Activists Beyond Borders: Advocacy Networks in International Politics by Margaret E. Keck and Kathryn Sikkink. Ithaca, Cornell University Press, 1998. 228 pp. Cloth, $??.??; paper, $??.??
Domestic Society and International Cooperation: The Impact of Protest on US Arms Control Policy by Jeffrey Knopf. Cambridge, UK, Cambridge University Press, 1998. 287 pp. Cloth, $59.95; paper, $19.95
The field of international relations has long since moved beyond the traditional billiard ball model that once dominated the discipline. Few scholars today would take issue with the assertion that "domestic politics matters" when it comes to explaining foreign policy behavior. Yet our understanding of just how societal actors influence international politics continues to evolve and expand. A growing number of studies have documented the significance of domestic forces at both the elite and mass levels of opinion. Yet much of this literature continues to treat societal actors as mere constraints on the policy-making process rather than as potential instigators of policy change.
Cases such as the recently victorious campaign to ban land mines suggest that even this framework is too narrow to capture the full impact of societal actors. The land mine campaign was transnational, rather than merely domestic, in scope. In contrast with elite interest groups that lobby on behalf of narrowly self-regarding goals, the land mine campaign united a network of grassroots activists around the pursuit of normative objectives. Nor did this network merely serve to "constrain" the range of policy options available to state decision-makers. The land mine campaign placed a new issue on the international agenda, one that had previously received scant attention.
The land mine ban campaign is neither unique nor unprecedented. Grassroots domestic and transnational networks have long served as sources of international change, although the numbers and effectiveness of such groups have certainly grown over time. Only recently, however, have scholars begun to develop theories and methodologies that could account for and measure the significance of such phenomenon.
The two books under review each make a major contribution to our understanding of the role that grassroots politics can play in international relations. Jeffrey Knopf examines the impact that citizen protest against nuclear arms has had on United States arms control policy. He finds that the presence of an active and visible peace movement at home often stimulated or accelerated American planning for new arms control initiatives. This was true, in varying ways and degrees, in the cases of the test ban negotiations of Eisenhowerís second term, the SALT negotiations of the early seventies and the START talks of the Reagan era. Knopf concludes that citizen activism can serve to shift state preferences and behavior in favor of international cooperation.
Knopfís evidence for domestic influence on arms control policy is strongest in the case of the nuclear freeze movement of the eighties. Widespread grassroots protest forced clear changes in the Reagan Administrationís initially bellicose approach to nuclear weapons and arms control. The test ban movement of the late fifties also appears to have accelerated a shift in the Eisenhower Administrationís priorities in favor of negotiations with the Soviet Union. Yet the ban on atmospheric testing ultimately reached under President Kennedy fell considerably short of the comprehensive halt to testing that activists had demanded. Knopf assigns a weaker but still significant role to domestic factors in explaining the Nixon Administrationís decision to push forward the SALT I talks. Yet given the absence of a grassroots anti-nuclear movement during this period, even Knopfís modest claims for the role of citizenís activism seem exaggerated in this case.
Knopfís book has its flaws. The author offers few original theoretical insights. His attempt to develop a quantitative model to test the impact of domestic protest on policy is awkward and unconvincing. The case narratives are sometimes repetitive and a bit wooden in tone. Knopf gives insufficient weight to the transnational ties connecting the American anti-nuclear movement with those abroad, especially Western Europe.
In one very important respect, however, Knopf makes a truly significant contribution. Scholars interested in the domestic sources of foreign policy have faced difficult problems in establishing causation. We can document societal activism. We can correlate this with policy change. But it is difficult to establish that the former is responsible for the latter, especially since other variables seldom remain constant over the relevant time period. While Knopf does not entirely resolve this problem, he offers perhaps the most sophisticated discussion to date of how one might go about tracing and measuring the impact of societal activism on foreign policy. Knopfís approach focuses on three potential routes of influence: an electoral pathway, an elite coalition-shift pathway and a bureaucratic utilization pathway. He provides a detailed examination of the pre-conditions necessary for effective influence along each pathway and the level of policy - whether general or specific - most open to change along that route. When combined with established case study methods involving structured, focused comparisons across multiple cases, Knopfís framework provides extremely useful guidance for scholars seeking ways to measure societal influence in a more rigorous manner.
Margaret Keck and Kathryn Sikkink examine the emergence, workings and effectiveness of transnational advocacy networks. These are densely connected collections of individuals and groups united across national boundaries around the pursuit of some particular set of "principled ideas." Their book offers chapter-length case studies of networks devoted to human rights, environmentalism and opposition to violence against women. The authors also discuss the implications of their conceptual and empirical work for evaluating existing theoretical paradigms or approaches in international relations, such as realism, liberalism, the English school, constructivism and world polity theory.
Keck and Sikkink hypothesize that transnational networks often emerge when aggrieved domestic societal actors are first denied access to political processes at home. This leads to a "boomerang effect," whereby isolated or repressed domestic groups in a particular country appeal to sympathetic groups abroad, who then enlist in a transnational effort to bring international pressure upon the recalcitrant regime. Governing elites thus find that growing repression at home only produces increasing criticism and pressure from abroad.
The most interesting theoretical contributions of the book concern the workings and effectiveness of transnational advocacy networks. The authors distinguish among four major types of transnational politics, each of which draws upon different sorts of network resources: information politics, symbolic politics, leverage politics and accountability politics. They also examine how the effectiveness of advocacy campaigns vary according to the characteristics of the issues and actors involved. The most successful networks, for instance, tend to focus on issues that involve bodily harm to vulnerable individuals or the denial of legal equality of opportunity.
The authors resist the temptation to idealize or oversimplify their discussion of transnational advocacy networks. Keck and Sikkink recognize that not all "principled ideas" fall near the liberal end of the political spectrum as, for instance, when they discuss the mobilization of a transnational anti-abortion network centered around the Catholic Church in connection with the 1995 United Nations Conference on Women in Beijing, China. Keck and Sikkink also acknowledge that transnational networks sometimes fail in their objectives. One of the more interesting parts of their book contrasts the largely failed campaign to eradicate female circumcision from parts of Africa with the earlier and more successful effort to end the practice of female footbinding in China. Finally, the authors forthrightly address the tensions that arise within the human rights, environmental and womenís movements based upon differences in culture and economic status. These conflicts often center on North-South cleavages and typically result in difficult negotiation and compromise among groups that may bring quite unequal resources to the bargaining table.
All in all, Activists Beyond Borders is a rich and rewarding book that provides scholars with a sophisticated set of conceptual tools for analyzing transnational grassroots politics. These two books together remind us that idealism can sometimes be quite realistic.
David Skidmore is an Associate Professor of Political Science at Drake University in Des Moines, Iowa.