Issue-adoption and campaign structure in transnational advocacy campaigns: a longitudinal network analysis
| Published date | 01 June 2024 |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1177/13540661231158553 |
| Author | Mette Eilstrup-Sangiovanni,Laura Breen |
| Date | 01 June 2024 |
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https://doi.org/10.1177/13540661231158553
European Journal of
International Relations
2024, Vol. 30(2) 486 –516
© The Author(s) 2023
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DOI: 10.1177/13540661231158553
journals.sagepub.com/home/ejt
Issue-adoption and campaign
structure in transnational
advocacy campaigns: a
longitudinal network analysis
Laura Breen
University of Southern California, USA
Mette Eilstrup-Sangiovanni
University of Cambridge, UK
Abstract
Why do transnational actors choose to campaign on specific issues, and why do they
launch campaigns when they do? In this article, we theorize the membership, focus, timing
and strategies used in transnational advocacy campaigns as a function of long-standing
professional networks between NGOs and individual professional campaigners. Unlike
previous scholarship that highlights the role of powerful ‘gatekeeper’ organizations
whose central position within transnational issue-networks allows them to promote
or block specific issues, we draw on recent work in organizational sociology to bring
into focus a wider transnational community of individuals and organizations whose
competition for professional growth and ‘issue-control’ is crucial in defining the
transnational advocacy agenda. In doing so, we qualify existing notions of agenda-setting
and gatekeeping in International Relations (IR) scholarship. To illustrate our theory we
use a longitudinal network analysis approach, alongside extensive interviews and analysis
of primary non-governmental organization (NGO) sources. Our empirical focus is on
transnational disarmament advocacy. However, our theoretical analysis has implications
for transnational advocacy more broadly.
Keywords
Transnational advocacy campaigns, humanitarian disarmament, longitudinal network
analysis, issue-selection, transnational agenda-setting, issue-professionals
Corresponding author:
Mette Eilstrup-Sangiovanni, Department of Politics and International Studies, University of Cambridge,
7 West Road, Cambridge, CB39DP, UK.
Email: mer29@cam.ac.uk
1158553EJT0010.1177/13540661231158553European Journal of International RelationsBreen and Eilstrup-Sangiovanni
research-article2023
Original Article
Correction (April 2023): Order of author has been updated in the article.
Breen and Eilstrup-Sangiovanni 487
A series of transnational advocacy campaigns have been launched since the 1990s to
pressure governments to outlaw specific weapons – from anti-personnel landmines and
cluster bombs to small arms, blinding lasers, nuclear weapons and ‘killer robots’. Some
campaigns have focused on disarmament issues that prominent advocacy groups have
worked on for many decades; others have targeted issues which have not previously
attracted much attention.
What determines which issues become the focus of transnational advocacy campaigns
and when? A burgeoning international relations literature examines issue-adoption in
transnational advocacy networks (TANs), pointing to intrinsic fit with pre-established
norms and practices (Keck and Sikkink, 1998; Price, 2003), political expediency
(Carpenter, 2014: 41–46; Carpenter et al., 2014; Shawki, 2010) and the interests of pow-
erful advocacy organizations (Bob, 2005, 2009; Bower, 2016; Carpenter, 2011, 2014;
Carpenter et al., 2014; Garcia, 2015; Haddad, 2013; Lake and Wong, 2009). Most extant
studies, however, have focused on single campaigns or used structured comparisons of
two or more campaigns to examine how issues ‘ripen’ and how the pivotal positions of
well-connected advocacy organizations allow them to shape the transnational advocacy
agenda.
This article takes a novel approach to understanding the factors that shape transna-
tional advocacy campaigns. Rather than treating individual weapon-ban campaigns as
discrete networks that can be isolated according to their membership and time span, we
treat the global disarmament community as a single ‘issue-network’ that has linked and
re-combined in successive campaign coalitions. Replacing ‘snapshot’ analyses of indi-
vidual disarmament campaigns with a longitudinal analysis allows us to theorize pro-
cesses of coalition-formation across multiple, sequential campaigns. In turn, this allows
us to explore how membership, issue-adoption and campaign timing are influenced by
long-established professional networks between advocacy organizations and between
individual campaigners whose personal professional networks traverse organizational
boundaries. We thereby shed new light on endogenous factors shaping transnational
advocacy campaigns, which may be missed when adopting a more ‘static’ network ana-
lytical approach that treats individual campaigns as separate instances of a similar
phenomenon.
Our longitudinal network analysis focuses on six disarmament campaigns: against
landmines, cluster munitions, small arms, explosive weapons, nuclear weapons and
Lethal Autonomous Weapons Systems (LAWS, also known as ‘Killer Robots’). These
represent the six most prominent transnational disarmament campaigns over the past
three decades. For each campaign, we examine links between organizations, between
individuals and between individuals and organizations – both within and across
campaigns.
This research design has several advantages. First, as already noted, previous studies
have treated successive disarmament campaigns as distinct cases of a similar form of
global civil society action. This masks important continuities in network structure and
campaign formation. As Vedres and Stark (2010) observe in their work on structural folding1
in social networks, ‘the conventional graph snapshot of network analysis does not distin-
guish robust and stable collectivities from transitory alignments; it only enables the distinc-
tion between denser or sparser network regions’. By treating successive transnational
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