from re-obtaining Category B status as had been proposed by
the Soviet Union (Willetts 1996: 34). The International Planned Parenthood
222 Jutta Joachim
Federation (IPPF) was denied consultative status when it had first applied for it
in the early 1950s because of the opposition of Catholic and Muslim countries but
been able to obtain it in the 1960s.16 More recent cases of politicization include
the International Lesbian and Gay Association (ILGA), which in the early 1990s
lost its Roster status shortly after it had been granted, given the strong opposition
from Catholic, Orthodox and Islamic countries (Willetts 1996: 36–7).
Professionalization
Studying social movements and NGOs at the domestic level, many scholars have
noted changes in organizational structures and performance or what they refer to
as professionalization among organizations engaged in state institutions (e.g.
Diani and Donati 1999; Rucht and Roose 1999; Staggenborg 1988; Young 1991).
Similar tendencies can also be observed among international women’s NGOs that
have changed from ‘little old ladies in tennis shoes’ (Archer 1983: 303) to becom-
ing professional women in business suits.
Until the 1970s and 1980s, many of the women’s organizations in consultative
status with the United Nations were run by volunteers, comprised almost exclu-
sively of white middle upper-class women who were not only devoted to women’s
equality with men but also educated and wealthy enough to travel (see Rupp 1994;
Rupp and Taylor 1999). Little did change in this respect until the UN Decade for
Women, when women’s activists became aware of the fact that effective lobbying
and influence in international institutions, such as the United Nations, required not
only expertise and knowledge of issues but also of the rules that prevail within
them.
Women’s NGOs began to organize so-called teach-ins at the parallel NGO
forums, where the more seasoned activists shared their knowledge about how the
United Nations works, how documents had to be prepared, what language had to
be used and where information could be obtained with the newcomers among the
organizations (see Stienstra 1994). The growing importance of expertise was also
evident in who was appointed for important positions in representing NGOs at the
United Nations, such as the convenors of the NGO forums. Two experienced
women – Rosalind Harris and Mildred Persinger – for example, had been selected
for the Mexico City conference. Although Harris had been the president of the
Conference of NGOs (CONGO) in consultative status with ECOSOC and already
successfully organized the NGO forum at the 1974 World Population Conference
in Bucharest, Persinger had been the UN representative of the World Young
Women’s Christian Association (WYWCA). Similarly, Elizabeth Palmer who had
been the convenor of the NGO forum of the women’s conference in Copenhagen
had been the former director of the YWCA based in Geneva and Nita Barrow
responsible for organizing the meeting in Nairobi had been president of the World
Council of Churches (WCC), the WYWCA and the International Council of
Adult Education (ICAE) (Fraser 1987).
Evidence for professionalization can be found in the organizations themselves.
Many international women’s NGOs maintain offices in New York or Geneva close
Taming of the shrew? 223
to UN buildings, have different programme areas and maintain an Internet pres-
ence. Rather than being made up of part-time activists, the majority of organiza-
tions represented at the United Nations are composed of what Meyer and Tarrow
(1998) refer to as ‘full-time movement professionals’. These organizations are run
by a paid and well-trained staff. They have an executive director, programme offi-
cers, accountants, sales and marketing persons. A look at the profile of NGO staff
reveals that the majority of officers have graduate degrees and NGO experience.
Furthermore, starting in the late 1970s and 1980s, NGOs began to bundle their
energies and magnify their presence within the UN framework by creating inter-
national networks. Of these, not only WEDO, the CWGL, the IWTC and the
IWHC but also the Southern network Development Alternatives with Women for
a New Era (DAWN) has emerged as linking pins between governments and civil
society. With the exception of the CWGL and DAWN, which are located in
Rutgers (United States) and Manila (Philippines), respectively, these networks
have their offices in close proximity to UN headquarters in New York, are
directed by experienced activists and are intended to facilitate the cooperation
between Northern and Southern women.17
Finally, professionalization also started to show in the 1980s and early 1990s
in other respects. UN secretariats and agencies as well as governmental delegates
increasingly solicited the input of NGOs on individual issues, consulted with
them in the preparation of position papers or asked them to write entire reports.18
Moreover, given their knowledge and expertise, NGO officers were also in
demand for UN jobs. UNIFEM is a particularly good example of this ‘revolving
door’ policy. Its former director Noeleen Heyzer had been co-founder of the
Southern women’s network DAWN and Roxanna Carrillo, head of the women’s
human rights programme, was a staff member of the CWGL before joining the
Fund (Joachim 2007; see also Finke 2005: 142).
Conclusion
Employing the concept of institutional power and focusing on international women’s
NGOs, this chapter has illustrated how formal and informal rules as well as practices
of international organizations affect civil society organizations. In addition to pre-
senting opportunities for transnational organizing or imposing constraints, the
226 Jutta Joachim
institutional arrangements have more far-reaching effects. They contribute to both
changes in the organizational structure and the ways in which NGOs relate to each
other and to governments. In the case of international women’s NGOs, UN rules,
procedures and practices have influenced, shaped and tamed the involved organiza-
tions. They have affected their representation at the international level, provided the
impetus for professionalization, prompted the involved organizations to adjust their
frames and precipitated conflicts between them.
In terms of their implications, the findings can be interpreted in different ways.
On the one hand, the ability of NGOs to adjust and respond to institutional
requirements has been considered a major ingredient of their success. Many
authors emphasize the ways in which these civil society organizations are able to
place marginalized issues on international agendas, contribute to new norms or
are better implementers because, contrary to states, they are more flexible, less
constrained by bureaucratic red tape or national sentiments. On the other hand,
the taming appears highly problematic when we turn to questions of democracy
and transparency. Rather than being a sign of hope, NGOs can be argued to have
fallen victim to co-optation and obstruction. If their choices are that tightly cir-
cumscribed and if they behave more like states, then, one might ask, how can
NGOs still represent or speak for civil society, hold governments accountable or
be critical of them? Both views appear extreme, and the answer of what NGOs
can do or what potential they have lies probably somewhere in between.
Therefore, it seems essential that we pay more attention to how NGOs are
affected by the power of others.
This requires a closer examination of the different actors and institutions with
whom NGOs interact, be they states, international governmental organizations, their
bureaucracies and individuals working within, or other NGOs, and the types of
power they use. It calls for a detailed analysis of the inner life of these civil society
organizations and how their organizational structure and their self-understanding
changes in turn. Although this does not mean ignoring the agency of NGOs entirely,
it does involve a shift in focus. By examining more closely the institutions in which
NGOs engage and are embedded, we are not only likely to obtain a more nuanced
picture of the possibilities and limits for NGO agency but also to learn more about
whether and to what extend NGOs are akin to the shrew and international govern-
mental organizations a taming force.
