Transnational Social Movements and Democratic Legitimacy

Abstract

Transnational social movements are among the most intensively debated transnational actors. One explanation for this could be that they are very hard to define. Are they national or local social movements interconnected in macro-organizations of some sorts or in international networks? Are they loose coalitions of like-minded actors operating in a coordinated fashion? Does the concept of a transnational, as opposed to a merely international, social movement imply that they mobilize and stage their protests in different locations, or in several locations at once? These definitional issues expose underlying questions regarding the dynamics of such mobilizations. It is, in fact, difficult to tell whether these transnational actors are qualitatively different from the social movements which have been empirically studied for decades, and which quite often have displayed international connections or an interest in international issues. Are they connected to other processes of transnationalization, such as the rise of transnational corporations and capital, the possibilities for fast communication opened by new technologies, supranational governance schemes, or increased mobility of people — phenomena that are generally subsumed under the rubric of globalization? These questions indicate that the study of transnational social movements refers more to an array of research perspectives than to an empirically identifiable set of actors. Therefore, it is easier to focus on the transnationalization processes, which can be observed in various social movements, than on transnational social movements as a new category in a taxonomy of contentious actors.