Transnational dimensions in digital activism and protest

ABSTRACT

This themed issue provides an international perspective on transnational processes in digital activism and protest. Against wider claims that social movements and citizen activism are shifting from the logic of spatial organization to networked flows, this themed issue foregrounds the interplay between the global and local in networked public spheres. Recent transnational movements such as #MeToo or Black Lives Matter yield the importance of interweaving digital communication, pre-existing activist collectives, and citizen activation on a seemingly global scale. In this Introduction, we ask how political causes circulate globally, what role digital technologies play, and ultimately, what “transnational” means for seemingly universal causes, global collective identity, and activist practice. After providing an overview of the different theoretical insights that an interdisciplinary approach to digital activism can provide, we outline a conceptual framework for approaching the transnational as an entanglement of flows, hierarchies, and agencies.

KEYWORDS:

• transnational activism
• digital activism
• collective action
• social movements
• online protest

Notes

1 Clare Saunders, “Activism,” in The Wiley-Blackwell Encyclopedia of Social and Political Movements, ed. David A. Snow, Donatella della Porta, Bert Klandermans, and Doug McAdam (n.p.: John Wiley & Sons, 2013), 1, https://doi.org/10.1002/9781405198431.wbespm002.

2 W. Lance Bennett and Alexandra Segerberg, “The Logic of Connective Action: Digital Media and the Personalization of Contentious Politics,” Information, Communication & Society 15, no. 5 (2012): 739–68.

3 Jordana J. George and Dorothy E. Leidner, “From Clicktivism to Hacktivism: Understanding Digital Activism,” Information and Organization 29, no. 3 (2019): Article 100249, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.infoandorg.2019.04.001.

4 Andrew Chadwick, The Hybrid Media System: Politics and Power (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017); Athina Karatzogianni, “Introduction: Four Phases of Digital Activism and Cyberconflict,” in Firebrand Waves of Digital Activism 1994–2014: The Rise and Spread of Hacktivism and Cyberconflict (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015), 1–4; Alice Mattoni, “A Situated Understanding of Digital Technologies in Social Movements. Media Ecology and Media Practice Approaches,” Social Movement Studies 16, no. 4 (2017): 494–505; Emiliano Treré, Hybrid Media Activism: Ecologies, Imaginaries, Algorithms (London: Routledge, 2019).

5 Anne Kaun and Julie Uldam, “Digital Activism: After the Hype,” New Media & Society 20, no. 6 (2018): 2099–106.

6 Sidney Tarrow, The New Transnational Activism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005).

7 Naima Cornelia, “Waarom activisme in Rotterdam nodig is: in gesprek met organisatoren achter Black Lives Matter” [Why Activism Is Needed in Rotterdam: Talking to Organizers behind Black Lives Matter], VersBeton, August 6, 2020, https://versbeton.nl/2020/08/waarom-activisme-in-rotterdam-nodig-is-in-gesprek-met-organisatoren-achter-black-lives-matter/.

8 Kaun and Uldam, “Digital Activism,” 2100.

9 Ibid., 2102 original emphases.

10 Mattoni, “A Situated Understanding of Digital Technologies in Social Movements,” 495.

11 Christina R. Foust and Kate Drazner Hoyt, “Social Movement 2.0: Integrating and Assessing Scholarship on Social Media and Movement,” Review of Communication 18, no. 1 (2018): 37–55.

12 In reference to Manuel Castells, Networks of Outrage of Hope: Social Movements in the Internet Age, 2nd ed. (London: Polity, 2015). The typology discussed in this paragraph stems from Foust and Hoyt, “Social Movement 2.0.”

13 Peter Van Aelst and Stefaan Walgrave, “New Media, New Movements? The Role of the Internet in Shaping the ‘Anti-Globalization’ Movement,” Information, Communication & Society 5, no. 4 (2002): 465–93; Stefania Vicari, “Networks of Contention: The Shape of Online Transnationalism in Early Twenty-First Century Social Movement Coalitions,” Social Movement Studies 13, no. 1 (2014): 92–109.