Notes
1 For exceptions, see, for example, Martens (2006) and Young (1991).
2 A number of scholars have grabbled with the concept of power, for example, Baldwin
(1989, 2002), Berenskoetter and Williams (2005), Enloe (1996), Guzzini (1993, 2000)
and Nye (2004).
3 The only organization that enjoyed official recognition was the Red Cross (Seary 1996:
22). Article 25 of the Covenant of the League called on its members ‘. . . to encourage
and promote the establishment and cooperation of duly authorized voluntary national
Red Cross organizations having as purposes the improvement of health, the prevention
of disease and the mitigation of suffering throughout the world’.
Taming of the shrew? 227
4 According to Mingst, access varies according to the aims of the respective institution:
‘The broader its functions in the social areas, the broader and deeper NGO participa-
tion; the narrower and more technical its tasks, the fewer NGOs are involved’ (Mingst
2009: 26).
5 Similar to the CSW, CEDAW was also serviced by the DAW before responsibility for
the treaty body was transferred to the Office of the High Commissioner on Human
Rights in Geneva at the end of 2008.
6 See, http://www.unifem.org/about/ (accessed August 10, 2009).
7 See, http://www.un-instraw.org/ (accessed August 10, 2009).
8 For a detailed discussion of these UN bodies, see Joachim (2010).
9 See, http://www.un.org/womenwatch/daw/daw/cou.htm (accessed August 10, 2009).
10 See, http://www.un.org/womenwatch/daw/ngo/index.html (accessed August 10, 2009).
11 See, http://www.un.org/womenwatch/daw/csw/communications_procedure.html (accessed
August 10, 2009).
12 See, http://www.un.org/womenwatch/daw/cedaw/NGO_Information_note_CEDAW.pdf
(accessed August 10, 2009).
13 Five categories of New York-based NGOs feature most prominently: (1) human rights
NGOs (e.g. Human Rights Watch, Amnesty International or the International Campaign
for the International Criminal Court), (2) humanitarian NGOs (e.g. OXFAM, CARE,
Médicines sans Frontieres, Save the Children, World Vision or International Rescue
Committee), peace and security NGOs (e.g. International Crisis Group, Quakers,
WILPF or Global Witness) or NGOs concerned with questions of global governance
(e.g. Global Policy Forum, World Federalist Movement and Parliamentarians for
Global Action).
14 For example, these organizations included the International Federation of Business and
Professional Women, the International Federation of University Women, Zonta
International or WILPF (Timothy 2004: 34).
15 In Mexico City, women from North America constituted the largest group of participants
followed by Latin America. Women from Europe, Africa and Asia comprised the smallest
group. In Copenhagen by comparison, the majority of women taking part in the forum
came from Europe (5,400), followed by approximately 1,000 women from North America
and the Carribean, 863 from Asia and the Pacific, 357 from Latin America, 245 from
Africa and 147 from the Middle East (Jaquette 1995: 56).
16 In the 1960s, Catholic and Muslim countries also prevented the accreditation of Human
Life International, an anti-abortion organization (Willetts 1996: 37).
17 Former US congresswoman and long-term activist Bella Abzug was co-founder and
until recently executive director of WEDO that was established before UNCED in
1990, Charlotte Bunch was a founding member and has been the executive director of
the CWGL that was established in 1989, Ann S. Walker was co-founder of the IWTC
that was established in 1976 following the Mexico City UN women’s conference and
served as executive director until 2002 before Vicki Semler assumed that responsibil-
ity, Adrienne Germain has been co-founder and president of the IWHC that was estab-
lished in 1980 and Gigi Franscisco is the general coordinator of DAWN that was
founded in 1984.
18 For example, WEDO, the CWGL, the IWHC and the IWTC are meanwhile recognized
by many UN agencies and committees as partners (Dorsey 1997: 346–7).
19 Compared with the former Commission on Human Rights, for example, CSW had been
given less prerogatives, was understaffed and short of financial resources (Reanda
1992).
228 Jutta Joachim
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12 AID(S) politics and power
A critique of global governance
Håkan Thörn
since participation is voluntary and the actors are free to leave the network,
and since the actors are mutually dependant on each other, nobody can use
their power to exert hierarchical control over anybody without risking to
ruin the network.
The case presented in this chapter does not confirm this. Although aid recipient
NGOs in theory are ‘free’ to leave networks if donors attach too many strings to
their aid, they are not inclined to do so because they may be deeply dependent on
the aid for their existence. Furthermore, I will argue that the emergence of a major
strategy of global AIDS governance since the turn of the Millennium has involved
a de-politicization and de-democratization of an important sector of global civil
society.
Nearly three decades after the first case of HIV/AIDS was reported, the dis-
ease is today an issue high on the global political agenda. A clear indication of
this is that the total resources made available for HIV/AIDS globally increased
from US$1.6 billion in 2001 to US$10 billion in 2007 (UNAIDS 2008) and is
AID(S) politics and power 233
expected to continue to grow. The reasons for this may seem obvious. According
to UNAIDS (2008), approximately 33 million people are living with HIV.
However, it is important to emphasize that HIV/AIDS, initially being narrowly
defined in medical terms as a ‘health issue’ and socially being stigmatized as a ‘gay
disease’, became politicized largely through the actions of social movements in
countries such as Brazil and the United States in the 1980s and in the context of
global civil society in the 1990s (Follér and Thörn 2008). As HIV/AIDS spread
quickly in poor countries of the South, it became an issue closely related to poverty
and social inequalities with global implications (Barnett and Whiteside 2006).1 The
fact that the poorest countries in the Global South, particularly in the region of sub-
Saharan Africa, carries a disproportionate burden of the epidemic made the issue of
medical corporation’s patent rights and their pricing of medicines a hotly contested
issue. An important moment in the politicization of the AIDS issue in a global con-
text occurred in 1998 when 38 pharmaceutical companies brought charges against
the South African state for suspected breaches of the WTO agreement, motivated
by a planned import of medicines from Brazil. In response to this, the South African
social movement organization (SMO) Treatment Action Campaign (TAC), in co-
operation with Médecins Sans Frontiers (MSF) and Oxfam, launched an extensive
global campaign, which subsequently pressured the pharmaceutical industry to drop
its charges because of negative publicity (Olesen 2006).
