Lessons Learned from Global Movements, Campaigns and Activism

Contents

Introduction

This excerpt is from the Movement Learning Catalyst: A Guide to Learning for Systemic Change. This guide is a collection of curricula and learning resources to empower movement learning for systemic change.

Learning from Histories of Transnational and Translocal Activism and Organising

What is the magic recipe for successful transnational work? Or is it just too hard, and the road too littered with mistakes, that we should give up on trying to work at the transnational level?

Should we retreat into “the local” because, at the end of the day, it is local groups, organisations, and movements that have a direct impact? How can political work be locally rooted and transnationally coordinated, transcend national borders, and foster solidarity across struggles?

What can we learn from previous experiences of working across borders and fighting against bordering?

Transnational Movements

Transnational movements have existed for a long time, from anti-colonial and anti-racist struggles, to feminist internationalism, to the labour and the peace movements (Berger & Scalmer, 2017; Gago, 2020). If we want to go all the way back before the existence of the nation-state, we can think about early pre-capitalist versions of cross-border movements, which include peasant revolts, foot riots, and rebellions for greater social political rights (Mollat & Wolff, 2022).

Anti-aristocratic social movements were already prominent in the late 18th and 19th centuries in Europe and anti-colonial and anti-imperial movements from the early 20th century. The anti-slavery movements started in the late 18th century, although the earliest documentation still remains limited (Berger, 2022).

To differing degrees, movements have influenced each other and cooperated across borders and boundaries (set by the hegemonic norms of their era) for a very long time.

Movements overlapped, and activists in one movement often became active on behalf of other movements. That is why it continues to be important to study them in terms of their interdependence and intersectionality as well as from a perspective that might help us imagine the outlines of something that could transcend the nation state (even if we can’t fully picture it yet).

In the late 20th and now 21st century, grassroots actors have transformed through the use of digital networks, connecting struggles across the globe – from the Zapatistas “first informal guerilla movement” in Mexico, to the World and European Social Forums in the early 2000s, to the transnational uprisings of the Arab Spring and the “movements of the squares” in the 2010s (Castells, 2022; della Porta, 2006, Flesher Fominaya, 2014).

In the last decades, movements have organised transnationally ranging from the labour movement and social reform movements, to religious movements, to moral movements, to youth movements and peace movements. There have been pan-movements, national liberation movements, women’s movements, LGBTQIA+ movements, movements for abolition and racial equality, indigenous rights movements and environmental movements. Of course, we don’t ignore the fact that there have also been fascist and nationalist movements that have coordinated transnationally, though for this module we won’t focus on those.

How do we understand these transnational movements?

We understand transnational movements as incredibly complex and overlapped phenomena, defined by a wide variety of strategies, tactics and organisational forms. An action could obviously lead to a campaign, an alliance to a gathering. So it may seem odd for us to try and collapse that diverse ecosystem into something as two dimensional as a taxonomy. However, in this curriculum we are engaged in an effort to strengthen our analysis and capacity for critical thought about our past activist and organising work, as well as to develop new ideas and capacities for our future work.

Therefore, we see a usefulness – as imperfect as the process may be – in highlighting the characteristics that may distinguish one form of transnational activism from another. We have no ambition to offer completeness here. However, we believe that viewing these different modes of transnational activism and organising can widen our perspective to what is possible. We propose a taxonomy that is built around six different modes of transnational and translocal activism and organising:

1. Transnational and Translocal Alliances

Some characteristics: 

• Tend to be a longer-term organising structure
• Build around a similar cause and connecting struggles across geographies
• Can be simply coalitional in nature (built around a shared goal or tactic) or be deeper alliances (built around shared ideological or political commitments)

Barcelona en Comu and the Fearless Cities Network

Barcelona en Comu began as a hyper-local experiment in grassroots political campaigning in the wake of the Movement of the Squares. Their surprise victory just a handful of months later thrust them into the international spotlight, and also created opportunities for Barcelona en Comu to play a key convening role of the burgeoning “municipalist movement.” The municipalists imagined an interconnected web of city-based movements each building local power at home, while sharing tactics and inspiration across urban areas.

In 2017, when Barcelona en Comu hosted muncipalists from around the world at the Fearless Cities conference, they aimed at something more than just sharing best practices: they sought to advance a theory of change built around the “feminisation
of politics” and the idea that cities – the growing and powerful engines of the global economy – could be harnessed through coordinated, translocal activism into a force capable of combating authoritarian regimes, inequality, and climate catastrophe.

