Social Movement Networks and Changing Patterns of Global Authority, 1983-2013

• In Event: 443 - Section on Political Sociology Paper Session. Democratic Challenges in Emerging Global Protest: Reconfiguring Publics and Institutions in a Neoliberal Era

Abstract

The contemporary wave of protests –including the most recent Arab Spring, Occupy Wall Street and anti-austerity protests as well as earlier mass mobilizations of the global justice movement—signal intensified contestation over political authority and the organization of economies. Drawing from organizational records in the Yearbook of International Organizations (1983-2013), we examine how the patterns of transnational organizing around human rights and environmentalism reflect these conflicts. In particular, we consider whether and how networks of relationships between transnational social movement organizations, inter-governmental organizations, and other international nongovernmental organizations indicate a shift away from inter-state arenas and towards more autonomous, movement-centered spaces. Such a shift would indicate changing patterns of political authority as movement challengers seek solutions to increasingly urgent global problems in a context of diminished institutional legitimacy, declining U.S. hegemony, and enhanced capacity for transnational organizing.

Authors

• Jackie Smith, University of Pittsburgh

• Melanie M. Hughes, University of Pittsburgh

• Brittany Julia Duncan, University of Pittsburgh