Cosmopolites enracinés et militants transnationaux

Les cosmopolites enracinés forment aujourd’hui une partie importante des groupes et des individus impliqués dans le militantisme social. S’appuyant sur les changements technologiques, l’intégration économique et les réseaux culturels, ce phénomène trouve son expression la plus frappante dans la mobilisation de jeunes militants à des manifestations organisées hors de leur propre pays, ce qu’on nomme le militantisme transnational. À partir de la définition relationnelle (et non cognitive) du cosmopolitisme, plusieurs figures du « cosmopolitisme enraciné » sont présentées, qui correspondent à autant de formes distinctes de militantisme transnational.A large segment of those individuals and groups involved in social activism is composed of rooted cosmopolitans. Following technological changes, economic integration and cultural networks this phenomenon is most apparent in transnational activism, which is the mobilisation of young activists for actions outside their own country. Starting from a relational rather than discursive definition of cosmopolitanism, several versions of the rooted cosmopolitan, corresponding to particular types of transnational activism, are described

Diasporas and transitional justice : transnational activism from local to global levels of engagement

Scholarship on transitional justice, transnational social movements, and transnational diaspora mobilization has offered little understanding about how memorialization initiatives with substantial diaspora involvement emerge transnationally and are embedded and sustained in different contexts. We argue that diasporas play a galvanizing role in transnational interest-based and symbolic politics, expanding claim-making from the local to national, supranational, and global levels of engagement. Using initiatives to memorialize atrocities committed at the former Omarska concentration camp in Bosnia and Herzegovina, we identify a four-stage mobilization process. First, initiatives emerged and diffused across transnational networks after a local political opportunity opened in the homeland. Second, attempts at coordination of activities took place transnationally through an NGO. Third, initiatives were contextualized on the nation-state level in different host-states, depending on the political opportunities and constraints available there. Fourth, memorialization claims were eventually shifted from the national to the supranational and global levels. The article concludes by demonstrating the potential to apply the analysis to similar global movements in which diasporas are directly involved

When trade unions succeed: cases of blocked liberalisation in the common market

Despite the generally accepted weakness of trade unions at the European Union level, an analysis of two high profile cases – the Services Directive and the Port Directive – shows that trade unions are able to mobilise effectively at the European level and, within constellations of actors, crucially impact EU decision making. In contrast to common claims that a lack of access to EU institutions makes such groups powerless, it is argued here that the exclusion of large opposing societal groups from consultations is neither a quick nor a sure fire recipe for dismantling opposition. On the contrary, it politicises the process and may lead to opposing groups mobilising in more contentious ways

The micro-foundations of party competition and issue ownership: the reciprocal effects of citizens’ issue salience and party attachments

While previous research on the reciprocal effects of citizens’ issue attitudes and their party support emphasize citizens’ issue positions, political competition revolves equally around issue salience, i.e., debates over which issue areas political parties should prioritize. Using multi-wave panel survey da¬ta from Germany and Great Britain, we analyze the reciprocal effects of citizens’ issue salience and their party support, and we conclude that citizens’ issue priorities both influence and are influenced by their party attachments, and, moreover, that these effects are linked to parties’ long-term associa¬tive issue ownership. This effect is strongest among supporters of a small issue-orientated niche par¬ty, the German Greens

Tents, tweets, and events: The interplay between ongoing protests and social media

Recent protests have fuelled deliberations about the extent to which social media ignites popular uprisings. In this article, we use time-series data of Twitter, Facebook, and onsite protests to assess the Granger causality between social media streams and onsite developments at the Indignados, Occupy, and Brazilian Vinegar protests. After applying Gaussianization to the data, we found contentious communication on Twitter and Facebook forecasted onsite protest during the Indignados and Occupy protests, with bidirectional Granger causality between online and onsite protest in the Occupy series. Conversely, the Vinegar demonstrations presented Granger causality between Facebook and Twitter communication, and separately between protestors and injuries/arrests onsite. We conclude that the effective forecasting of protest activity likely varies across different instances of political unrest

Political mobilisation by minorities in Britain: negative feedback of ‘race relations'?