14 Van Alest and Walgrave, “New Media, New Movements?”

15 Vicari, “Networks of Contention,” 104.

16 Ibid., 105.

17 Delia Dumitrica, “‘Chuck Norris, Please Help!’ Transnational Cultural Flows in the 2017 Anti-Corruption Protests in Romania,” Media and Communication 9, no. 3 (2021): 239–48.

18 Libby Lester and Simon Cottle, “Transnational Protests, Publics and Media Participation (in an Environmental Age),” in The Routledge Handbook of Environment and Communication, ed. Anders Hansen and Robert Cox (London: Routledge, 2015), 100–10.

19 Ibid., 102.

20 Delia Dumitrica and Maria Bakardjieva, “The Personalization of Engagement: The Symbolic Construction of Social Media and Grassroots Mobilization in Canadian Newspapers,” Media, Culture & Society 40, no. 6 (2018): 817–37.

21 Olu Jenzen et al., “The Symbol of Social Media in Contemporary Protest: Twitter and the Gezi Park Movement,” Convergence: The International Journal of Research into New Media Technologies 27, no. 2 (2021): 414–37.

22 Bennett and Segerberg, “The Logic of Connective Action.”

23 Lee Rainie and Barry Wellman, Networked: The New Social Operating System (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2012).

24 Christina Neumayer and Luca Rossi, “15 Years of Protest and Media Technologies Scholarship: A Sociotechnical Timeline,” Social Media + Society 2, no. 3 (2016): 1–13, https://doi.org/10.1177/2056305116662180.

25 Suay M. Özkula, Paul J. Reilly, and Jenny Hayes, “Easy Data, Same Old Platforms? A Systematic Review of Digital Activism Methodologies,” Information, Communication & Society (2022): 14 original emphases, https://doi.org/10.1080/1369118X.2021.2013918.

26 Take, for instance, a study of the #SayHerName campaign targeting police violence against Black women, where the U.S. context within which the campaign is initiated and unfolds receives no substantial conceptual treatment. The focus on “Black women” implies a rather universal lens, even though the findings suggest the data originate primarily from the United States with a smaller subset from the United Kingdom. This is enough for the authors to conclude that the hashtag has become “a transnational, intersectional narrative about police brutality” (Melissa Brown, Rashawn Ray, Ed Summers, and Neil Fraistat, “#SayHerName: A Case Study of Intersectional Social Media Activism,” Ethnic and Racial Studies 40, no. 11 [2017]: 1841). The same universalization by omission can be seen in another hashtag activism study, this time on #MuslimWomensDay. Once again, this turns out to be a U.S. initiative (with yet again a U.K. connection). As it turns out, the campaign was itself challenged from within, as participants raised concerns about exclusion and lack of representation of voices that were not present/heard online (Rosemary Pennington, “Making Space in Social Media: #MuslimWomensDay in Twitter,” Journal of Communication Inquiry 42, no. 3 [2018]: 199–217).

27 Andreas Wimmer and Nina Glick Schiller, “Methodological Nationalism and Beyond: Nation-State Building, Migration and the Social Sciences,” Global Networks: A Journal of Transnational Affairs 2, no. 4 (2002): 301–34.

28 Giuliana Sorce and Delia Dumitrica, “#fighteverycrisis: Pandemic Shifts in Fridays for Future’s Protest Communication Frames,” Environmental Communication (2021): 1–14, https://doi.org/10.1080/17524032.2021.1948435.

29 Donatella della Porta and Hanspeter Kriesi, “Social Movements in a Globalizing World: An Introduction,” in Social Movements in a Globalizing World, ed. Donatella della Porta, Hanspeter Kriesi, and Dieter Rucht (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1999), 3–22.

30 Jackie Smith, “Transnational Social Movements,” in The Wiley-Blackwell Encyclopedia of Social and Political Movements, ed. David A. Snow, Donatella della Porta, Bert Klandermans, and Doug McAdam (n.p.: John Wiley and Sons, 2013), 1–5, https://doi.org/10.1002/9781405198431.wbespm454.

