Over the past several decades scholars have intensively debated what factors drive globalization. Answers have ranged from the emergence of the information society and the global economy to value-conflicts embedded in different civilizations. A different yet closely related question is who is driving globalization? That is, however, much less studied, even if it is arguably key to making global governance intelligible. A whole list of actors seem to offer possible answers to the question of who the globalizers are: Are they global institutions such as the World Trade Organization (WTO) or the International Criminal Court (ICC); communities of experts providing technocratic solutions; transnational networks of activists seeking to alter global and national politics by pursuing, for example, environmental or human rights agendas; or are they powerful individuals forming transnational elites taking the fate of the global society in their hands at a safe distance from ordinary politics in places such as Brussels, New York, or Davos?
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Article
Mikael Rask Madsen and Mikkel Jarle Christensen
Article
Felix Berenskoetter and Yuri van Hoef
International friendship affects the making and conduct of foreign policy, an angle that is largely neglected in the International Relations (IR) literature. Friendship constitutes the Other as familiar rather than foreign and implies a significant degree of trust, and analysts need to pay careful attention to the various ways close bonds develop and “work” across state boundaries. They need to understand how seeking friends can be an explicit goal of foreign policy and how established friendships function by studying their discursive, emotional, and practical expressions and their impact on decision making in concrete situations and as a disposition for cooperation in the long term. Yet, tracing these bonds and associated practices, especially the informal ones, is an analytical challenge. This article presents international friendship as a particular relationship of mutually agreed role identities embedded in a strong cognitive, normative, and emotional bond revolving around a shared idea of order. It discusses three types of practices unique to this relationship: providing privileged/special access, solidarity and support in times of need, and resolve and negative Othering against third parties. These friendship bonds and associated practices can be observed across three levels: political leaders, government bureaucracies, and civil society.
Article
Terrence Lyons
Political outcomes in Africa are increasingly shaped by ideas, actors, and processes that are transnational in character. Diasporas and transnational communities living in new host countries but still connected to homelands provide resources, leadership, and other forms of support that shape political outcomes in the country of origin. African politics take place in these transnational spaces, less restricted by the need to be close geographically. From civil war in Burundi and Somalia, electoral outcomes in Liberia, Ghana, and Kenya, and civil society initiatives in Zimbabwe and the Democratic Republic of Congo, actors and processes that are globally distributed and linked through transnational networks are increasingly at the center of African politics.
Much of the literature on diasporas emphasizes cultural links or specific forms of identity whereby residents at a distance remain deeply connected with their kin back home in a form of “long-distance nationalism.” From the perspective of seeking an understanding of the transnationalization of African politics, however, it is more useful to see diasporas as the outcomes of processes of political mobilization, constituencies activated by political entrepreneurs to advance specific political agendas. Leaders invest in creating and sustaining diasporas because these networks are strategic assets that allow them to deploy specific identity frames and categories, to make claims for resources and loyalty, and to engage in diverse activities in dispersed locations to maximize impact.
In many cases African governments wish to engage with diasporas in order to encourage remittances and investments in the homeland. Many have created special directorates for diaspora affairs and some have considered different forms of dual citizenship or overseas voting in order to build these linkages. Diasporas play important roles in lobbying new host governments to either increase pressures on homeland regimes or to increase donor support.
In addition, politically mobilized populations in the diaspora often play key roles as sources of financial support for opposition political parties and through diaspora media that can shape the nature of political debates. Liberian and Ethiopian politicians often campaign and fundraise in the United States. In authoritarian settings such as Zimbabwe and Togo, the closing of political space at home makes the diaspora even more important as a means to fill the vacuum. Civil wars always have transnational dimensions as both rebels and incumbent regimes reach beyond their borders for political support and resources. Whether it is African National Congress’s (ANC’s) de facto embassies during apartheid, diaspora support for the Eritrean People’s Liberation Front, refugee recruits to rebel movements in the Mano River region of West Africa, or exiled politicians attempting to stage-manage peace talks in Darfur from Paris, the contentious politics of armed conflict is rarely contained by borders. Extended civil wars and political crises that generate substantial refugee flows, particularly to Europe and North America, have created cases where transnational politics is most pronounced. “Conflict-generated diasporas” may be more categorical in their political positions and therefore limit options for homeland politicians dependent on the diaspora’s support.
