New Dimensions Of Transnational Activism

Abstract

The historic phenomenon of transnational activism, defined as political mobilisation across borders, has long been characterised by the agentic primacy of Global North political actors and professional advocacy by formal civil society organisations and networks. Bring Back Our Girls, the movement by Nigerian women for the rescue of Nigerian schoolgirls abducted by Boko Haram in 2014, is one of several new activisms that breaks this mould, marking a shift toward spontaneous, mass-based protests initiated and led by eclectic Global South actors and grounded in Global South contexts. Some recent scholarship recognises the North-South shift of transnational activist agency, yet much of it remains focused on NGO advocacy and social movements that originate in the Global North. This means that vital insights are missing from knowledge of how transnational resistance is happening today and what this means for international politics. It also signals an imperative to revisit dominant models and theories of transnational activism in order to update them. Using interviews with 27 Bring Back Our Girls leaders and participants, digital ethnography and content analysis, this study asks: what does Bring Back Our Girls reveal about the changing structure, motives and function of contemporary transnational activism? The case of Bring Back Our Girls affords empirical insights from an African-led activism for the rights of girls in an epistemic field centred on Global North activists and malestream actors. I argue that Bring Back Our Girls signals a new direction of transnational activism which I theorise as multimodal transconnective activism. This framework rests on three pillars: a mix of formal and informal actors in which constellations of informal social networks are prominent; individuals' motives for activist engagement as important but understudied drivers of transnational activism that stem from their personal and social identities, values, beliefs and positionalities; and a shift in the relationship between Global South and North activists from dependence to collaboration, signalling a reconfiguration of core-periphery dynamics in terms of who ‘owns’ political problems and who leads their resolution.