Transnational Rights Activists Flashcards
What is the historical background of transnational advocacy networks (TANs)
After WWII: huge increase in NGOs
- technological transformations to facilitate
- spirits of the 1960s: contestation of authority, disatisfaction
What is the definition of an NGO
any international organization not established by intergovernmental agreement
What are some classifications of NGOs
- functional classification: advocacy vs service orientated
- tactical/political classifications:
- conformist, reformist, radical
- orderly, obstructive, destructive - national
- int. NGO (INGO)
- gov. organized NGO (looks like NGO but is puppet to state)
- quasi NGO (directly financed by state or corporation)
What are transnational advocacy networks (TANs)
- relevant actors working internationally on an issue, bound together by shared values, common discourse and dense exchanges of info and services
- based on principled ideas and norms
- mobilizing structures
- importance of campaigns (e.g. anti-apartheid, anti-nuclear movement, argentinian human rights, save darfur)
What are networks?
forms of organization characterized by voluntary, reciprocal and horizontal patterns of communication and exchange
What is the boomerang effect
-actors: states, NGOs, intergovernmental org
-dynamics: blockage, pressure, info
-using transnational networks (so NGOs) to put pressure on blocked states
NGO state A — info —> NGO state B —> State B —> intergovernmental org —> state A
What are political entrepreneurs missions?
-sharing info
-attaining greater visibility
-gaining access to wider publics
-multiplying channels of institutional access
its active people that bring about change (vs situations)
What strategies do TANs employ?
- Persuasion, socialization, pressure: (frame alignment, frame resonance, cognitive frames)
- Info Politics: (networks, data, credibility, drama…)
- Symbolic Politics: (to make sense of a situation for people far away)
- Leverage Politics: (material leverage - conditionality, linking issues, moral leverage - moral entrapment)
- Accountability Politics: (gov. commits to a principle and can be exposed for distance between discourse and practice)
How do you assess a TAN’s influence?
- issue creation and agenda setting
- discursive position
- institutional procedures
- policy change
- state behaviour
What are conditions for TAN’s influence?
- Issue characteristics:
- establishing clear casual chain (framing)
- bodily harm & equality of opportunity = best narratives - Actor characteristics
- strong and dense networks
- access to info
- material vulnerability
- moral vulnerability
What work did Keck and Sikkink publish?
Advocacy Networks and International Society
How does K&S’s vision vs. Bull’s vision of international society agree and disagree
- agree: international society is based on common interests and values
- disagree: that its a society of states
- > K&S: “neo-medievalism” vision - overlapping authority and multiple loyalty
According to Keck and Sikkink, what is the World Polity Thesis
- John Meyer, John Boli, George Thomas
- International society is site of diffusion of world culture -> explains changes
- IOs and NGOs are “conveyor belts” of Western liberal norms
How does K&S’s TAN vision vs. World Polity Thesis disagree?
- World Polity Thesis removes politics, power and conflict
- transnational actors have profoundly divergent purposes and goals and are a space of negotiation
- understanding thresholds might allows to integrate both theories:
- > TAN focuses on norm formation
- > WPT focuses on norm diffusion
According to Keck and Sikkink, TAN vs. Realism and Liberalism
- TAN addresses the question of change
- Realism: no motor of change
- Liberalism:
- > agree: domestic politics: regime type is important
- > agree: acknowledges collapse of domestic/foreign distinction
- > disagree: but conceives actors as being risk-averse
- > disagree: but sees state as sole path to the int. for domestic interest groups