A complete analysis of African politics therefore requires consideration of how transnational mobilization can shape outcomes. Political actors on the continent, whether they are governments, opposition parties, civil society organizations, or rebels, recognize that linking their goals to the resources and ideas based in diasporas provides advantages in their struggles at home. Increasingly, scholars have recognized that understanding political processes and outcomes in Nigeria, Cameroon, or Zimbabwe entails consideration of transnational dimensions. This seems to be even more the case in countries that have experienced conflict, such as Liberia, Somalia, or Eritrea.
Article
Marie-Emmanuelle Pommerolle
Academic studies on the globalized dimension of African protests have complexified the understanding of “transnational social movements,” too often considered as the mechanical and adequate response to a newly globalized neoliberal economy. The long history of globalized protest in and about Africa, starting from the antislavery campaigns to the global justice movements, shows that these movements, often initiated outside the continent, have contributed to the “invention of Africa.” The notion of “extraversion” developed by Jean-François Bayart to explain African states’ relation to the outside world helps interrogating the material and symbolic asymmetrical relationships inside these networks but also the agency of African protesters in shaping their causes. Resources, legitimate knowledge, and audiences of protest are structurally located with Western actors, creating misunderstanding or conflicts in these globalized networks. But African activists do benefit from their internationalization, acting as a protection and a—sometimes contested—legitimation. Also, against the imposition of supposedly universal causes, African protesters have developed new concepts and narratives, especially on gender and sex rights, to assert an African way of framing these causes. Far from being completely constrained by Western agenda, funding, or audience, some local conflicts also benefit from often international ramifications born out of the development of transnational criminal economies. Lastly, reflections on the regional variations and the diffusion of protest inside the continent shows a differential density of international networks and the growing importance of social media in the globalization of protest.
Article
Ann Hironaka
Civil wars in the contemporary world are deeply interpenetrated by international influences. There are six different conceptions of the international system and their effects on civil conflicts: (1) the realist conception and the superpower interventions of the Cold War period, (2) the liberal institutional conception and the diplomatic mediation of the United Nations, (3) global cultural influences such as world religions, democratization and education, (4) the global economy and structural poverty, (5) transnational bilateral relations with neighboring states, and (6) the planetary ecosystem and the effects of climate change. Taken together, these international influences have a weighty effect on the conduct and duration of contemporary civil wars.
Article
Sebastian Bitar and Tom Long
Latin America exhibits some of the world’s most worrisome patterns of insecurity. Homicide rates have reached alarming levels in dozens of cities in Mexico, Central America, Brazil, Venezuela, and Colombia. Drug and other illicit trafficking generate massive income for criminal organizations. Fighting among these organizations, and between criminal groups and the state, threatens human security in zones of production and along transit routes. Refugee crises—especially an exodus of 4 million Venezuelans by 2019—could increase substantially. Receiving countries struggle to respond.
Insecurity in Latin America cannot be fully understood through comparison of the domestic challenges of each country in the region. The sources of contemporary insecurity are not contained within countries, but extend to transnational criminal networks, flows of illicit goods, and human trafficking and displacement. Likewise, isolated state responses are insufficient to respond to transnational dynamics; although some coordination has been achieved, intergovernmental responses have produced limited gains and substantial unintended consequences. Thus, we consider security challenges in the region as a “security complex” that includes Latin American and Caribbean countries, but in which the United States remains significant.