La Via Campesina

La Via Campesina is an international movement advocating for the interests and rights of small scale farmers, peasants, landless workers and rural communities. Originating to resist the impacts of globalisation and officially founded in 1993, the organisation soon developed into a transnational alliance with member organisations across 80 countries and local entities which run actions and campaigns on a translocal and transnational level.

The alliance understands itself as autonomous, pluralist, and multicultural, as well as independent from any political, economic, or other type of affiliation.

The alliance strongly opposes global corporate agriculture and transnational companies that are destroying people and nature. With their approach they are a powerful example of transnationalism from the bottom up.

2. Transnational Campaigns

Some characteristics: 

• Typically time-delimited activities that elevate an issue and/or put pressure on a “target”
• Usually marked by the ability to say “we won” or “we lost” 
• Often connected to the coalitional form of organising (i.e. short to medium-term cooperations between organisations which may or may not share a deeper level of ideological or tactical alignment)

International Movement Against Apartheid

The anti-Apartheid campaign had deep roots within South Africa, but it was also a prominent example of a transnational campaign, especially in its later years. It is also notable the way in which this transnationalist campaign – often led by South African dissidents living in exile – traced the map of colonial domination in reverse.

As part of the campaign to free Nelson Mandela from prison, campaigners in the UK successfully launched efforts to rename streets after him. The result is that there are more streets named after Mandela than in any other country other than South Africa. In 1988, in honour of Mandela’s 70th birthday, campaigners organised an international concert at Wembley Stadium which was broadcast on television to 67 countries around the world.

Stop East African Crude Oil Pipeline EACOP Campaign

EACOP, or East African Crude Oil Pipeline, is a controversial project designed to transport oil from Uganda to Tanzania, raising concerns about its environmental and social consequences. The “Stop EACOP” campaign is a grassroots movement led by Justice Movement Uganda (JMU) in collaboration with concerned individuals, organisations, and communities across the world. It centres on the urgent need to halt the East African Crude Oil Pipeline (EACOP) project – a major infrastructure undertaking with potentially devastating environmental and social impacts.

The campaign is an excellent example of a transnational struggle that not only connects several affected countries, but also one that involves other countries which could put pressure on investors of the project. With Total Energies being one of the main investors, the campaign has travelled across Europe and sparked actions and publicity in their name.

Stop EACOP shows how fighting multinationals and fighting for climate justice requires a transnational campaign strategy.

3. Transnational Mobilisations

Some characteristics: 

• Informed by a spontaneous moment – not in the sense that they took no planning, but rather that participation reached a tipping point from “the people we turned out” to “we don’t know where they all came from!”
• Often larger scale gatherings of actors around a certain moment in time or cause
• Often held by temporary alliances rather than long term organised structure
• Ambition is to get many people out on the streets, not necessarily to build structure or organisation

Alter-globalisation Movement

The alter-globalisation movement rose around and before the 1990s as a response to neoliberal globalisation, capitalist internationalisation, and the rising influence of financial institutions. Some of the key protests include 1985 against
the G7 summit, 1988 against the meeting of the IMF and the World Bank, the 1994 meeting of Zapatitas in Mexico and a three week transport strike by rail workers in 1995, and the battle of Seattle at the end of 1999, in which actions obstructed the negotiations of the third World Trade Organisations conference.

In the early 2000s, protests included marches in 2001 against the EU summit and G8 summit. There were certainly organisations that provided necessary infrastructure for each of these mobilizations to reach the level of scale that they did (and other organisations that grew out of these mobilisations) but the alter-globalisation movement was significantly defined by these large, disruptive street protests. Some portion of the people who participated in these mobilizations travelled internationally from one to the next in a practice referred to critically at the time as “protest hopping”.

Arab Spring

Starting with anti-government protests in Tunisia in 2011, the Arab Spring turned into a transnational phenomenon with protests spreading to five other countries in a short amount of time. Several long-standing national leaders were deposed, and the protests continued to spread. Unfortunately, as powerful as these mobilizations were, they did not result in the kind of lasting change that
many of the people in the streets were calling for, with more organised social forces – including religious communities and the military – being able to fill the leadership vacuums created by these early mobilizations.

