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Transnational Actors (transnational + actor)

Distribution by Scientific Domains

Humanities and Social Sciences	62%
Law and Criminology	37%

Selected Abstracts

The Anonymous Matrix: Human Rights Violations by ,Private' Transnational Actors

THE MODERN LAW REVIEW, Issue 3 2006
Article first published online: 27 APR 200, Gunther Teubner
Do fundamental rights obligate not only States, but also private transnational actors? Since violations of fundamental rights stem from the totalising tendencies of partial rationalities, there is no longer any point in seeing the horizontal effect as if rights of private actors have to be weighed up against each other. On one side of the human rights relation is no longer a private actor as the fundamental-rights violator, but the anonymous matrix of an autonomised communicative medium. On the other side, the fundamental rights are divided into three dimensions: first, institutional rights protecting the autonomy of social discourses , art, science, religion - against their subjugation by the totalising tendencies of the communicative matrix; secondly, personal rights protecting the autonomy of communication, attributed not to institutions, but to the social artefacts called ,persons'; and thirdly, human rights as negative bounds on societal communication, where the integrity of individuals' body and mind is endangered. [source]

Transnational political action and ,global civil society' in practice: the case of Oxfam

GLOBAL NETWORKS, Issue 3 2009
CRAIG BERRY
Abstract The term ,global civil society' has taken on increasing significance within scholarly debate over the past decade. In this article we seek to understand transnational political agency via the study of a particular transnational actor, Oxfam. We argue that various schools of thought surrounding the global civil society concept, in particular the prevailing liberal-cosmopolitan approach, are unable to conceptualize transnational political action in practice , due largely, in the case of liberal-cosmopolitanism, to a shared normative agenda. We also assess what contribution literature on development and civil society has made to the analysis of groups such as Oxfam. In investigating Oxfam's own perceptions of its context and the meanings of its agency, we discover an anti-political perspective derived from an encounter between Oxfam's longstanding commitment to liberal internationalism and globalization discourse. Existing scholarship has insufficiently identified the local or parochial nature of the identities of global civil society actors. [source]

Referendums and the Political Constitutionalisation of the EU

EUROPEAN LAW JOURNAL, Issue 4 2008
Min Shu
One is the revision of national constitutions to accommodate the integration project at the national level. The other is the construction of transnational rules to regulate novel inter-state relationships at the European level. EU referendums are contextualised in such a duel constitutionalisation process. At the domestic level, EU referendums handle the debates on national constitutional revision. At the transnational level, these popular votes ratify supranational constitutional documents. The article comparatively analyses three types of EU referendums,membership, policy and treaty referendums,according to this analytical framework, exploring the campaign mobilisation of voters, national governments, and transnational institutions, and examining the legal and political interaction between referendums and European integration. A key finding is that, as the dual constitutionalisation process deepens and widens, entrenched domestic players and restrained transnational actors are under increasing pressure to ,voice' themselves in EU referendums. [source]

Stabilizing flows in the legal field: illusions of permanence, intellectual property rights and the transnationalization of law

GLOBAL NETWORKS, Issue 1 2003
Paul Street
In this article I examine some of the problems that ,modern' legal theory poses for a consideration of the extended reach of social actors and institutions in time and space. While jurisprudence has begun to engage with the concept of globalization, it has done so in a relatively limited manner. Thus legal theory's encounters with highly visible transnational practices have, for the most part, resulted not in challenging the prevailing formal legal paradigm, but in a renewed if slightly modified search for a general jurisprudence that ultimately takes little account of the manner in which the work of law is carried out transnationally. In the first part of this article I examine how legal theory's concern to maintain its own integrity places limitations on its ability to examine the permeability of social boundaries. In the latter part I draw on critical human geography, post,structuralism and actor,network theory (ANT), to examine the manner in which transnational actors have been able to mobilize law, and in particular intellectual property rights (IPRs), as a necessary strategy for both maintaining the meanings of bio,technologies through time and space, and enrolling farmers into particular social networks. [source]

European Integration and Migration Policy: Vertical Policy-making as Venue Shopping

JCMS: JOURNAL OF COMMON MARKET STUDIES, Issue 2 2000
Virginie Guiraudon
Since the beginning of the 1980s, migration and asylum policy in Europe has increasingly been elaborated in supranational forums and implemented by transnational actors. I argue that a venue-shopping framework is best suited to account for the timing, form and content of European co-operation in this area. The venues less amenable to restrictive migration control policy are national high courts, other ministries and migrant-aid organizations. Building upon pre-existing policy settings and developing new policy frames, governments have circumvented national constraints on migration control by creating transnational co-operation mechanisms dominated by law and order officials, with EU institutions playing a minor role. European transgovernmental working groups have avoided judicial scrutiny, eliminated other national adversaries and enlisted the help of transnational actors such as transit countries and carriers. [source]

Imagined lives and modernist chronotopes in Mexican nonmigrant discourse

AMERICAN ETHNOLOGIST, Issue 2 2010
HILARY PARSONS DICK
ABSTRACT The globalization literature spotlights the way that the experiences of transnational actors are refracted through lives inhabitable elsewhere. In this article, I examine this process in spoken discourse about U.S.-bound migration produced by nonmigrants in the Mexican city of Uriangato. This talk is organized around a "modernist chronotope" that pits "progress" against "tradition," producing images of space,time grafted onto images of persons, or social personae. I show that acts of position taking vis-à-vis these social personae are fundamentally expressed through the ways speakers deploy the modernist chronotope and, thus, become emplotted in its imaginative sociology,a practice that constructs speakers as certain gender and class types. [discourse, chronotope, transnational migration, modernity, social positioning, gender and socioeconomic class] [source]

Externalised Justice and Democratisation: Lessons from the Pinochet Case

POLITICAL STUDIES, Issue 2 2006
Madeleine Davis
The attempt to try Pinochet in Spain exemplified and publicised a trend to use ,externalised justice' to tackle impunity for human rights crimes. It also demonstrated the possibilities and limitations of externalised justice initiatives, in terms of securing democracy at the national level, and of advancing accountability for serious crimes under international law. In Chile, Argentina and Spain the Pinochet affair served to restart stalled impulses towards accountability, accelerate democratic reform and challenge the legitimacy of compromises conceded during earlier democratic transitions. With regard to the wider role of international law in limiting impunity, expectations for rapid or consistent replication of ,the Pinochet precedent' have not been met. Despite some notable achievements, the exercise of universal jurisdiction by national courts remains inconsistent and controversial. The International Criminal Court (ICC) provides a new mechanism for external justice. An aggressive US campaign to undermine it, and to reverse progress in international law, is a serious obstacle to fulfilment of the ICC's enforcement role. However, at the domestic level the ICC may have similar indirect effects to the Pinochet litigation, boosting domestic enforcement prospects and strengthening democratic commitment. In both cases the key role for externalised justice is as stimulus or back-up. This suggests that progress in tackling impunity depends on incremental and dynamic interaction between domestic and international law, and between national and transnational actors. [source]