On the other hand, international conflict and civil war, as traditionally defined, have almost vanished from Latin America. Threats of military coups and politically motivated violence have declined after being a key security issue for decades. However, some troubling cases and trends complicate this positive trend. Venezuela’s governing civilian–military alliance eroded basic democratic institutions and produced an economic, political, and humanitarian crisis. In response, the United States has raised the specter of military intervention or coup sponsorship. Honduras and especially Nicaragua have turned to authoritarianism, accompanied by alarming levels of repression of protesters and civil society activists. U.S. policies under the Trump administration toward migrants from Central America and Mexico are creating great tension in the region and fear of reprisals. Although most border disputes have been settled a few still are unresolved or contested and could generate tensions between countries in the region.
The academic literature about international security in Latin America reflects the complex dynamics described above, covers historical and contemporary security challenges in the region, and presents debates and developments on Latin American security at the international and national levels. Despite its wide scope, the existing literature presents areas where more work is needed to account for emerging trends of (in)security.
Article
Paul DeBell
HIV/AIDS in Europe highlights the centrality of politics at local, state, and international levels to the successes and failures in fighting transnational, global threats. Though several European states have led the international struggle against HIV/AIDS and have made great strides in treatment and prevention, others host the fastest-growing epidemics in the world. Even in states with long histories of treatment, specific subpopulations, including many LGBTQ communities, face growing epidemics. This variation matches trends in public policy, the actions of political leaders, and social structures of inequity and marginalization toward affected populations. Where leaders stigmatize people living with HIV (PLHIV) and associated groups, the virus spreads as punitive policies place everyone at increased risk of infection. Thus, this epidemic links the health of the general public to the health of the most marginalized communities. Mounting evidence shows that a human rights approach to HIV/AIDS prevention involving universal treatment of all vulnerable communities is essential to combating the spread of the virus. This approach has taken hold in much of Europe, and many European states have worked together as a political force to shape a global human rights HIV/AIDS treatment and prevention regime.
Despite this leadership, challenges remain across the region. In some Eastern European states, tragic epidemics are spreading beyond vulnerable populations and rates of transmission continue to rise. The Russian case in particular shows how a punitive state response paired with the stigmatization of PLHIV can lead to a health crisis for the entire country. While scholars have shed light upon the strategies of political legitimization likely driving the scapegoating and stigmatization of PLHIV and related groups, there is an immediate need for greater research in transnational social mobilization to pressure for policies that combat these backward political steps. As financial austerity and defiant illiberalism spread across Europe, key values of universal treatment and inclusion have come into the crosshairs along with the European project more generally. Researchers and policymakers must therefore be vigilant as continued progress in the region is anything but certain. With biomedical advances and the advent of the “age of treatment,” widespread alleviation from the suffering of HIV/AIDS is a real possibility. Realizing this potential will, however, require addressing widespread political, social, and economic challenges. This in turn calls for continued interdisciplinary, intersectional research and advocacy.
Article
Ettore Recchi
While migration has always existed, and its consequences have always been important, few people have lived a mobile life in the history of mankind. Population immobility has recurrently been part and parcel of political strategies of social control and domination. Since the second half of the 20th century, however, the extent of geographical movements of individuals has expanded enormously. In particular, the size and scope of international travel has increased at an exponential pace. Favored by globalization and technological progress, transnationalism, initially linked to migration, has emerged as a relatively widespread phenomenon that involves a growing portion of the general population, especially, but not only, in developed countries. Mainly on the basis of research carried out in Europe, there is evidence that transnational practices tend to strengthen cosmopolitanism and the legitimacy of supranational polities (particularly the European Union [EU]), while it is less clear whether they entail denationalization. Further research is needed to improve the quality of independent and dependent variables in this area and assess the effect of international mobility and transnationalism outside the European context.
Article
Kiran Klaus Patel
Together with the Treaty of Paris (1951), which established the European Coal and Steel Community (ECSC), the two Treaties of Rome (1957) were the founding treaties of today’s European Union. Of the two Rome treaties, the more influential proved to be that which created the European Economic Community (EEC), although many contemporaries expected the European Atomic Energy Community (Euratom) to acquire that role. As during all major treaty negotiations in the history of European integration, there were divisions of opinion among the six ECSC member states (Belgium, France, West Germany, Italy, Luxembourg, and the Netherlands) along and within national lines. In the end, however, their governments were able to agree on a complex package deal with various components. To reach this result, the work of two preparatory bodies, the so-called Spaak Committee and an intergovernmental conference set up by the foreign ministers of the six ECSC states, proved crucial. In addition, transnational actors and networks had a considerable impact on the Treaties.
