Suchergebnisse

Into the 1990s, Arab countries witnessed a rise in the number of terrorist attacks perpetrated by Islamist militants against governments, foreign targets, and citizens. In response to terrorism, governments throughout the Middle East and North Africa suppressed the civil and political rights of all citizens. This clampdown on civil society transpired on the heels of political reforms in several countries and coincided with the increasing integration of these states into international treaty regimes, signaling a willingness to comply with world standards on human rights. Engaging the literatures on terrorism, world polity, and social movements, I first analyze the relationship between political regime type and movement mobilization. Next I examine the impact of transnational terrorism on human rights mobilization. I use network analysis to show that, contrary to expectations of world polity theory and the boomerang hypothesis, activists' ties to the transnational rights network thinned over the same time period (1980-2000) that these states became more integrated into international society through treaty ratification and memberships in intergovernmental organizations. The findings indicate that while the globalization of human rights has empowered human rights movements in nondemocratic societies, state power continues to set limits on mobilizing capacities.

Into the 1990s, Arab countries witnessed a rise in the number of terrorist attacks perpetrated by Islamist militants against governments, foreign targets, and citizens. In response to terrorism, governments throughout the Middle East and North Africa suppressed the civil and political rights of all citizens. This clampdown on civil society transpired on the heels of political reforms in several countries and coincided with the increasing integration of these states into international treaty regimes, signaling a willingness to comply with world standards on human rights. Engaging the literatures on terrorism, world polity, and social movements, I first analyze the relationship between political regime type and movement mobilization. Next I examine the impact of transnational terrorism on human rights mobilization. I use network analysis to show that, contrary to expectations of world polity theory and the boomerang hypothesis, activists ties to the transnational rights network thinned over the same time period (1980-2000) that these states became more integrated into international society through treaty ratification and memberships in intergovernmental organizations. The findings indicate that while the globalization of human rights has empowered human rights movements in non-democratic societies, state power continues to set limits on mobilizing capacities.

Since the late 1980s, governments have focused intensely on formalizing political and economic relationships within regions. There has also been a concurrent rise in transnational, regional level organizing among social movement activists globally, suggesting the regionalization of `global civil society.' However, opportunities for participation in transnational associations vary widely across countries. In this article, we examine the influence of international (both global and regional) institutional contexts, citizen participation in international society, and national level factors on varying levels of participation in regional transnational social movement organizations (TSMOs). We use negative binomial regression to examine relationships among these factors at three time points: 1980, 1990, and 2000. We find that in the early time period, citizen network connections to international society facilitated the formation of and participation in regionally organized TSMOs. Over time, however, regional and global institutional contexts were more predictive of participation in regional TSMOs than were international network ties. Our analysis also uncovered how qualitatively different forms of regionalism translated into significantly different levels of TSMO regionalization. In Europe, where the regional institutional structure is more elaborated than elsewhere in the world, the number of regional TSMOs in which citizens participated greatly outpaced that found elsewhere. Irrespective of international, institutional factors, however, state-level features remained crucial to explaining the development of regional TSMO sectors and the variable levels of participation in them. Citizens in states with restrictions on political rights and civil liberties had significantly lower participation in these organizations in 1990 and 2000. Even so, over time, citizens in states with more ties to global and regional multilateral processes found more ways to overcome this disadvantage and strengthen their participation in regional, transnational civil society.