31 Ibid.

32 David N. Pellow, “Environmental Justice Movements and Political Opportunity Structures,” in The Routledge Handbook of Environmental Justice, ed. Ryan Holifield, Jayajit Chakraborty, and Gordon Walker (London: Routledge, 2017), 37–49, https://www.routledgehandbooks.com/doi/10.4324/9781315678986.ch4.

33 David S. Meyer, “Political Opportunity and Nested Intitutions,” Social Movement Studies 2, no. 2 (2003): 30.

34 Pellow, “Environmental Justice Movements and Political Opportunity Structures,” 47.

35 Sydney Tarrow and Doug McAdam, “Scale Shift in Transnational Contention,” in Transnational Protest and Global Activism: People, Passions, and Power, ed. Donatella della Porta and Sidney Tarrow (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2005), 127.

36 Massimiliano Andretta, Donatella della Porta, and Clare Saunders, “Globalization and Social Movements,” in The Wiley Blackwell Companion to Social Movements, 2nd ed., ed. David A. Snow, Sarah A. Soule, Hanspeter Kriesi, and Holly J. McCammon (Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley & Sons, 2019), 602–17.

37 Donatella della Porta and Sidney Tarrow, eds., “Transnational Processes and Social Activism: An Introduction,” in Transnational Protest and Global Activism (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2005), 1–17.

38 Simon Lindgren, “Movement Mobilization in the Age of Hashtag Activism: Examining the Challenge of Noise, Hate, and Disengagement in the# MeToo Campaign,” Policy & Internet 11, no. 4 (2019): 418.

39 Stuart Davis and Melissa Santillana, “From the Streets to the Screen to Nowhere: Las Morras and the Fragility of Networked Digital Activism,” Westminster Papers in Communication and Culture 14, no. 1 (2019): 18–32; Jan Servaes and Rolien Hoyng, “The Tools of Social Change: A Critique of Techno-Centric Development and Activism,” New Media & Society 19, no. 2 (2017): 255–71; Marcela Suarez Estrada, Yulissa Juarez, and C. A. Piña-García, “Toxic Social Media: Affective Polarization after Feminist Protests,” Social Media + Society 8, no. 2 (2022): 1–12, https://doi.org/10.1177/20563051221098343.

40 Ulf Hannerz, Transnational Connections: Culture, People, Places (London: Routledge, 1996), 6 qtd. in Sanjeev Khagram and Peggy Levitt, “Constructing Transnational Studies,” in Rethinking Transnationalism: The Meso-Link of Organizations, ed. Ludger Pries (London: Routledge), 23.

41 Daphné Josselin, “From Transnational Protest to Domestic Political Opportunities: Insights from the Debt Cancellation Campaign,” Social Movement Studies 6, no. 1 (2007): 22.

42 Mario Diani and Ivano Bison, “Organizations, Coalitions, and Movements,” Theory and Society 33 (2004): 281–309, as discussed in Joost de Moor, “Alternative Globalities? Climatization Processes and the Climate Movement beyond COPs,” International Politics 58 (2021): 582–99.

43 Giuliana Sorce, ed., Global Perspectives on NGO Communication for Social Change (London: Routledge, 2022).

44 Christopher Chase-Dunn et al., “The Contours of Solidarity and Division among Global Movements,” International Journal of Peace Studies 12, no. 2 (2007): 2.

45 Kathryn Sikknik, “Patterns of Dynamic Multilevel Governance and the Insider–Outsider Coalition,” in Transnational Protest and Global Activism, ed. Donnatella della Porta and Sidney Tarrow (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2005), 151–73.

46 Chase-Dunn et al., “The Contours of Solidarity and Division among Global Movements,” 13.

47 As for instance illustrated in Danielle Resnick’s study of the (framing) rifts between local minority and Indigenous groups and international NGOs working on a campaign for the return of the Central Kalahari Game Reserve in Botswana. Where local groups linked their own displacement to extractivism, NGOs framed the issue in terms of government discrimination (“The Benefits of Frame Resonance Disputes for Transnational Movements: The Case of Botswana’s Central Kalahari Game Reserve,” Social Movements Studies 8, no. 1 [2009]: 55–72).