The ultimate treaty texts reflected this trajectory of negotiations and the wider political context of the time. The Treaties of Rome were less supranational than the Treaty of Paris, and the three resultant communities were characterized by their hybrid nature: until the Merger Treaty of 1967, they shared some common institutions, such as the Parliamentary Assembly and the Court of Justice, while they had three independent executive bodies. Euratom, which focused on cooperation in the sphere of nuclear power, soon experienced institutional crises, and the same holds true for the ECSC. The EEC, in contrast, possessed greater powers and unleashed more significant dynamics and thus became the core of European integration.
On the basis of the Treaties of Rome, the European Communities incrementally turned into the foremost forum of international cooperation and integration in (Western) Europe. That, however, was quite unclear in 1957, as reflected in opinion polls at the time. Moreover, there were important contenders for this role. By the end of the Cold War, the EC had outpaced them all, for three main reasons: its focus on market integration, its greater legal integration in comparison to organizations such as the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) and the Council of Europe and, finally, its financial resources. In sum, one needs to know about the Treaties of Rome and the integration dynamics they unleashed in order to understand the enormous importance that today’s EU has acquired.
Article
Ryan Thoreson
As lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) advocates around the globe have fought to gain rights and recognition, their shared endeavors and coordinated activism have given rise to an international LGBT movement. Over the past century, advocates around the world have recognized common aims and collaborated in formal and informal ways to advance the broader cause of sexual equality worldwide. Advocates in different contexts have often connected their struggles, borrowing concepts and strategies from one another and campaigning together in regional and international forums. In doing so, they have pressed for goals as diverse as the decriminalization of sexual activity; recognition of same-sex partnerships and rainbow families; bodily autonomy and recognition for transgender and intersex people; nondiscrimination protections; and acceptance by families, faith communities, and the public at large. At times, the international LGBT movement—or, to be more accurate, LGBT movements—have used tactics as diverse as public education, lobbying and legislative campaigns, litigation, and direct action to achieve their aims. The result has been a gradual shift toward recognizing LGBT rights globally, with these rights gaining traction in formal law and policy as well as in public opinion and the agendas of activists working for human rights and social justice. The movement’s aims have also broadened, being attentive to new issues and drawing common cause with other campaigns for bodily autonomy and equal rights. At the same time, gains have triggered ferocious backlash, both against LGBT rights and against broader efforts to promote comprehensive sexuality education, access to abortion, the decriminalization of sex work, and other sexual rights. Understanding this advocacy requires consideration of important milestones in global LGBT organizing; how LGBT rights have been taken up as human rights by domestic, regional, and international bodies; and some of the main challenges that LGBT advocates have faced in contexts around the globe.
Article
Christopher Hill
Scholarship on the domestic sources of foreign policy has focused on parties, interest groups, and a generalized notion of public opinion, but it has neglected the societal dimension. This is a mistake given the multiethnic and multinational makeup of many of the world’s states. The focus here is on those European states which imagined themselves settled in the aftermath of war, empire, and the Cold War, yet now find themselves surprised by the new challenges of migration and multiculturality—meaning the growth in ethnocultural diversity as a form of everyday life. These states have adopted varying strategies—or none—in order to address the problems which arise, but did not at first realize the extent to which the domestic realm had become inextricably entangled with external relations—whether through the transnational activities of diasporas or through blowback from their own foreign policies in regions of the world where some of their minority communities have intimate connections.