4. Transnational Actions and Strikes

Some characteristics: 

• Often characterised by the transnational spread of tactics
• Tend to have a feeling of being spontaneous – not in the sense that they took no planning, but rather that the tactic happens in an unexpected or novel way. This allows the idea of it to “travel”
• Organised transnational actions can enhance the spread of certain tactics across borders, which are then adapted to the local context.

Occupy Movement

The Occupy movement started with the unorthodox call to go to the financial district of New York City and to “Occupy Wall Street.” This moment had plenty of protest antecedents, including the Arab Spring and the Indignados movement in Spain. Going further back, “sit down strikes” were a tactic employed by the labour movement.

So a defining element of this protest movement was the idea itself of “occupying” something. It was both intuitive and easily replicable in numerous settings, allowing the rapid spread of the “Occupy Movement” around the world.

Dockworker Action against Apartheid

Dockworkers are, by nature, internationally oriented. They load and unload cargo bound for all points of the globe. So it is no surprise that some of the most powerful examples of transnational strike actions have resulted from the coordination between dockworkers of different countries.

Going back to the 1950’s, dockworkers in Durban, South Africa engaged in industrial action in solidarity with the anti-Apartheid movement. In a country like South Africa, where the development of capitalism was deeply intertwined with systematised anti-Black racism, the fact that Black dockworkers could grind the gears of the economy to a halt to support the anti-Apartheid struggle was deeply threatening to the white power structure of the country.

The struggle against South African Apartheid grew to be an increasingly transnational effort, as did the dockworker-led actions. For example, for eleven days in 1984, the dockworkers union on the west coast of the United States refused to unload cargo from South Africa. This action reverberated throughout the US labour movement, which at that time had not yet taken a position opposing Apartheid.

5. Transnational Decision Making Bodies

Some characteristics: 
• Express the ambition to take collective decisions that would guide the actions of many actors across borders
• Historically associated with international gatherings of political tendencies that aim to establish “a line” and agree upon movement-wide strategic objectives for the coming period
• Objective is to walk away with some level of decision/agreement between actors

International Working Men’s Association 1864 and the First International

A very early example of an international decision-making body is the founding of the International Workingmen’s Association in 1864, which later came to known as the “First International”. What started off as a meeting of German, Italian, French and English workers, in solidarity with Polish workers rising against Russian imperialism, continued to include delegates from more and
more countries. While splits partially occurred between Marxists and Anarchists, these gatherings emphasised developing and deciding upon shared strategy and an ideological “line” that would be shared across movement spaces in multiple countries.

Minga Indigena

The minga indigena (other terminology, Abya Yala, is used depending on the context) is a gathering of indigenous groups and people’s representatives. The word Minga:n (Quechua) refers to a voluntary agreement between communities to come together to achieve a common purpose, e.g. to build a rope bridge, a road, or a government.

In the vast diversity of the indigenous movement, not defined by nation state borders, communities gather to make decisions
together that not only affect them but their wider community, ecosystems and the cosmos. In some cases decisions of these group processes have influenced local politics or directly resulted in representation in parliaments (CONAIE in Ecuador). In other cases the decision making structures are consulted to bring demands to the international community (Indigenous Environmental Network or the Indigenous People’s caucus UNFCCC).

6. Transnational Movement Gatherings

Some characteristics: 

• Often take place adjacent to another politically important event (i.e. a meeting of elite decision makers where street protests are also planned)
• Bring together a range of activists and organisers to strengthen ties within or across movements – to connect, network, learn, and build collectively
• Often lean into “decentralised” organising approaches and do not emphasise making decisions or establishing “a line.

The first World Social Forum was held in Porto Alegre, Brazil in 2001, adjacent to the World Economic Forum and gathered tens of thousands of activists from around the world. Driven by the motto “another world is possible”, the forum succeeded in offering grounds for open debate and coordination between movements, including the alignment on demands and strategies of the global
justice movement. While some describe it as a crucial moment for movements to come together, others have criticised its lack of strategy. According to some critics, “a strategy for seizing power, for claiming agency, has to be devised” (Marsili & Milanese, 2018).