In this chapter, I will argue that in the 2000s, this wave of global AIDS activism
was largely succeeded by a process of ‘NGOization’ or ‘quangoization’ of activ-
ism (Kaldor 2003; Miller and Rose 2008), as NGOs have come to play a central
role in global AIDS governance. Locally and nationally, NGOs have served as
recipients and distributors of aid. Transnationally, international NGOs (INGOs)
have functioned as links between donors – funds, international institutions and
Western states – and NGOs and authorities at the local and national level.2 Davis
(2006: 76) has argued that this emphasis on NGOs and civil society in global
development politics started in the mid-1990s under the leadership of the World
Bank, and that it could be understood as representing a ‘“soft imperialism”, with
the major NGOs captive of the agenda of the international donors, and grassroots
groups similarly dependent on the international NGOs’. I will argue that AIDS aid
governance is a relevant case to shed light on the contested issue of ‘imperialism’
in contemporary global politics.
According to de Waal (2006: 113), contemporary AIDS aid means that ‘we are
on the brink of an unparalleled life-controlling intrusion into African societies,
and we just don’t know what it will look like’. This chapter discusses how this
situation is played out in the context of South Africa. The case study3 is used as a
springboard to address some more general questions with relevance for theories
of global politics, power and activism: What are the strategies of the global donor
community in relation to local AIDS activism in the context of civil society in the
Global South? What are the functions of these strategies and what are their effects
on local AIDS work? And how are power relations articulated, reproduced and
resisted in governance networks?
234 Håkan Thörn
Critique of governance
As an analytical approach, governance often emphasize the transformation of
boundaries between the state, the market and civil society (Sörensen and Torfing
2007). In the context of globalization theory, governance represents practices that
‘can extend beyond the state and substate institutions to include supra-state
(macro-regional and global) regimes’ (Scholte 2005: 140–1). I argue that govern-
ance theory often underestimate power imbalances between actors in political
networks. Although governance theory argues that the political power of the
nation state is weakened as governance networks move in, our case shows that
particular states continue to constitute ‘power centres’ – largely based on material
resources – within global governance networks.
Considering that governance is a term frequently used by the donor organiza-
tions and political networks studied here, I will not use governance as a theoreti-
cal tool. In this chapter, governance instead refers to an empirical practice/
discourse, which is the object of critical analysis. As aid discourses often define
the operations of global policy networks in terms of partnership, there is a need
to analyse these discourses critically – with a focus on the power relations they
may (mis)represent.
To analyse how power is exercised in ‘governance networks’, I depart from
the framework of governmentality theory developed to analyse and understand
‘governing at a distance’ in the context of ‘advanced liberalism’. As emphasized
by Miller and Rose (2008), it is mistaken to understand advanced liberalism
simply in terms of a reduction of state power. Rather, advanced liberalism means
a transformation of the role of the state and its mode of regulation towards
mechanisms of self-regulation. According to Miller and Rose (2008: 215), then,
this transformation:
CCMs are independent entities; they are not formally part of the Global
Fund. Nevertheless, the Global Fund has developed guidance on how
CCMs should be structured and how they should function. Some of this
guidance is in the form of requirements – that is, conditions that the CCM
has to meet before the Global Fund will accept proposals from the CCM.
(Garmaise 2009: 41)
AID(S) politics and power 241
In a similar vein as the GF, PEPFAR frames the emphasis on civil society in the
context of ‘public–private partnerships’. For example, under the headline
‘Community, Business and U.S. Government Build Rural Health Clinic’, the 2006
Annual Report states that PEPFAR ‘has joined hands with South Africa’s govern-
ment and private enterprise to bring vital health service to underserved people’
(PEPFAR 2006: 24). However, just as important, PEPFARs’ emphasis on civil soci-
ety is also about being able to educate the population in the recipient country about
certain values and norms, as local NGOs such as community-based organizations
(CBOs) and faith-based organizations (FBOs) according to PEPFAR (2006: 7) ‘are
best equipped to reach local communities and influence values and norms’.
The arguments of the donor programmes presented in this section are basically
about making international aid policies legitimate. They point to the link between
the two most important concepts on the programmatic level of current AIDS aid
discourse: the obvious inequality between partners is supposed to be compensated
by the (weaker) recipient’s ownership of the issue. Furthermore, emphasizing the
role of civil society involves a claim to legitimacy for methods of marketization
(because the market itself does not have mechanisms for the construction of
legitimacy). In the case of PEPFAR, support for local NGOs also served the func-
tion to make its programmatic demands on ‘Christian values’ in connection with
AIDS work look less ‘from above’ or simply ‘neo-imperialist’. However, as we
will see in the next section, the differences between the two donor agencies
become even less clearly defined when looking at their actual practices. This is
related to the fact that AIDS aid governance networks, in most cases, use the same
techniques in connection with the implementation of their funds.
The rules and regulations regarding the administration of the money can be
quite challenging so it makes it very difficult for a weaker civil society
organization to be able to comply with those rules . . . Our grantees are hav-
ing a problem in demonstrating impact . . . All they (the donors; author’s
remark) give us are indicators they would like us to use, or tools to measure.
For example, we’ve got one donor who gives us money specifically for
children’s programs. Now, they give us a questionnaire and a monitoring
AID(S) politics and power 243
tool, and you’ve got to say: ‘does the child smile a lot?’ – ‘yes’. . . So, to
gather the data that they are expecting is not really practical because the
people who are working in those communities are solid women who . . .
have been working in the community doing . . . burial societies, women’s
groups, church groups . . . home based care . . . work with orphans, but they
are not highly trained specialists being able to say that so many children
were traumatized but now they have moved from that stage and they are at
that stage of rehabilitation.
(Interview 5)
I wish that somebody would like to look at how you measure very nebulous
sorts of things. I mean it’s easy if we talk about things like prosecution for
rape. I mean you know what your success rate is in terms of prosecutions
. . . you have an incident that is reportable, you can provide the tests to
confirm whether the individual’s been raped . . . but things like male
involvement in discussions on social norms is really hard.
(Interview 11)
But instead we run workshops, you know why? Because that’s what donors
fund. Donor’s say you got to reach 800 men the next six months and you
know, here’s your impact evaluation, here are the indicators and it’s very
technocratic.
