Transforming Civil Society: Network Processesand Trade Politics in the Americas

Review by Jackie Smith

Department of Sociology, University of Pittsburgh

Building Transnational Networks: Civil Society and the Politics of Trade in the Americas. By Mar-isa von Bulow. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2010. 259 pp., $80.00 hardcover(ISBN-13: 978-0-521-19156-2).

With Building Transnational Networks, Brazilian political scientist Marisa von Bulowmakes an important contribution to the rapidly growing literature on transna-tional activism and its relationships to broader global processes. She combinesmultiple methods to open up the black boxes contained in our notions of civilsociety (global or otherwise) and challenges conventional conceptual and disci-plinary boundaries in the process. Her work highlights the ways our conventionalthinking about politics—which separates national from international ⁄ globalarenas—inhibits our understandings of the activities and relevance of civil societymobilizations. Moreover, she demonstrates how conventional methods that focuson case studies and campaigns have prevented us from identifying changes intransnational activism over time.

von Bulow’s study analyzes civil society mobilizations around free trade negoti-ations in the Americas from their humble origins in the 1980s through the mid-2000s. She combines analyses of interview and organizational data from leadingorganizations in these struggles with a network analysis based on the surveys of123 organizations from Chile, Brazil, Mexico, and the United States that werethe most active in these mobilizations. In addition, a detailed analysis of changesin how one of the main transnational alliances, the Hemispheric Social Alliance,articulated its demands for alternatives to the neoliberal order between 1998and 2005 provides rich empirical data on the substantive implications of theorganization’s strategic and organizational development.

The long time frame of von Bulow’s study allows her to identify three distinctperiods of transnational mobilization between the early 1980s and late-1990s,each characterized by new forms of transnational collaboration and increasingties across the hemisphere, aimed at hemispheric trade negotiations within theFree Trade Area of the Americas. While some of the early leadership came fromgroups in the North, von Bulow argues convincingly that Southern groupsand activists have over time claimed more prominent and central roles intransnational activist networks.

von Bulow demonstrates the ‘‘double embeddedness of actors in social networks andpolitical systems’’ (p. 7, emphasis original). She shows how relationships amongactivists and organizations and obligations to domestic constituencies affect shiftsin actors’ energies and orientations. The agendas of international trade bodieshelped spur initial attempts to build transnational alliances, and the sustainedprogress of these negotiations during the 1980s and 1990s allowed for organiza-tional adaptations and innovations that improved transnational coordination andexchange. However, as inter-state trade negotiations stalled (in part due topublic opposition), governments shifted their attention toward bilateral trade

Smith, Jackie. (2011) Transforming Civil Society: Network Processes and Trade Politics in the Americas. International Studies Review,doi: 10.1111/j.1468-2486.2011.01073.x� 2011 International Studies Association

International Studies Review (2011) 13, 678–680

arrangements and domestic economic policies, transforming the strategicopportunities for civil society actors.

As a result of reduced opportunities in the global sphere in the late 1990s,umbrella organizations that had formed to help advance transnational strugglessaw reduced activity, in part because alliance members had shifted attention todomestic struggles. However, von Bulow’s network analysis of organizations showshow, in the course of the earlier transnational mobilizations, national groupsdeveloped direct ties to local and national actors in other countries of theregion. This made coalition organizations like the Hemispheric Social Allianceand its national affiliates less critical for sustaining transnational ties. While manygroups still relied on these coalition organizations to help broker relations withactivists in other countries, most also maintained their own direct transnationallinks. This pattern reflects the enhanced capacities of local activists that havebeen strengthened both by communications technology and by organizationaltechnologies and models developed in the course of transnational struggle.

This observation supports von Bulow’s main contention that networks are botha precondition and an outcome of collective action. In the course of major anti-free trade campaigns, activists created new linkages and developed new modelsof collaboration, and these shaped the possibilities for future actions. von Bulowmaps variations in the extent to which collective action is internationalized—thatis, whether its focus is on domestic or transnational alliances—and sustained overtime. She shows that transnational activism occurs in spurts, expanding whenthreats and opportunities in the international realm emerge, but returning todomestic political contexts when these threats and opportunities subside orchange. Nevertheless, actors’ new understandings of the relations betweendomestic and international contexts continue to inform their strategic orienta-tions in domestic arenas. Thus, transnational mobilizations transform activists,organizations, and networks, leaving new ideas about how local and global con-texts relate to each other as well as transnational activist identities andorganizing repertoires.

von Bulow’s research leads her to some very clearly stated and convincinglyargued conclusions. First, she argues that there are distinctive ‘‘pathways to trans-nationalization’’ that are shaped by actors’ embeddedness in social networks andin political contexts. Second, she identifies key relational mechanisms developedin the course of anti-free trade organizing in the Americas to facilitate transna-tional action, including extension (of shared goals, identities), suppression (ofcontradictory aims), diffusion (of tactics and frames), and transformation (ofidentities and agendas). Third, the presence of brokers was key to helpingovercome the important obstacles to sustained transnational cooperation,which included language barriers, resource constraints, and organizationalasymmetries.

Building Transnational Networks thus calls into question the tendency in theliterature to qualify the term civil society with the adjective ‘‘global.’’ This haslikely caused more confusion than clarity. It suggests that civil societies are inher-ently national and creates a binary opposition between global and national con-texts. However, there is no reason to conceptualize society in this way. Ourdisciplinary and methodological conventions often lead us to forget the impor-tant fact that national states are a historic phenomenon and that civil soci-ety—which is purposive relations among people that are somewhat autonomousfrom states and markets—both pre-dates them and will outlast them as well. Forinstance, Markoff’s (1996) study of the emergence and development ofdemocratic states in the eighteenth century demonstrates the importance oftransnational flows of people and information to the spread of democratic idealsand challenges. We learn with this study to think of civil society as necessarily

679Jackie Smith

global, even though the intensity and frequency of exchanges over long distancesebb and flow over time.

Building Transnational Networks is essential reading for scholars working oninternational policy, social movements, and transnational activism and for thoseengaged in analyses of national policy debates related to trade and other highlyinternationalized issues. It makes very valuable empirical and theoretical contri-butions to the existing scholarly literature, while also adding to our practicalknowledge about the factors shaping transnational activism and its effectiveness.This highly readable text that addresses such important substantive and theoreticalconcerns can also enhance graduate and advanced undergraduate courses.

Reference

Markoff, John. (1996) Waves of Democracy: Social Movements and Political Change. Thousand Oaks: PineForge Press.

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