The subject of foreign policy and multicultural societies is thus a new but important one, politically as well as intellectually. To approach it we need both a grounding in foreign policy analysis and an understanding of the debates in political theory and sociology about multiculturalism, given that practitioners have increasingly to face inwards as much as outwards and that the distinction between the external and “homeland” dimensions of security is now blurred. Although the world has not fallen into a simple “clash of civilizations,” the challenges of managing diversity certainly now present themselves in a set of interlinked levels, crossing national boundaries and therefore significantly changing the context of foreign policy and its making.
Article
Niklas Swanström and Christina Wenngren
Transnational organized crime is part and parcel of the modern, globalized economy. The black market has irrefutable influence over both economic and political structures. It corrodes, corrupts, and coopts the institutions with which it comes into contact. Features that arise as a side effect of organized criminal activity also impact economic, social, and political developments. Isolated approaches aimed at counteracting criminal networks have proved ineffective, necessitating a fresh perspective on foreign policy-based solutions.
A central difficulty of researching organized crime is the opaque nature of criminal networks, whose members prefer to operate in the shadows. The underworld does not owe accountability to any outsiders, nor do crime syndicates generally file tax returns. International bodies like the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime are forced to rely on the reports of member states, which are often subject to distortion. This makes accurate assessment of the extent and impact of organized crime difficult, to say the least.
Part of what makes the black market difficult to combat is the malleable approach of criminal networks. They employ a variety of strategies to pursue their illicit activity and will quickly adapt to the given strength or weakness of their host state. These strategies manifest themselves as either evasion, confrontation, or infiltration of state institutions. All of these strategies undermine legitimate sociopolitical structures, making it imperative to implement effective foreign policy initiatives that fight the trade as a whole.
Article
Pamela Neumann
Femicidio refers to the murder of a woman because of her gender. Feminicidio emphasizes the role of the state in enabling these crimes and the impunity with which they are treated. Feminist legal activism and the development of supranational and regional human rights instruments throughout the 1990s and 2000s were essential to the development of femicidio/feminicidio laws across Latin America. As of 2018, such laws were in effect in 18 countries across the region. However, the precise content and scope of laws criminalizing femicidio/feminicidio vary. For example, in the case of Mexico, transnational feminist legal activism, including a case brought before the Inter-American Human Rights Court, was essential to shaming the Mexican state into codifying feminicidio. This process was facilitated by the presence of feminist legislators within the Mexican legislature, who advocated for such legislation. In the case of Nicaragua and Peru, local feminist advocacy and copious documentation of the scope of the problem of femicidio/feminicidio proved more significant in the ultimate codification of femicidio/feminicidio. However, the legal advances against gender violence achieved in Nicaragua in 2012 were subsequently undone due to pressure from men’s rights and religious conservatives, leading to the weak implementation of the law criminalizing femicidio.
Article
Kim Moloney and Diane Stone
Transnational administration is the routinization and bureaucratization of global governance. Concepts of transnational administration move beyond methodological nationalism and absolutist understandings of administrative sovereignty vested solely with nation-state authorities to articulate various administrative arenas of global policy. Transnational administration is a new “third scale” of public administration. The first two scales of public administration are national administration, and its internationalization due to globalization, and the international public administration located in the secretariats of international organizations. Transnational administration incorporates nonstate actors in decentralized, devolved, or delegated interactions within and between policy communities operating in global and regional spheres. Organizations such as the Bank of International Settlements, the Kimberley Process, the Global Health and Partnership Model, and Transparency International highlight the actions of transnational administrative actors. Critiques of these and other organizations have raised new concerns about accountability, representation, and transparency.