(Interview 8)
Resistance as re-politicization
The leading SMO in South Africa in connection with AIDS politics is the TAC,
which in 2003 launched a successful campaign of civil disobedience to support a
framework agreement on a government HIV/AIDS policy (Mbali 2006). TAC is
a broad SMO, which has functioned as a node in the national network of civic
HIV/AIDS initiatives. A key aspect of its overall strategy is making strong efforts
to mobilize and link up with other NGOs/SMOs regionally (Southern Africa) and
globally (as in the campaign against the pharmaceutical industry mentioned ear-
lier). With its roots in the anti-apartheid struggle and its links to the ANC (African
National Congress), in the 2000s, the TAC has achieved a position strong enough
to refuse to take any aid that restricts its work. As we have seen in this chapter,
this is, however, not the case with weaker NGOs. Nevertheless, the power tech-
niques of AIDS aid governance also open up spaces for resistance, which can be
appropriated for counter-mobilization. In the South African case, it is possible to
discern the following political strategies, which have all emerged as resistance to
major programmes/strategies of AIDS aid governance:
Conclusion
On the most general level, this chapter related the case of global AIDS aid gov-
ernance to the debate on whether the current global power structure can be
analysed in terms of a US-led neo-imperialism, or whether it rather should be
understood in terms of a post-imperialist power constellation based on regula-
tion through market mechanisms and self-regulation, with an emphasis on ‘civil
society participation’. The case to some extent supports Rojas’ (2004) argument
in the sense that aid politics of the 2000s has meant a return of bilateral aid and
a ‘new imperialism’ in which the dominant state has used aid to legitimize its
foreign policy in a manner resembling ‘the civilising mission’ of classical cul-
tural imperialism.
However, more important, there are currently many indications that the US
administration under Obama is taking a different approach to foreign policy and
aid than the Bush administration. Relating this to our case, one of Obama’s first
decisions after taking office was to lift the restrictions for condom use in the
PEPFAR programme (PEPFAR 2009). There is, however, nothing that indicates
that its policies go against the ‘deep structures’ of advanced liberalism, implying
a change regarding the emphasis on market mechanisms and ‘self-regulation’ in
the context of aid. Furthermore, when locating the most important tensions, con-
flicts and consequences of aid policies, as well as accounting for the perceptions
of those who are at the receiving end, the case clearly indicates that it is the
246 Håkan Thörn
power strategies of governance networks, emphasizing ‘regulation through self-
regulation’, rather than those of the classical imperialist civilising mission, that
seems to be most significant.
This does not, however, imply that the state is just one level among many, as
argued by Fraser (2003). The governance discourse implies a transformation of
the functions of states and their modes of regulation, re-defining the roles of the
donor state and the recipient state in different ways. The techniques of responsi-
bilization, with their emphasis on partnership/ownership, are not only applied to
actors in civil society but also in relation to the aid recipient state. Hindess (2004:
35) quotes Joseph Stiglitz who, in the capacity of Vice-President of the World
Bank, stated that the country, not just the government, should be ‘in the drivers
seat’. This approach is clearly visible in the Global Fund’s emphasis on the CCM
as the key instance for the accountability of AIDS aid, as it emphasizes the role
of the nation state in aid while at the same time prescribes participation by repre-
sentatives not just from the government but also for private business and civil
society. The weight given to the CCM by the Global Fund indicates that the state
is, thus, not just one level among many. However, the character of the CCM (with
representatives from corporations and civil society) indicates a rearticulation of
the role of the state level in aid.
Although governance discourses in most cases stick to some variant of the UN
definition of civil society, which define it as a sphere separate from the market
(and the state), a consequence of the emphasis on civil society is, nevertheless,
tendencies towards marketization and privatization of the sector of AIDS aid and
even of wider sectors of the recipient societies. There are several aspects of this.
First, the mechanisms of audit have spread the techniques of ‘calculative prac-
tices’ (Miller and Rose 2008: 11), of financial calculation, cost-reduction and
budgetary obligations to new areas, transformed the definitions of ‘accountabil-
ity’ and ‘legitimacy’ and created new markets for business consultants and
accountants. The quantitative logic of the techniques of responsibilization means
a commodification of civil society, which affects not only language and reporting
procedures but also how organizations, communities and individuals perceive
themselves, their activities and their relations with society.
Second, in connection with my argument that power struggles about legiti-
macy in the context of civil society is ultimately about the control of material
resources and institutions, AIDS aid to civil society has in some cases also been
a mode of legitimization of private health sector initiatives in the recipient coun-
tries, as in the case of the above-mentioned construction of a health clinic orga-
nized by PEPFAR. Several of our respondents argued that considering the
amount of money invested in aid projects such as this, there are reasons to
believe that they may represent a ‘tacit’ privatization of the health sector in
Southern African countries.7 As it has been argued that the health sectors in
countries of the Global South need to be strengthened for the provision of
medication to have an effect, the issue of public health sector privatization points
to the close links between aid to AIDS prevention, which has been the focus of
this chapter, and programmes providing AIDS medicines (anti-retroviral drugs
AID(S) politics and power 247
[ARVs]). Research on AIDS governance in connection with the provision of
ARVs to the Global South supports this chapter’s argument regarding the impor-
tance of public–private partnerships; in 2004, there were 18 AIDS-related global
governance networks that included multi-national drug companies, with 60 per
cent of the US$250 million funding to support these networks provided by the
Bill and Melissa Gates Foundation (compared with 16 per cent from govern-
ments, Wogart 2007).
As AIDS aid programmes exercise social control at a distance and seek to
legitimize power relations in governance networks through strategies of respon-
sibilization, the re-definition of the concept of accountability is crucial. Although
the original political meaning of accountability referred to a practice where the
sovereign (the king) held his subjects to account, modern democracy reversed the
process by making authorities accountable to their citizens. In a sense, gover-
nance discourse presents a new reversal, as accountability to a large extent means
the practice by which powerful actors in governance networks hold their subjects
(the aid recipients) to account.
This chapter has put its main emphasis on analysing the exercise of power of
influential actors in governance networks and much less on highlighting global
activism. Rather than a starting point for the research project presented here, this
is a consequence of the ‘logic of the facts’ of our empirical material. Nevertheless,
AIDS aid has been a site of collective struggles by civil society actors in South
African civil society. As accounted for in this chapter, the resistance strategies
emerging from these struggles were, however, highly conditioned by donors’
power strategies.
