Two new books argue that recent claims asserting the power of transnational activism have overstated the influence of those external forces. Robert Press uses the case of Kenya to show that a domestic culture of resistance, not donor pressure or transnational activism, set the nation on a path toward democratization during the late 1980s and 1990s. Sidney Tarrow takes a more subtle approach by reminding us how exceedingly difficult it is to create and maintain transnational coalitions for social change in the first place. Whereas Press pits domestic against international factors, Tarrow incorporates both, theorizing a set of transnational processes to elaborate the opportunities and challenges of organizing for social and political change across borders.
Press combines an agency-centered social movement framework with an empirically rich case study of Kenya's modern political development. The book advances its core arguments chronologically and views political change in Kenya primarily as the result of an expansion of individual and organizational activism (Chapters 3 and 4) and mass public protests and resistance (Chapters 5 and 6). The evidence for his core claims is based on roughly 70 interviews, archival work, and secondary literature. The study does not systematically evaluate competing international and domestic accounts of regime change. Instead, Press is content with describing in detail the domestic mobilization against the former Moi regime. The reader becomes familiar with the specific actions taken by domestic activists, but learns little about the comparative influence of external and internal forces, let alone the interactions between them in supporting or undermining regime change. This stands in stark contrast to the actions of the very “domestic” activists who framed their grievances in a universal human rights language (just as their predecessors during the 1950s and 1960s fought the anticolonial struggle based on the universal idea of nationhood).
By taking a mutually exclusive view of domestic and international forces, Press not only misses an opportunity to tell an intriguing transnational story of political change in Kenya, but also remains indifferent to the potential harmful effects of transnational activism and the divisions within the ruling elites (Stephen N. Ndegwa, “Citizenship and Ethnicity: An Examination of Two Transition Moments in Kenyan Politics,” American Political Science Review 91 [no. 3, 1997]: 599–616). There is little analytical room in Peaceful Resistance to explore the unintended consequences of donor policies promoting good governance or transnational activism supporting a specific interpretation of the global human rights discourse. When donors shifted their financial support to the very “domestic” nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) that Press views at the forefront of organizational activism, the ambiguous effects of such support remain largely unexplored. Thus, the question is not if the domestic or the international matters more (or at all), but what kinds of interactions (or processes in Tarrow's words) across borders produce what types of political outcomes.
The international system and transnational activism provide constraints and opportunities for a wide array of domestic actors, including repressive governments. Clifford Bob has shown in The Marketing of Rebellion (2005) how external actors can manipulate the demands expressed by domestic activists. Authoritarian governments themselves can use external activism as a mobilization platform, for example, when President Moi regularly referred to global human rights groups as representatives of neocolonialism. Finally, many of the domestic human rights NGOs in Kenya emerged or changed in response to external incentives and translated the global discourse on human rights into an effective tool in the hands of specific ethnic groups (such as the Kikuyu) seeking to control state power (see Table 4.2, p. 106 for a telling ethnic breakdown of Kenyan activists during the 1990s). Thus, it is surprising that Press does not build on Stephen Ndegwa's groundbreaking study, The Two Faces of Civil Society (1996), which goes a long way in clarifying the conditions under which specific civil society organizations (in Kenya) become effective agents for political change. Engaging Ndegwa's claims with an assessment of the external democracy and human rights promotion efforts directed at Kenya would have provided a more compelling story about how Kenya's political development was shaped by a set of external and internal forces also familiar to many other national experiences during the 1990s.
Tarrow's approach in the New Transnational Activism is appropriately skeptical of the power of transnational actors, but focuses on why such mobilization across borders is difficult to organize and certainly not a natural response to what many would call processes of globalization. Unlike Press, Tarrow initially suspends his skepticism about the power of transnationalism and embarks on identifying the actual processes that have emerged to link the domestic and the international. Tarrow builds on his previous collaborative work with Doug McAdam and Charles Tilly (Dynamics of Contention, 2001) that is designed to “overcome the distortions of excessive voluntarism and excessive structuralism” (Peaceful Resistance, p. 14, n. 32; here Press cites an e-mail exchange with Tarrow in November 2005) that is inherent in much of the traditional social movement literature. The New Transnational Activism adopts the concept of contention to move beyond comparing seemingly similar events (e.g., revolutions, strikes, ethnic violence). Instead, Tarrow proposes to focus on processes that activists use to link domestic causes and international institutions or symbols.
Tarrow's first claim is that transnational activism is not a reflex response to globalization per se, but thrives in specific issue areas characterized by a high degree of internationalization, or the increasingly dense relationships among states, intergovernmental organizations, and nonstate actors (p. 8). The book is organized around six core transnational processes, labeled global framing, internalization (domestic), diffusion, scale shift (linking domestic arenas), externalization, and coalition forming (international). For Tarrow, the last two have the greatest potential to form a basis for truly transnational social movements. Rooted cosmopolitans are the core agents of the new transnationalism because they embody the essence of the “learning they bring back to their own societies and the ties they have developed across borders” (p. 56). Although most cross-border interactions are short-term and limited, the successful transnational activist is rooted in strong domestic networks. For Tarrow, a transnational process such as diffusion signifies a “transfer of claims of forms of contention from one site to another” (p. 32), but does not necessarily give rise to sustained cross-border interactions or even the emergence of shared identities among different societal actors. Hence, Tarrow links distinct processes of interactions across borders with explanations for the success and failure of individual transnational campaigns.
In analyzing four different types of such transnational coalitions (p. 167), Tarrow views the antilandmines campaign as an emblematic case of a campaign coalition, which is characterized by an intense and long-term involvement of a cross section of transnational activists. By contrast, more short-term campaigns (instrumental and event coalitions) carry in his view the risk of falling apart before reaching sustainable results, whereas more routinized forms of cooperation (federations) frequently lack the ability to adapt to local differences and may not be able to mobilize their membership (p. 179).
The NGO coalition against landmines shares many characteristics of Tarrow's instrumental and event coalitions and exhibited significant variation in the level of participation among its members. More generally, Tarrow's taxonomies provide a useful first cut, but likely overlap in describing a given transnational campaign. Second, activists tried to model a similar campaign against small arms but have failed to get close to the outcome of the landmines campaign. The reasons are not so much related to the campaign itself, but to the framing of the issue and the presence of countervailing mobilization. Although landmines always represented an inherent challenge to the civilian protection expressed in international humanitarian law, framing small arms in a similar way was met with significant resistance, including civil society actors such as the National Rifle Association. So while a process-oriented analysis of transnationalism is more dynamic than the previous emphasis on static opportunity structures, Tarrow's analysis fails to extend its contentious perspective to the discourses within and across civil society actors.
Peaceful Resistance upholds the fiction of the “domestic” and misses the opportunity of assessing the ambiguous effects of the transnational politics of democracy promotion. The New Transnational Activism is also skeptical about the power of the transnational, but contributes to our understanding of those processes by linking the success of transnational organizing to variation in the processes establishing connections across borders and between societies. It is now time to develop more rigorous research designed to assess the effectiveness of transnational organizing and to understand transnational activist networks themselves as sites of intense political contention.