48 Aziz Choudry, “Transnational Activist Coalition Politics and the De/Colonization of Pedagogies of Mobilization: Learning from Anti-Neoliberal Indigenous Movement Articulations,” International Education 37, no. 1 (2007): 97–112, as discussed in Dominique Caouette, “Conclusion,” in Beyond Colonialism, Development and Globalization: Social Movements and Critical Perspectives, ed. Dominique Caouette and Dip Kapoor (London: Zed Books, 2015), 264.

49 Sonja K. Pieck, “Transnational Activist Networks: Mobilization between Emotion and Bureaucracy,” Social Movement Studies 12, no. 2 (2013): 121–37.

50 Anna Lavizzari and Zorica Siročić, “Contentious Gender Politics in Italy and Croatia: Diffusion of Transnational Anti-Gender Movements to National Contexts,” Social Movement Studies (2022): 1–19, https://doi.org/10.1080/14742837.2022.2052836.

51 Geoffrey Pleyers, “From Local Ethnographies to Global Movement: Experience, Subjectivity, and Power among Four Alter-Globalization Actors,” in Insurgent Encounters: Transnational Activism, Ethnography, and the Political, ed. Jeffrey S. Juris and Alex Khasnabis (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2013), 108–26.

52 Clifford Bob, “Social Movements and Transnational Context: Institutions, Strategies, and Conficts,” in The Wiley Blackwell Companion to Social Movements, 2nd ed., ed. David A. Snow, Sarah A. Soule, Hanspeter Kriesi, and Holly J. McCammon (Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley & Sons, 2019), 115–30.

53 Hong Tien Vu, Hung Viet Do, Hyunjin Seo, and Yuchen Liu, “Who Leads the Conversation on Climate Change? A Study of a Global Network of NGOs on Twitter,” Environmental Communication 14, no. 4 (2020): 460. See also Vicari, “Networks of Contention.”

54 Saif Shahin, Junki Nakahara, and Mariana Sánchez, “Black Lives Matter Goes Global: Connective Action Meets Cultural Hybridity in Brazil, India, and Japan,” New Media & Society (2021): 3, https://doi.org/10.1177/14614448211057106.

55 Ibid., 15.

56 Alice Mattoni and Emiliano Treré, “Media Practices, Mediation Processes, and Mediatization in the Study of Social Movements,” Communication Theory 24, no. 3 (2014): 254.

57 Saskia Sassen, “Interactions of the Technical and the Social: Digital Formations of the Powerful and the Poweless,” Information, Communication & Society 15, no. 4 (2012): 456.

58 Arjun Appadurai, Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996).

59 Thomas Olesen, “The Uses and Misuses of Globalization in the Study of Social Movements,” Social Movement Studies 4, no. 1 (2005): 58.

60 Marwan M. Kraidy, Hybridity, or the Cultural Logic of Globalization (Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press, 2005), 155.

61 Curd Knüpfer, Matthias Hoffmann, and Vadim Voskresenskii, “Hijacking MeToo: Transnational Dynamics and Networked Frame Contestation on the Far Right in the Case of the ‘120 Decibels’ Campaign,” Information, Communication & Society 25, no. 7 (2022): 1010–28; Giuliana Sorce, “Sounding the Alarm for Right-Wing #MeToo: ‘120 Dezibel’ in Germany,” Feminist Media Studies 18, no. 6 (2018): 1123–26; Sander van Haperen, Justus Uitermark, and Walter Nicholls, “The Swarm Versus the Grassroots: Places and Networks of Supporters and Opponents of Black Lives Matter on Twitter,” Social Movement Studies (2022): https://doi.org/10.1080/14742837.2022.2031954.

62 Sabrina Zajak, “Rethinking Pathways of Transnational Activism,” Global Society 31, no. 1 (2017): 125, 126.