Mai 2, 2016, 11:51 am, SASKIA KOK, RICHARD ROGERS, Allgemein.
In this study, we examine the transnational networks of the Somali diaspora online. We explore the claims that the web signifies a shift towards a de-territorialized, transnational diaspora, which constructs its identity and engagement around a transnational imagined community. Based on a network and web content analysis, we assert that the claims about the transnational as the territorial locus of identity and engagement should be revisited. The analysis shows that the Somali diaspora’s engagement has a specific multi-territorial topology through which information and resources are exchanged and a hybrid identity is constructed. Somalis‘ online engagement, however, is mainly directed towards community-based practices and social integration in their host-land, as opposed to transnational advocacy for the homeland. We argue that web data show a particular territorial arrangement and engagement, which we conceptualize as transglocalization, meaning local, networked formations existing alongside the national and transnational, each operating with awareness of the other yet acting separately. The study demonstrates that online network analysis offers promising approaches to diasporic social integration, policy-making and issue advocacy.
Mai 2, 2016, 11:50 am, MARIA KOINOVA, DŽENETA KARABEGOVIĆ, Allgemein.
Scholarship on transitional justice, transnational social movements, and transnational diaspora mobilization has offered little understanding about how memorialization initiatives with substantial diaspora involvement emerge transnationally and are embedded and sustained in different contexts. We argue that diasporas play a galvanizing role in transnational interest-based and symbolic politics, expanding claim-making from the local to national, supranational, and global levels of engagement. Using initiatives to memorialize atrocities committed at the former Omarska concentration camp in Bosnia and Herzegovina, we identify a four-stage mobilization process. First, initiatives emerged and diffused across transnational networks after a local political opportunity opened in the homeland. Second, attempts at coordination of activities took place transnationally through an NGO. Third, initiatives were contextualized on the nation-state level in different host-states, depending on the political opportunities and constraints available there. Fourth, memorialization claims were eventually shifted from the national to the supranational and global levels. The article concludes by demonstrating the potential to apply the analysis to similar global movements in which diasporas are directly involved.
Mai 2, 2016, 11:50 am, CHRISTOPHER L. PALLAS, Allgemein.
The boomerang model is typically used to describe campaigns in which international NGOs respond to requests from local activists, often from marginalized populations, for assistance in addressing local needs. Such campaigns are perceived to represent local interests and have some accountability to local actors. However, while the local–international–local pattern is often accurate, it does not capture the full spectrum of campaign development. This article theorizes an international–local–international or ‘inverse’ boomerang, in which international NGOs facing an international policy blockage initiate a transnational campaign, recruiting local activists to assist in the international advocacy effort. The article demonstrates the theory’s plausibility using several cases of Northern-initiated advocacy. It then examines the implications of the model for campaign legitimacy. It finds that inverse boomerang campaigns benefit from the same presumptions of legitimacy as traditional boomerang campaigns, but that representivity and accountability are substantially weaker, potentially disempowering the campaigns‘ claimed stakeholders.
Mai 2, 2016, 11:46 am, FIONA MOORE, Allgemein.
In this article I explore the impact of location on transnational identities through an ethnographic case study of Taiwanese professionals in London and Toronto. I argue, first, that both groups use their transnational identities not just to bridge two cultures, but also as a strategic resource for building connections with many different groups. Second, I argue that the expression of transnational identity is different in each local context, as it is framed through London’s identity as a ‘global city of sojourners‘, and Toronto’s as a ‘global city of settlers’. Finally, I argue that this, combined with the strategic use of identity in each location, influences each group’s transnational connections and affects their ability to construct networks.
Mai 2, 2016, 11:46 am, CAROLYN CARTIER, Allgemein.
Relational geographies of capital and consumption between Hong Kong and mainland China have been forming through tourism engagement in Hong Kong and the development of model Hong Kong malls in China. This analysis of urban restructuring for the consumer economy identifies how landmark Hong Kong malls are reproduced in major cities of China by networks of Hong Kong property firms and mainland elites. Adapting Leslie Sklair’s formulation of architectural iconicity in the culture-ideology of consumerism, this economic relationship, which restructures urban space, constructs iconic built forms and develops Chinese consumerism, marks hegemonic opportunities of a national capitalist class, suggesting how Chinese state capitalism and its Hong Kong networks limit and incrementally engage transnational capital while instantiating Hong Kong-style consumer iconicity. New malls in mixed-use developments in China often occupy sites of historical markets and thus affirm Sklair’s prediction that iconic architecture increasingly proclaims consumer space while claiming historic forms of public space.