Looking back at nearly three decades of AIDS politics, there is hardly any doubt
that AIDS activism in many respects is a story of social movement success, at least
until the turn of the Millennium. After emerging as one of the new social movements
in the 1980s in countries such as Brazil and the United States, where governments
were pressured to a more proactive response to the disease, equally successful global
campaigns were launched in the 1990s. However, the fact that success also meant
being invited to co-operate with powerful institutions in the context of governance
networks did seem to have negative consequences for activism. In his study of the
Canadian government’s response to AIDS-activism, Kinsman (1996) showed that
Canada’s 1990 national partnership strategy steered the activities of activist groups
from advocacy to service provision. Our case indicates that this to a large extent has
also happened to global and local AIDS activism in the 2000s. During this period,
AIDS-activism has been rather re-active, in contradistinction to the proactive phases
of AIDS activism in the 1980s and 1990s. The governance of AIDS aid in the 2000s,
thus, seems mainly to be a story of de-politicization and de-democratization of an
important sector of national and global civil societies.
Notes
1 Today, 67 per cent of the infected live in this part of the world (UNAIDS 2008: 32), a region
where more than 40 per cent live on less than US$1 per day (UNAIDS 2008: 88).
248 Håkan Thörn
2 In this chapter, I use NGO as a broad term for a wide range of organizations that partake
in civil society activities, such as SMOs, CBOs and FBOs. In other contexts (e.g. in some
of the documents I quote), the term CSO is used synonymously with NGO. Although I
use such a broad definition of ‘NGO’, I regard the criticism against NGOization or quan-
goization of politics and activism (Kinsman 1996; Ottaway and Carothers 2000; Kaldor
2003; Miller and Rose 2008) as valid, as it first and foremost refers to a proliferation of
professionalized types of NGOs, who cannot be considered as activist organizations
(SMOs), but more or less function as complements, or service providers, in relation to
official or private institutions.
3 The research project was carried out between 2006 and 2009, studying state agencies (US
AID/PEPFAR, SIDA), foundations (The Global Fund, Bill and Melissa Gates Foundation),
INGOs (Medicins sans frontiéres, World Vision) and South African NGOs (TAC, AIDS
Foundation and Sonke Gender Justice Network). In addition to discourse analysis of
policy documents of donor organizations, 11 interviews with key informants (including
donor representatives working in South Africa, South African NGO representatives and
South African researchers) were carried out. The interviews and selection of donor docu-
ments that this chapter is based on was made in 2006/2007 by Agnes Dahné (See also
Dahné 2008), Christoph Haug and the author. Additional material was collected in 2009
by Bomanson (2009). In addition to our own material, we have also closely studied two
research reports by South African NGOs on the consequences of AIDS aid to civil society
in Southern Africa (Alexander et al. 2007; Birdsall and Kelly 2007). The author would
like to thank Agnes Dahné, Christoph Haug, Tim Bomanson and Ingemar Bohlin for
productive discussions in connection with the analysis of the material.
4 The report is based on 40 key informant interviews (conducted July–November 2006,
with assistance from UCLA’s programme in Global Health) with representatives of South
African NGOs, INGOs and US Government officials (Alexander et al. 2007: 1).
5 This report (and the fact that it is available through GF’s homepage and, thus, could be
considered as ‘authorized’ by the GF), produced by an NGO ‘whose mission is to rein-
force the effectiveness of the Global Fund’ (www.aidspan.org), is an example of the
symbiotic and technocratic relationship between funders and NGOs that sometimes exist
in the context of governance networks. Although AIDSPAN presents itself ‘as an inde-
pendent watchdog of the Global Fund’ (www.aidspan.org), the “Beginner’s Guide
. . . ” quoted above, which is produced to ‘provide a broad introduction to the Global
Fund for people who have little or no prior experience of the Fund’ (Garmaise 2009: 7),
is not a critical evaluation of the GF but rather a descriptive user’s guide.
6 The Paris Declaration, which came about as a response to widespread criticism about the
ineffectiveness and fragmentation of international aid, meant that the leading interna-
tional donor agencies committed to work with developing countries to better coordinate
and streamline their activities at country level.
7 TAC also criticized the state agencies for using donor money to purchase ARVs from
medical corporations based in their own countries, which are much more expensive than
those imported from Brazil (interview 4).
8 All interviews are made by the author except *made by Agnes Dahné.
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Interviews (Interviewee/organisation/place/date)8
No 1: Mandisa Mbali/Treatment Action Campaign, University of Oxford/Gothenburg/18
May
No 2: Suzanne Leclerc-Madlala/University of Kwa-Zulu Natal/Gothenburg/19 May
2006
AID(S) politics and power 251
No 3: Alan Whiteside/HERD, University of KwA-Zulu Natal/Durban/ 31 July 2006
No 4: Sindi Blose/Treatment Action Campaign/Durban/2 August 2006
No 5: Anonymous/AIDS Foundation/Durban/3 August 2006
No 6: Anonymous/AIDS Foundation/Durban/3 August 2006
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Town/9 August
No 8: Dean Peacock/Sonke Gender Justice Network/ Cape Town/24 October 2007*
No 9: Anne Ljung/SIDA/Pretoria/29 October 2007*
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No 11: Anonymous/USAID, PEPFAR/Pretoria/1 November 2007*
Conclusion
Transnational counter-publics and
democracy
Thomas Olesen
Introduction
The preceding chapters have all provided important glimpses of transnational
activist power. They have also given us a clear idea of its limits. Assessing the
power of transnational activism requires a nuanced navigation between these
poles, an understanding that transnational activists operate in a structured space
where states, institutions, and corporations continue to be powerful players and
opponents. However, inquiring about their power vis-à-vis these opponents often
leads to relatively instrumental and behavioural analyses with a focus on outcomes
and results: that is, transnational activists exercise power when they force new
issues on the agenda, when they pressure a corporation to withdraw an ‘unethical’
product, when they assist national civil society organizations in instigating regime
change and so on. These are all important lines of inquiry, but they may over-
shadow other less measurable forms of power that, furthermore, need to be under-
stood in a long-term perspective. In the opening of the introductory chapter, I
referred to the anti-war protests of 2003 and the COP15 demonstrations in 2009 as
failures and successes: failures because they did not achieve their immediate goals
and successes because of their ability to mobilize and generate public debate. It is
the latter reading that inspires this chapter. In the following, I offer a set of com-
ments on the concept of transnational counter-publics, which I find particularly
useful for addressing this aspect of power. The arguments are illustrated with refer-
ence to the world social forum (WSF) format that has become a central element in
transnational activism. In conclusion, I build on these insights to briefly explore
the democratic contribution of contemporary transnational activism.
