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

Strange Bedfellows: How an Anticipatory Countermovement Brought Same-Sex Marriage into the Public Arena

Since the 1980s, social movement scholars have investigated the dynamic of movement/countermovement interaction. Most of these studies posit movements as initiators, with countermovements reacting to their challenges. Yet sometimes a movement supports an agenda in response to a countermovement that engages in what we call “anticipatory countermobilization.” We interviewed ten leading LGBT activists to explore the hypothesis that the LGBT movement was brought to the fight for marriage equality by the anticipatory countermobilization of social conservatives who opposed same-sex marriage before there was a realistic prospect that it would be recognized by the courts or political actors. Our findings reinforce the existing scholarship, but also go beyond it in emphasizing a triangular relationship among social movement organizations, countermovement organizations, and grassroots supporters of same-sex marriage. More broadly, the evidence suggests the need for a more reciprocal understanding of the relations among movements, countermovements, and sociolegal change

La contestation transnationale

« Au cours de deux siècles d’exception » déclare Charles Tilly, « les pays européens et leurs extensions sur les autres continents ont remarquablement réussi à circonscrire et à contrôler les ressources se trouvant à l’intérieur de leurs frontières… Mais à notre époque… au moins en Europe, l’ère des Etats forts tire maintenant à sa fin » . Tilly admet volontiers que sa déclaration se fonde sur une « série de spéculations, de conjectures et d’hypothèses ». Mais admettons, au moins pour le mo..

Strange Bedfellows: How an Anticipatory Countermovement Brought Same-Sex Marriage into the Public Arena

Since the 1980s, social movement scholars have investigated the dynamic of movement/countermovement interaction. Most of these studies posit movements as initiators, with countermovements reacting to their challenges. Yet sometimes a movement supports an agenda in response to a countermovement that engages in what we call “anticipatory countermobilization.” We interviewed ten leading LGBT activists to explore the hypothesis that the LGBT movement was brought to the fight for marriage equality by the anticipatory countermobilization of social conservatives who opposed same-sex marriage before there was a realistic prospect that it would be recognized by the courts or political actors. Our findings reinforce the existing scholarship, but also go beyond it in emphasizing a triangular relationship among social movement organizations, countermovement organizations, and grassroots supporters of same-sex marriage. More broadly, the evidence suggests the need for a more reciprocal understanding of the relations among movements, countermovements, and sociolegal change

Transnational Contention

Digitised version produced by the EUI Library and made available online in 2020

Stings and Scams: Fake News, the First Amendment, and the New Activist Journalism

Constitutional law, technological innovations, and the rise of a cultural “right to know” have recently combined to yield “fake news,” as illustrated by an anti-abortion citizen-journalist sting operation that scammed Planned Parenthood. We find that the First Amendment, as construed by the Supreme Court, offers scant protection for activist journalists to go undercover to uncover wrongdoing, while providing substantial protection for the spread of falsehoods. By providing activists the means to reach sympathetic slices of the public, the emergence of social media has returned journalism to its roots in political activism, at the expense of purportedly objective and truthful investigative reporting. But the rise of “truthiness” — that is, falsehoods with the ring of truth, diffused through new forms of communication — threatens the integrity of the media. How to respond to these contradictions is a growing problem for advocates of free speech and liberal values more generally

Challenges of the Anti-Trump Movement

This article explains the sudden and strong emergence of a movement in resistance to the presidency of Donald Trump as a countermovement to the long-term "movementization" of the Republican Party in the wake of civil rights, the Nixon "southern strategy", and the emergence of white nativism. It identifies the Resistance as posing three distinct challenges for both citizens and scholars of participation and conflict: the political opportunity challenge, the coalitional challenge, and the radicalization/institutionalization challenge. The article situates the Resistance in a historical and comparative context, highlights its dilemmas as it faces the focal point of a populist/nativist President, and asks if it is an effective countermovement to the white nativist movement that supports him

Political values and extra-institutional political participation: The impact of economic redistributive and social libertarian preferences on protest behaviour

Previous studies have found that left-wing and libertarian individuals are more likely to engage in extra-institutional political activism. However, due to a lack of suitable data, studies to date have not analysed the relative influence of economic redistributive and social libertarian values for the intensity of protest participation. By analysing data from a unique cross-national dataset on participants in mass demonstrations in seven countries, this article addresses this gap in the literature and provides evidence of the relative impact of economic redistributive and social libertarian values in explaining different degrees of protest participation. We show that there are divergent logics underpinning the effect of the two value sets on extra-institutional participation. While both economically redistributive and libertarian social values support extra-institutional participation, economically redistributive protesters are mobilized to political action mainly through organizations, whereas the extra-institutional participation of social libertarian protesters is underpinned by their dissatisfaction with the workings of democracy