This article uses a political opportunity approach to study the relationship of minority groups to the political community in Britain. The main argument is that the British race relations approach established in the 1960s had an important effect that still shapes the patterns of political contention by different minority groups today. Original data on political claims-making by minorities demonstrate that British 'racialised' cultural pluralism has structured an inequality of opportunities for the two main groups, African-Caribbeans and Indian subcontinent minorities. African-Caribbeans mobilise along racial lines, use a strongly assimilative 'black' identity, conventional action forms, and target state institutions with demands for justice that are framed within the recognised framework of race relations. Conversely, a high proportion of the Indian subcontinent minority mobilisation is by Muslim groups, a non-assimilative religious identity. These are autonomously organised, but largely make public demands for extending the principle of racial equality to their non-racial group. Within the Indian subcontinent minorities, the relative absence of mobilisation by Indian, Sikh and Hindu minorities, who have achieved much better levels of socio-economic success than Pakistani and Bangladeshi Muslims, suggests that there is also a strong socioeconomic basis for shared experiences and grievances as Muslims in Britain. This relativises the notion that Muslim mobilisation is Britain is purely an expression of the right for cultural difference per se, and sees it as a product of the paradoxes of British race relations

Computational Controversy

Climate change, vaccination, abortion, Trump: Many topics are surrounded by fierce controversies. The nature of such heated debates and their elements have been studied extensively in the social science literature. More recently, various computational approaches to controversy analysis have appeared, using new data sources such as Wikipedia, which help us now better understand these phenomena. However, compared to what social sciences have discovered about such debates, the existing computational approaches mostly focus on just a few of the many important aspects around the concept of controversies. In order to link the two strands, we provide and evaluate here a controversy model that is both, rooted in the findings of the social science literature and at the same time strongly linked to computational methods. We show how this model can lead to computational controversy analytics that have full coverage over all the crucial aspects that make up a controversy.Comment: In Proceedings of the 9th International Conference on Social Informatics (SocInfo) 201

Transnational Movements

After introducing the long history of transnational movements, this article provides an overview of some of the principal transnational structures and processes of transnational movements, as well as their impacts on governments, intergovernmental organizations, and corporations. The diversity of transnational movements and their influence is emphasised, as is their significance across regional contexts. The analysis considers the latest transformations in transnational movements, and concludes with discussion of significant challenges confronting these movements in the twenty-first century

Close interaction, incompatible regimes, contentious challenges: the transnational movement to protect privacy

Scholars and legal practitioners have found profound differences between the privacy practices of Europe and the United States. This has produced incompatible regimes of regulation, causing serious normative and political issues. This conflict -originally centered on the exchange of commercial data- became increasingly more acute after 9/11, as American policy-makers saw digital data as a major source of intelligence and Europeans become frightened of the impact of American surveillance. On the cusp of 9/11, the EU and the US had negotiated a peculiar mixedlevel agreement -the "Safe Harbor" agreement- to regulate the behavior of firms exchanging data across the Atlantic. The Snowden affair and related revelations showed how badly this agreement worked, producing incentives for European advocates to challenge "Safe Harbor" in court in 2015, resulting in a new -but still untested- agreement in 2016, and influencing the shape of the EU's new data regulatory authority. These interactions raise three kinds of problems for scholars of global governance and social movements: First, how does the combination of close interaction and incompatible regimes affect the capacity of states and other actors to resolve problems of international collaboration? Second, how have international institutions responded to these challenges? Third, such disputes raise the puzzle of how digital globalization has affected the difficult process of the formation of transnational movements. I will argue that -two decades after the start of digital globalization- it has taken critical junctures like 9/11 and the Snowden revelations to produce the political opportunity for the formation of a trans-Atlantic movement on behalf of privacy