The World Social Forum is an open meeting place for reflective thinking,
democratic debate of ideas, formulation of proposals, free exchange of
experiences and interlinking for effective action, by groups and movements
of civil society that are opposed to neoliberalism
(World Social Forum Charter of Principles 2002)
Transnational learning
The reason that transnational counter-publics are important for the discussion of
power in this volume is that they constitute sites of transnational activist learn-
ing. There are at least two dimensions to this observation. First, returning to
Lukes’ definition above of power as taken-for-granted norms and ideas, counter-
publics are sites for the development of oppositional identities and visions.
Through encounter, debates and exchanges with others, activists analyze existing
power structures and ‘teach’ each other to see the hidden aspects of power. The
plurality of activist backgrounds and the resulting diversity in experiences with
power in the WSF counter-public enable a highly multifaceted learning process
and ‘screening’ of power from various angles (Smith 2008: Chapter 10).
This perspective mainly focuses on processes taking place within the coun-
ter-public and among activists. However, and this is the second dimension,
counter-publics and the discussions taking place within them are also ‘observed’
by ‘outsiders’. Their public nature enables individuals who are not yet engaged
in activism, but are sympathetically inclined or at least curious about their
debates, to ‘access’ them online. During the meetings, for example, activists
produce considerable amounts of information that is distributed through various
outlets such as Indymedia centres set up at the meetings (e.g. Juris 2008: 260).
Journalists also have an interest in monitoring counter-public discussions. The
motivations may vary considerably: some journalists will be assigned to cover-
ing the events because the newspapers, magazine or television channels they
work for are sympathetically inclined to activism. Others will be assigned for
the opposite reason, to search for weaknesses and points of criticism in the
WSF. No matter the motivation, this type of coverage provides points of inter-
section between the WSF transnational counter-public and dominant public
spheres around the world. Through these processes of observation, the opposi-
tional learning that goes on within the WSF is made available to people outside
the counter-public, although in an indirect fashion. In addition, WSF activists
proactively target dominant public spheres to alert them to the counter-public
Conclusion 257
and its debates. As noted by Fraser above, counter-publics are not isolated and
self-enclosed. In fact, WSF discussions and agreements often form the basis of
interventions into the dominant public sphere. A recurring theme, for example,
concerns how and if WSF activists should target the mainstream media to gain
a wider sounding board for their ideas. Returning to the two examples from the
introduction – the February 15, 2003, anti-war protests and the 2009 COP15
protests – many of the activities related to these events were planned, discussed
and coordinated in the WSF counter-public or in counter-publics intersecting
with this. However, the events themselves took place in dominant public
spheres and were designed to – and had considerable success in – attracting the
attention of the mainstream media.
There is a long tradition in activist research stressing the importance of so-
called mobilizing structures, that is, already existing organizations and settings
that may provide potential and emerging activists with resources, knowledge and
experience (e.g. McAdam 1982; McCarthy 1996). These structures have tradi-
tionally been located in national activist cultures and institutions. Genuinely
transnational mobilizing structures are still relatively undeveloped. The WSF – in
both its mediated and physical form – is a historically unique form of transna-
tional activist memory and culture building. To be sure, as evidenced by
Charnovitz (1997) and Sikkink and Smith (2002), transnational activist organiza-
tions have a long history. Until this point in time, however, they have worked
mainly on an individual basis or occasionally through coordinated campaigns.
The WSF format is unique precisely because it attempts to create and institution-
alize a counter-public at the transnational level. This process involves a collective
and public ‘storage’ of transnational activist experience, knowledge and memo-
ries. Such learning processes are important in a power perspective because they
generate durable activist resources that can be developed and activated by future
transnational activists. Where transnational activists 10–20 years ago faced a
relatively empty landscape in terms of mobilizing structures and activist learning,
they now move in an increasingly dense terrain. The WSF counter-public is one
of its landmarks.
Transnational democracy
The presence of counter-publics indicates a highly self-reflexive and complex
society; a society engaged in constant debate on and with itself (Beck et al. 1994).
If we measure the ‘quality’ of democracy through the depth and plurality of pub-
lic debate, it follows that societies with numerous counter-publics are also demo-
cratically vibrant societies. Continuing this line of argument, it is reasonable to
suggest that the presence of transnational counter-publics, such as the one taking
form around the WSF, make a positive contribution to transnational democracy.
It is, however, an observation that immediately raises questions and challenges.
Outlining these is a useful conclusion to the volume as they force us, once again
but from a different angle, to confront the scope, character and limits of transna-
tional activist power in the contemporary world.
258 Thomas Olesen
In the deliberative democratic model, public debate is a democratic quality in
itself, even if it is not ultimately aimed at obtaining specific goals. Power, democ-
racy and publicity, in this vein, are interlinked. In deliberative democratic thinking,
democracy is more than a method for electing parliaments and governments. It is
also a process that ensures that politicians are constantly and routinely challenged,
monitored, and ‘exposed’ to new political ideas and alternatives (Habermas 1992,
1996). This oppositional and critical function of the public sphere is strengthened
by the existence of counter-publics. This is so because the dominant public sphere
is a limited space in at least two senses: First, not all potential issues and problems
can be addressed by politicians and the media, and second, there is a certain access
hierarchy where activist frames – and perhaps especially radical ones – are given
less priority by the mainstream media vis-à-vis elite and authority frames (e.g.
Bennett et al. 2004; Entman 2004). For the latter reason, counter-publics are often
structured around alternative media production (see Rucht this volume). Counter-
publics, in other words, have emerged to mitigate the exclusionary practices of the
dominant public sphere, and it is precisely here that their contribution to democracy
and, consequently, power challenge lies.
In the preceding sections, it was argued how the internal counter-public
debates contributing to transnational activist identity building and learning in the
WSF are important sources of power and, we may now add, contributions to
democracy. They expand and institutionalize the presence of activists at a trans-
national level and leave behind mobilizing structures to build on in the future.
However, to reiterate Fraser’s argument, activists and counter-publics rarely con-
fine themselves to such internal processes but rather see them as elements in a
long-term vision to affect dominant public spheres and, through that, politics. As
Habermas (1992: 452) notes, discourses do not govern but influence decision-
making processes through threats of legitimacy and – in the last instance – vote
withdrawal. This process seems to presuppose a relatively clearly defined public
and ‘receiver’ of public debate (Fraser 2008). Traditionally, these categories have
been defined nationally and geographically, that is, for example, a German people
debating in a German public sphere and with reference to the German political
system. Even if national counter-publics are less oriented to the formal political
system, they still aspire to be ‘heard’ in the dominant public sphere and make an
impact on politics. This raises a vexing question of who constitutes the wider
audience for transnational counter-publics.