Mai 2, 2016, 11:46 am, JULIA MORRIS, Allgemein.
With the expanded use of immigration detention and migration management practices worldwide, detention has emerged as a key issue for United Nations and international human rights institutions. A growing international rights movement seeks to make the practice fairer and more humane, leading to the dominance of a mainstream detention rights agenda and counter-hegemonic system of governance. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork conducted in Geneva and elsewhere, this article examines the capital, knowledge, and technological expertise that went into the construction of UNHCR’s Global Detention Strategy. I highlight the rational calculation undergirding this global detention rights agenda, including the transnational policy networks of NGOs, INGOs, and academics that facilitate the movement’s moral authority and capitalist growth. Their practices have become powerful neoliberal development tools, which give veracity to human rights agendas and attract oppositionally-figured abolitionist praxis.
Mai 2, 2016, 11:45 am, ZEYNEP ATALAY, Allgemein.
Over the last two decades, informal Islamic networks have been re-establishing themselves as formal NGOs and building transnational coalitions. These newly formed faith-based NGOs retain their original agendas: promoting Islamic revival and global solidarity by supporting Muslim communities around the world. However, they now reposition themselves as ‘civil society initiatives’ and selectively appropriate the liberal civil society discourse. In this article, I analyse the discursive strategies that local actors undertake when they vernacularize external idea packages that challenge their cognitive preconceptions. The empirical findings of the article demonstrate that the ideological self-positioning of the local norm-taker is a key determinant of the vernacularization of micro processes. To reconcile the perceived normative conflict between political Islamist and liberal civil society frameworks, vernacularizers prune the civil society concept down to its associational and communitarian elements, discard its Western connotative associations, reconstruct the concept to match their institutional and cultural preconceptions, and claim its original ownership.
Mai 2, 2016, 11:45 am, SUZANA KOELET, CHRISTOF VAN MOL, HELGA A. G. DE VALK, Allgemein.
Although intra-European migration is often considered relatively easy to realize given European citizens‘ right to freedom of movement, settlement in another European country can still be experienced as socially disruptive. Insights in the insertion processes of European migrants, nevertheless, remain rather scarce. In this study, we analyse the social networks of European nationals with a native partner in Belgium and the Netherlands. The analysis is based on survey data from the EUMARR project (n = 576). First, we study the size and composition of European migrants‘ local family and friendship networks, and the frequency of contact with these networks. Second, we connect intra-EU movers‘ insertion routes to investments in transnational networks in their home country. The results reveal how size, composition and contact with the local and transnational network change over time. Children help to maintain contact with both the local and transnational family network and form a bridge for parents to meet own friends in the host country. Moreover, having own friends and own family around matters for contact frequency with the local networks.
Mai 2, 2016, 11:45 am, Minako O’Hagan, Allgemein.
10.1080/14781700.2016.1170628<br/>Minako O’Hagan
Mai 2, 2016, 11:41 am, CLAUDIA PADOVANI, ELENA PAVAN, Allgemein.
In this article, we address transformations in global governance brought about by information and communication technologies (ICTs). Focusing on the specific domain of ‘gender-oriented communication governance’, we investigate online interactions among different kinds of actors active in promoting gender equity in and through the media. By tracing and analysing online issue networks, we investigate which actors are capable of influencing the framing of issues and of structuring discursive practices. From the analysis, different forms of power emerge, reflecting diverse modes of engaging in online interactions, where actors can operate as network ‘programmers’, ‘mobilizers’, or ‘switchers’. Our case study suggests that, often, old ways of conceiving actors‘ interactions accompany the implementation of new communication tools, while the availability of a pervasive networked infrastructure does not automatically translate into meaningful interactions among all relevant actors in a specific domain.