The division of Germany into two militarized blocs during the Cold War fundamentally shaped the lives of people living in both East and West. Yet, as recent scholarship has increasingly highlighted, there were also numerous areas of contact and intera…
Global solidarity with anti-imperialist struggles – which state socialist regimes in eastern Europe sought to inculcate in their populations from the 1950s onwards – constitutes a little studied form of modern transnational political socia…
This article explores the case of the Larzac plateau in southern France which was the site of protests against the extension of a military base in the 1970s. It analyses the development of the site as a focus of local, national and transnational prote…
This article explores the engagement between European, African and US peace activists as a case-study of the transnational dimensions of decolonization. Its focus is the protest against the first French nuclear weapons test in the Sahara, and European…
This article compares the mobilization of Belgian society for campaigns professing solidarity with three different issues in the 1980s: the Sandinista revolution in Nicaragua, the independent trade union Solidarność in the Polish People’s Republic, and the long struggle against apartheid in South Africa. It inquires into the ideological, social, and strategic similarities and differences between these movements, and does so in a broader context by connecting the 1980s with previous forms of transnational solidarity. First and foremost, it compares the differences in the forms of transnational collaboration between these three cases, regarding the actors, the different ideological frameworks in which they operated, and the relative importance of each. It highlights the active role of the political movements themselves – Sandinistas, visiting Solidarność members, and the South African ANC – who played a key role in the mobilization of activists in Western Europe – a fact which has so far largely been ignored.
Quelle: http://jch.sagepub.com/cgi/reprint/50/3/403?rss=1
Alfred Loisy is well known by scholars of the Roman Catholic Modernist controversy for his work in theology and biblical studies, which ended with his excommunication in 1908. His later work in the history of religions is also well known. What is less…
In response to anti-sweatshop activism, lead firms in global production networks (GPNs) have adopted voluntary corporate social responsibility commitments such as codes of conduct. Scholars have begun to examine whether and how these shape labour conditions at the point of production, but existing research either focuses on a small number of cases or lacks a control group of factories that are not exposed to codes of conduct. In addition, scholars have sometimes suggested that codes of conduct can only influence certain types of factory conditions, or that government labour inspection can accomplish as much or more than codes. These possibilities have rarely been assessed systematically. In this article, we analyse data on 192 electronics, apparel/textile and footwear factories in Indonesia and show how the significance of codes varies across issues. Our findings also suggest that codes and government labour inspection fill different niches, although neither guarantees decent factory conditions. The findings have implications for the study of ‘labour agency’ and the ‘complementarity’ of public and private governance in GPNs.
The frontier of corporate social responsibility (CSR) is constantly being negotiated by corporate and non-corporate actors that vie to define its meaning and scope. In this article, we explore the relationship between CSR and governance in the context of global value chains that span both organizational boundaries and geographic borders. We draw on the CSR and global value chain literature to highlight the nexus between CSR and what we see as two overlapping dimensions of governance. These are industrial governance (or the coordination of relationships among actors in a global value chain) and global governance (the efforts of non-state actors to manage transnational processes, including via the creation of norms and rules regarding global production). Drawing inspiration from an emergent neo-Gramscian perspective on global value chains, we propose the notion of contested governance to explain how CSR becomes a key domain in which these contending, though potentially complementary, ways of defining and delimiting governance as an analytic concept play out.
The social consequences of global value chains – including their effects on economic development – are shaped, in part, by non-governmental organizations (NGOs) and social movement organizations (SMOs). While scholars have extensively explored the causes and effects of downstream corporate social responsibility, we know little about the influence of upstream NGOs and SMOs in shaping value chains. To address this lacuna, I draw on a case study of rural development organizations in the Indian state of Uttarakhand. I find that these groups build marginal producers’ organizational and technical capacity, assist producers in meeting certification standards, and work to cultivate alternative value chain segments, both local and global. Results suggest that NGOs and SMOs help marginal producers to engage more profitably with corporate value chains, even as they simultaneously pursue strategies that are more contentious and that aim to create deeper structural change.
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