In recent years, there have been numerous attempts to outline the contours of
a transnational or global public sphere (e.g. Fraser 2008; Nanz and Steffek 2004;
Smith 2008). I am sceptical about concepts such as these. Leaving the question
of the desirability of a transnational public sphere aside, I am inclined to argue
that a genuinely transnational public sphere is only identifiable in a limited set of
situations when actors around the world simultaneously debate the same issue:
Recent examples are the Danish Muhammad Cartoons crisis in early 2006, the
debate about the war in Iraq in early 2003 and the debate surrounding the COP15
meeting on global warming in Copenhagen in 2009. Returning to the questions
above this observation implies that there is no clear cut ‘corresponding’ dominant
Conclusion 259
public sphere for the transnational counter-publics discussed in the preceding
section. Mainstream debate, in other words, still primarily occurs in national
public spheres and in national media. When activists engaged in, for example, the
WSF counter-public, seek to relay their ideas and frames to the wider public, this
is generally a national public. This reveals an important insight about transna-
tional activists: That they are not necessarily transnational all the time but rather
what Tarrow (2005) has called rooted cosmopolitans who move back and forth
between transnational counter-publics and the dominant public sphere of their
country of origin (see also footnote 2 in the introductory chapter). A Spanish
environmental organization can be an active part – in both its physical and elec-
tronic manifestations – of the WSF counter-public but simultaneously involved in
environmental activities and debates at the national or even local level. It is pre-
cisely the blurring of these boundaries and the corresponding physical and mental
ease with which they are crossed that is the essence of contemporary transna-
tional activism.
It requires considerable analytical sophistication to link the local, the national,
and the transnational dimensions of social and political issues and problems. The
ability to do this is at the core of transnational activist power. Recalling Lukes’
power definition, it is through this analytical interlinking that they are able to
confront and expose contemporary injustices in novel and innovative ways. This
power builds on and is developed in the context of transnational counter-publics
such as that emerging around the WSF. If the idea of transnational democracy is
to have any meaning, it needs to include the critical contribution of transnational
counter-publics. transnational democracy does not only include the development
of new political mega-institutions modelled on the European Union or the United
Nations (e.g. Habermas 2001; Held and McGrew 2002). Transnational democracy
exists only when issues of transnational solidarity and justice are systematically
and routinely discussed in national debates and within international institutions.
Historically, transnational activists have played a unique role in placing and keep-
ing them there. At the current juncture with xenophobic, fundamentalist and
nationalist sentiments on the rise, this responsibility is only increasing. The emer-
gence of transnational counter-publics built on critical transnational dialogue and
learning have created a stable yet vibrant and dynamic power base from which to
accomplish this huge and important task.
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Index
accountability, 35, 84, 98ff, 173ff, climate change, 1, 51, 56, 60, 61, 214
225, 237 climate justice, 54, 58, 59, 67, 152
advocacy, 44–5, 53, 56ff, 77, 113, 115, Climate Justice Now, 58, 68
137, 143, 151ff, 157–8, 161ff, 173, Cold War, the, 7, 10–11, 39, 77, 215,
175ff, 183ff, 219, 247; see also 217, 221
advocacy networks colonialism, 53, 66
advocacy networks, 53, 56–7, 77, communicative power, 2, 5
137, 151–2 communism, 53, 61–2
AIDS, 173ff, 232ff contentious politics, 76, 78, 80, 86, 132
alternative media, 196, 198, 258 COP15, 1, 12, 51, 52, 59, 60, 65, 252, 269
Amnesty International, 31, 114, 116, 125 cosmopolitanism, cosmopolitan, 24ff, 53,
anarchism, 51–2, 61–2, 68 151, 259
anti-apartheid, 244 counter-power, 23ff, 34, 92
anti-war, 58, 130, 252 counter-publics, 1, 252ff
apartheid, 7, 137; see also anti-apartheid counter-summits, 94, 97, 103
Attac, 197–8
autonomous spaces, 55, 255 Darfur, 121
autonomy, 34–5, 37–8, 42, 46, 58, 66, 68, debt, 80, 199
123, 204 democracy, 9, 27, 32, 36, 39–8, 45, 51, 52,
55, 58, 63, 92, 116, 174, 191, 204, 226,
Bachrach, P. and Baratz, M. S., 4, 5, 252 236–7, 246, 252ff
Bono, 44 developing countries, 61, 179, 223, 225
boomerang model, 43 discursive opportunities, 2ff, 131, 194
borders, 8, 31, 59, 67, 76, 80, 82, 97, domination, 23, 26–7, 29, 36, 40, 53,
101, 105–6, 115, 194–5 216, 225, 353
Bourdieu, Pierre, 30
Brazil, 233, 247 empire, 61ff
Bush, George W., 44, 81ff, 134, 137, environmental activism, 130, 134, 138,
139, 143, 237–8 140, 145
EU, 44, 82, 84, 85, 97ff, 102, 105, 131,
Canada, 75ff, 243, 245 141, 160, 259
capitalism, 23, 35, 40, 52ff, 66–7, 86, 136 European Council, 99ff
Castells, Manuel, 3 European Parliament, 99ff
charities, 153ff European Social Forum, 65, 97, 195,
charity, 235 254–5
children, 173ff, 243
China, 61, 125ff, 221 fair trade, 83
civil disobedience, 67, 98, 136, 144, 244 FAO, 219