Article
Brandon C. Prins, Aaron Gold, Anup Phayal, and Ursula Daxecker
With Somali-based piracy in the Greater Gulf of Aden no longer a significant threat to commercial shipping, and great power competition, along with the COVID-19 pandemic, driving media attention, maritime piracy no longer remains the salient global security concern it was a decade ago. The number of attacks attributable to Somali-based pirates dropped dramatically between 2011 and 2015 and has remained low ever since. In the first 6 months of 2021, only five incidents were reported in the Greater Gulf of Aden, and none of the attacks were successful or definitively involved Somali perpetrators. The boundaries of the High-Risk Area in the Indian Ocean have been reduced significantly since 2011, and small, private maritime security firms have begun to go out of business as demand for armed guards on ships has diminished. But recent increases off the coast of West Africa and in the Singapore Straits confirm that the threat has not been entirely eliminated. Previous surges in sea crime led Indonesia, Malaysia, Singapore, and Thailand to initiate coordinated patrols in the Malacca and Singapore Straits. The dramatic increase over the past 3 years in armed robbery on ships off of the Riau Islands in the east-bound lane of the Traffic Separation Scheme has produced calls from local authorities, as well as the Information Sharing Center at ReCAAP, for increased surveillance, coordination, and enforcement. While the international community mounted a significant counterpiracy response to attacks in the Greater Gulf of Aden beginning in 2009 and shipping companies started to implement protective measures to safeguard their transports, piracy endures because the conditions driving it persist. Successful attacks against ships produce sizable payoffs, and the risk of capture remains low in most places. Further, the continued presence of fragile governments, corrupt elites, joblessness, and illegal foreign fishing ensures that pirates will continue to pose a threat to marine traffic. Recognizing the enduring hazard of sea piracy, the International Maritime Organization Assembly in December 2021 called for a decade-long commitment to capacity building so that governments would have the tools to suppress organized criminal violence and protect seafarers.
Current research efforts focus on the subnational drivers of pirate attacks. While structural (country-level) indicators of poverty and institutional fragility correlate with piracy, local conditions on land proximate to anchorages and shipping lanes where incidents occur provide additional leverage in explaining where pirates locate and why piracy endures. Existing research also suggests piracy is connected to armed insurgency. As rebels seek resources to help fund their antistate or separatist campaigns, piracy, like gemstones, oil, and narcotics, can serve as a means to pay fighters and purchase weapons. Spatially and temporally disaggregated analyses as well as the synthesis of research on civil war, organized crime, and maritime piracy will open up new lines of inquiry into the relationship between rebel fighters, transnational crime, and state capacity. Not only do we observe connections between trafficking, piracy, and illegal fishing, but interstate rivalry and resource competition enables maritime crime by impeding coordinated government efforts to apprehend sea criminals.
Article
Kristian Skrede Gleditsch
Civil war is the dominant form of armed conflict in the contemporary international system, and most severe lethal armed conflicts in the post-Cold War era have been civil/intrastate rather than interstate. Still, it would be misleading to see these conflicts as purely domestic, as many contemporary civil wars such as Syria display clear transnational characteristics, including inspirations from events in other countries, links to actors in other countries, as well as international interventions. Moreover, civil wars often have important implications for other states, including security concerns and economic impacts. There is a need to focus on the growth and core findings in the literature on transnational dimensions of civil war, in particular on how factors outside a particular state can influence the risk of conflict within states as well as some of the central consequences of domestic conflict for other states or relations between states. This line of research has helped expand our understanding of both civil conflict and interstate war, and that a comparative focus on varieties conflict and attention to the possible transnational dimensions of civil war deserve a prominent role in future research.
Article
Ivana Isailović
Over the past few years, same-sex marriage reforms have become central to contemporary LGBTQ movements. As a result of their mobilizations, many countries across the world have adopted same-sex marriage reforms. According to scholars, LGBTQ movements were successful in part because they used law and legal discourse, arguing that same-sex marriage flows from states’ legal obligations to protect equality and prohibit discrimination.
The turn to law and the law of marriage in the local and transnational contexts may fail, however, to deliver substantive justice for all LGBTQ people. First, same-sex marriage reforms, rather than being just a translation of equality into law, is a product of ideological and legal battles in specific socioeconomic contexts. For instance, in the United States, same-sex marriage, rather than being another form of relationship recognition, became prominent because of the centrality of marriage in the country’s economic, cultural, and legal order. Second, the law of marriage is a system of governance historically shaped by different-sex couples’ needs, with specific one-size-fits-all rules that may not correspond to LGBTQ individuals’ desires, wishes, and lived experiences. Third, as queer theorists have shown, the law of marriage creates an “outside,” a space of exclusion that is inseparable from the legal regime of marriage and the cultural intelligibility of marriage. The emphasis on marriage by LGBTQ movements risks delegitimizing other forms of intimate relationships. The emphasis on marriage may also entrench neoliberalism in contexts in which the marriage, not the state, is seen as a primary safety net. Finally, in the global or transnational setting, claims for same-sex marriage may perhaps unintentionally feed into representations of civilizational conflicts, between those countries that recognize same-sex marriage and those that do not, while also erasing the variety of local practices around sexuality and gender norms.