International Anarchist Gathering

The first Anarchist International of St. Imier was held in St. Imier, Switzerland in 1872 after a split between Anarchists and Marxists in the First International The first congress attracted workers from a range of countries and resulted in a resolution and a range of common proclamations. The gathering continued sporadically throughout the years and larger ones were held in 2012 and in 2023, where hundreds of anarchists gathered to attend the proposed 412 workshops, and hundreds of supporting events. The gathering was run by volunteers and self-financed and aspired to not only connect anarchists transnationally to promote collective reflection, the sharing of experiences and building solidarity across struggles and borders.

Lessons Learned

Lessons learned and how groups identify themselves rely on the eye of the beholder.

It is dynamic and dependent on a range of external factors. Drawing lessons from these historical case studies often relies on perspective. While some participants might have experienced a moment in time as incredibly empowering or successful, others might critique the internal organising procedures or have other thoughts about the amount of power that was won or lost. Change is largely contextual and unfortunately successes in one instance cannot just be transferred to another location or struggle. However, there are some broad lessons that we can look at.

Power

In theory, all of these examples emerged in response to an oppressive form of power, and in turn sought to exercise a form of counter-power. In reality, in many of these examples the actors involved have struggled to come to terms with where and how they built power. They have not always managed to articulate to themselves, or to the outside world, what is at stake or who is the target of their campaigning, organising, mobilising etc. While discounting differences and unevenness within these examples, it is a useful practice for our learning to look back at them and ask: how did they win, or seek to win, power? If they did not, why not?

Coordination and Trust

These examples all point to the fact that holding different, sometimes loosely organised and agile, and sometimes fragile, parts of a transnational project together requires a strong coordination and trust-building capability. This capability is grounded in relational work but has to go beyond that.

Building a translocal alliance or preparing for a transnational action does not always allow the space and time to personally befriend all the actors involved. Coordination, agility and flexibility will enable different individuals and groups to work together, after establishing the necessary trust.

In the historical examples it is interesting to understand what groups, alliances, gatherings etc. were prioritised when it comes to coordination and how they (or did not) invest in relational and trust work across those struggles.

Patience and Resilience

Many groups, campaigns and actions prepared for long periods of time, built lasting relationships of trust, and rested on strong
networks which enabled their endurance and success. While this might seem like a downer – especially during the moments of movement exuberance when everything seems possible – holding on to the long view of winning also allows us to experience other positive spill-over effects and different kinds of transformation that happen alongside our fights.

Diversity of Views

It is no news that groups and alliances have split up in a field where everything is dynamic and working with uncertainty and volatility is the norm. It is difficult, but exciting, to build alliances and dare to work with people with conflicting opinions.

Ideological splits happen in movements but throughout them we should always ground ourselves in the questions: what are we fighting for together, and how can we collectively win?

Process

Groups in their localities and struggles have different processes, different ways to take decisions, different ways to communicate, raise their hand, sit in the room, organise an all-members meeting. There are different cultures around security and relationships to institutions, authorities, and the public. While for some groups business as usual might look like sitting in a large plenary with over 200 people listening to different speeches, other groups work with caucuses and small groups to determine the larger group decisions.

Understanding differences in process and finding compromises is key, and trusting the process is both lovely and requires patience.

Context

This might not be surprising that adjusting the work one does to the respective context is crucial in winning transnationally. When one plans to run a transnational gathering in a certain country, be aware of local traditions of organising, communicating and strategising.

What are the local conditions and laws when executing an action that occurs in several countries, how tactics can be adapted to a different political context, or how effective will a narrative be, in a place that has little connection to your target?

This lesson requires learning, reflecting, sometimes failing, and learning again. But over time context-aware transnational organising is incredibly rewarding, always dynamic, and provides fresh insights to adapt your strategy to win.

Conclusion

Transnational work can be challenging but is incredibly rewarding and part of a recipe to counter the transnational injustices of our world today. Out of frustration, it can lead people to simply focus on the things they can control, or to even fetishize “the local.” However, the examples of various kinds of transnationalism that we have looked at in this module do point to examples of success, as well as moments of creativity and unlocking new power for our movements.

Therefore, we must hold on to these histories, extract and teach their lessons, because the people who control forms of oppressive and top-down transnationalism have very little interest in reminding us of our rich history of bottom-up transnationalist practice!

Access Full Resource

Movement Learning Catalyst: A Guide to Learning for Systemic Change
See Module 3: Learning from Histories of Transnational and Translocal Activism and Organising, pgs 54 – 65.

About

Explore

Filter