Climate Action Network, 59 50 Years is Enough, 43, 143
Index 263
fortification, 94, 97, 103, 105–6 international institutions, 3–5, 7, 11,
Foucault, Michel, 133, 234 43–4, 151, 162, 176–7, 194, 222,
framing, 1ff, 77, 103, 131–2, 134, 208, 233, 244, 259
214, 220, 223–4, 244, 252–4 internet, 41, 58, 80, 82, 121, 140–1,
France, 116, 141, 152ff, 193, 195, 198, 208–9, 223
Free Trade Area of the Americas, 77, 81 Iraq, 1, 46, 83, 140, 143, 194, 238, 259
Israel, 7, 46
G8, 42, 43, 81, 91, 97, 99, 102, 195,
197ff, 237 Japan, 152ff
gender, 60, 137, 218–19, 243 journalism, 197; see also journalists
Genoa, 44, 81, 91, 95ff, 197, 200ff journalists, 91, 119, 121, 191ff
Germany, 195ff Jubilee, 44, 58, 80, 143
global civil society, 3, 4, 24, 25, 27, 28,
31, 45, 56, 57, 77, 152, 165, 174, 176, Kaldor, Mary, 35–6, 41ff
186, 232, 237; see also transnational
civil society latent conflict, 253
global inequalities, 61, 255 Latin America, 35, 40, 193
global justice, 25, 96, 104, 143, 190ff least developed countries, 61
global public sphere, 258; see also legitimation, 26ff
transnational public sphere liberalization, 79, 81, 84, 203–4
global north, 235 Lukes, Steven, 53, 56, 252–3, 256, 259
global south, 40, 54, 58, 63, 67, 232–3,
237–8, 242, 246–7 Marxism, 51–2, 66, 68
global warming, 259 Médecins sans Frontières, 158, 181, 233
governance, 27, 44, 51–2, 55–6, 58–9, media, 3, 11, 26, 30, 36, 43, 59, 61, 63,
61ff, 77–8, 84–5, 92, 173ff, 215, 232ff 79, 96, 114, 117, 120, 125, 140, 184,
governmentality, 234ff 190ff, 254, 257–8
Gramsci, Antonio, 133, 139, 236, 253 Mexico, 46, 55, 75ff
Greenpeace, 31, 39, 60, 100, 136ff, migrants, 105, 123–4, 194
144, 193, 208 militarization, 94–5, 103ff
military power, 3, 29, 112, 114, 122, 125
Habermas, Jürgen, 56, 133, 253–4, 258–9 mobility, 23
Hardt, Michael, and Negri, Antonio, 36–7, mobilizing structures, 131, 257–8
39ff, 62ff modernity, 9, 27, 31, 39, 42, 254
health, 173 modernization, 115, 123
hegemony, 133, 236, 253 multi-stakeholder, 84, 178, 181, 240
human rights, 4–5, 7, 9–10, 24, 27, 31,
43, 75–6, 93, 111ff, 143, 151, 175, 178, NAFTA, 75ff
180, 182, 204, 218–19, 221, 223 national security, 6, 8, 10–11, 101
Human Rights Watch, 116ff nation-state, the, 23–4, 27, 32
humanitarian intervention, 10, 24 NATO (North Atlantic Treaty
Organization), 32
ILO, 219 neoliberal globalization, 52, 54, 58, 77, 136
IMF (International Monetary Fund), neoliberalism, neoliberal, 25, 78, 103, 136,
5, 43, 44, 51, 81, 194, 199, 200 200, 239, 254–5; see also
imperialism, 33, 225, 233, 236, 238–9, neoliberal globalization
245 new social movements, 37–8, 41, 43, 95
India, 39–40 9/11, 7, 8, 10, 13, 97, 106, 145; see also
indigenous people, 68, 83 September 11
information technology, 77 Nobel Peace Prize, 135
institutional power, 214ff
intelligence, 7, 94, 97, 99, 102ff, 142 Obama, Barack, 78, 84, 245
international governmental organizations, Olympics, the, 111ff
92, 104, 214, 226 Oxfam, 60, 164, 233
264 Index
Palestine, 46 spiral model, the, 113, 122, 125
parallel summits, 43 state power, 6, 23, 29, 32, 36, 54, 64–5,
peace, 7, 31, 46, 53, 139, 143, 91–3, 136, 145, 234
219–20, 223, suffering, 47, 86, 121, 174–5, 182–3
Peoples’ Global Action, 59, 64, 66 surveillance, 92, 97, 106, 120, 140ff
Polanyi, Karl, 52, 61 sustainable development, 60, 75, 81
policing, 7, 91ff, 134, 144
political consumer, 25–6, 28 terror, 1, 7–8, 11, 54, 81, 83, 85, 97–8,
political opportunities, 2, 6, 78, 81, 104ff, 130ff; see also war on terror
85–6, 103, 130ff, 152ff Third World, 5, 44, 58
political power, 25, 29, 39, 78, 86, Tianenmen Square, 111
104, 191, 234, 253 Tibet, 39, 120
Porto Alegre, 44, 255 Tilly, Charles, 131ff
poverty, 31, 56, 184, 233 torture, 28, 111, 113ff, 125
privatization, 27, 40, 52, 75, 94, 246 transnational activist cooperation, 80
public order, 92ff, 142 transnational civil society, 55, 123–4,
151
radical democracy, 38, 55 transnational democracy, 257ff
radicalism, 52, 55, 136 transnational networks, 29, 43, 76
realism, 112 transnational public sphere, 258
refugees, 10, 174
representation, 37ff, 43–4, 82, 173ff, UNAIDS, 179–80, 233
220ff, 237 UNCHR, 111, 115ff
resource mobilization, 131 United Nations, 11, 43, 51, 67, 179,
revolution, revolutionary, 25, 39–40, 51, 214ff, 222ff
53ff, 61–2, 66, 68, 120, 130, 136, 145 Universal Declaration of Human Rights,
Rio de Janeiro conference, 30, 218, 220–1 9–10, 121
Risse, Thomas, 3–5, 112ff, 118, 122 universalism, 6, 8, 10
USAID, 154, 236ff
sans-papiers migrants, 194
Seattle, 34, 77, 80–1, 94ff, 195, 199ff Via Campesina, 58–9, 67
securitization, 2ff, 134
Security Council, 121–2, 125, 217, war on terror, the, 1, 7, 10, 13, 54, 83,
219–20 139, 141–2
self-regulation, 234, 245 Weber, Max, 26, 93
September 11, 81ff, 130–1, 135, welfare state, 9, 23, 25, 31, 61, 235
138ff, 143, 145, women, 58, 179, 214ff
shaming, 3, 122 World Bank, 43, 51, 81, 116, 165, 194,
Sikkink, Kathryn, 3, 5, 9–10, 43, 56ff, 199, 219, 233, 246
77, 112ff, 118, 151, 214, 225, 257 World Economic Forum, 96
sit-ins, 140, 144, 225 World Social Forum, 54, 83, 164, 252ff
social democracy, 51–2, 68 WTO, 32–3, 42–3, 51, 68, 77, 80–1, 103,
Soft power, 57, 77 199–200, 233
solidarity, 9, 39, 46, 59, 64, 82, 93
South Africa, 40, 233ff xenophobia, 28
sovereignty, 9–10, 24, 30ff, 36, 62–3,
77–8, 86, 115 Zapatistas, 39–40, 64, 80
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