Article
David Attwell
Noting that many pre- and post-colonial oral forms have always been political, the article focuses on the literary culture wars that arose in the context of mid-20th-century decolonization. These debates include the question of whether writers should use indigenous or colonial languages; the complexities of publishing with access to local and international markets; the adaptation and indigenization of European forms to African value-systems, mythic structures and social realities; and the relationship between cultural decolonization and debates in Europe after 1968, when the emphasis fell on questioning realism. The article concludes by noting that the cultural nationalism of the 20th century is giving way to new forms of transnational politics.
Article
John F. McCauley
Social science literature does not identify a direct effect of religion on the occurrence of intrastate conflict. Yet religion as a sociopolitical identity does have several fairly unique features that render religious differences particularly useful to political entrepreneurs in the course of conflict. First, religions often have codified guidelines, typically written, that convey normative behaviors—what one should do to attain salvation, for example. The presence of such guidelines can reinforce the organizational strength of particular groups and underscore the nonnegotiable status of their beliefs, both of which can be useful in the course of conflict. Second, the religious identity includes multiple levels of division that do not exist within other identity types—including interfaith differences, differences between sects within religious traditions, and divisions between secularists and strong religionists. Such divisions create opportunities for outbidding that exacerbate tensions and conflict. Third, religious group membership confers nonmaterial benefits, such as perceived access to salvation, that can motivate behavior in very tangible, this-worldly ways, for example by encouraging fighters to choose martyrdom over negotiated settlements. Finally, religious networks link adherents transnationally in a manner that no other identity type can, creating opportunities to mobilize resources and support from abroad for a conflict within borders.
These features suggest that, whereas religion is no more likely than other types of identity divisions to cause conflict, it can be particularly powerful for political entrepreneurs to wield as a tool in conflict settings. In some cases, conflicts are viewed as religious because the religious labels of competing sides differ, even if the conflict itself has nothing to do with religion. In other cases, conflicts may be described as religious if the content over which adversary sides fight is itself religious in nature; violence over the imposition of Islamic sharia law in a religiously mixed country may be one such example. Even when intrastate conflicts are fought over religious content, however, from the perspective of political scientists the matter is still one of political choice. This underscores the critical role that political entrepreneurs play in the shaping of conflicts as religious. Understanding the power of codified behavioral guidelines, multiple layers of division, non-material payoffs, and transnational networks that religious identity provides, political entrepreneurs can use religion to exploit the (sometimes unrelated) grievances of their supporters and thus escalate conflict where doing so pays political dividends. In this way, scholars recognize that intrastate conflicts with various causal foundations frequently become fights in the name of God.
Article
Marisa von Bülow
Latin American transnational social movements (TSMs) are key actors in debates about the future of global governance. Since the 1990s, they have played an important role in creating new organizational fora to bring together civil society actors from around the globe. In spite of this relevance, the literature on social movements from the region focuses primarily—and often exclusively—on the domestic arena. Nevertheless, there is an increasingly influential body of scholarship from the region, which has contributed to relevant theoretical debates on how actors overcome collective action problems in constructing transnational social movements and how they articulate mobilization efforts at the local, national and international scales. The use of new digital technologies has further blurred the distinction among scales of activism. It has become harder to tell where interpretative frames originate, to trace diffusion paths across national borders, and to determine the boundaries of movements. At the same time, there are important gaps in the literature, chief among them the study of right-wing transnational networks.
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