Global Issue Networks
This set of research projects explores the emergence and non-emergence of ideas and issues in transnational advocacy networks.
View fullsize
![]()
View fullsize
![]()
Books
“Lost” causes
Why do some issues and threats―diseases, weapons, human rights abuses, vulnerable populations―get more global policy attention than others? How do global activist networks decide the particular causes for which they advocate among the many problems in need of solutions? According to Charli Carpenter, the answer lies in the politics of global issue networks themselves. Building on surveys, focus groups, and analyses of issue network websites, Carpenter concludes that network access has a direct relation to influence over how issues are ranked. Advocacy elites in nongovernmental and transnational organizations judge candidate issues not just on their merit but on how the issues connect to specific organizations, individuals, and even other issues.
The New Power Politics: Networks And Transnational Security Governance 1st Edition
Traditional analyses of global security cannot explain the degree to which there is "governance" of important security issues -- from combating piracy to curtailing nuclear proliferation to reducing the contributions of extractive industries to violence and conflict. They are even less able to explain why contemporary governance schemes involve the various actors and take the many forms they do.
Who Governs the Globe? (Cambridge Studies in International Relations)
Academics and policymakers frequently discuss global governance but they treat governance as a structure or process, rarely considering who actually does the governing. This volume focuses on the agents of global governance: 'global governors'. The global policy arena is filled with a wide variety of actors such as international organizations, corporations, professional associations, and advocacy groups, all seeking to 'govern' activity surrounding their issues of concern. Who Governs the Globe? lays out a theoretical framework for understanding and investigating governors in world politics. It then applies this framework to various governors and policy arenas, including arms control, human rights, economic development, and global education. Edited by three of the world's leading international relations scholars, this is an important contribution that will be useful for courses, as well as for researchers in international studies and international organizations.
Research Papers
R. Charli Carpenter,Duygulu, S., Montgomery, A., & Rapp, A. (2014) Explaining the Advocacy Agenda: Insights from the Human Security Network : Insights from the Human Security Network. International Organization, 68(2), 449-470 PDF
Through a series of focus groups with human security practitioners, we examined how powerful organizations at the center of advocacy networks select issues for attention. Participants emphasized five sets of factors: entrepreneur attributes, adopter attributes, the broader political context, issue attributes, and intranetwork relations. However, the last two were much more consistently invoked by practitioners in their evaluations of specific candidate issues. Scholars of global agenda setting should pay particular attention to how intranetwork relations structure gatekeeper preferences within transnational advocacy spaces because these help constitute perceptions of issues' and actors' attributes in networks.
R. Charli Carpenter and JOSE, B. (2012), Transnational issue networks in real and virtual space: the case of women, peace and security 12: 525-543. PDF
To what extent do online issue networks serve as a proxy for their real‐space counterparts in structure and substance? This question is significant because a number of scholars have begun to study transnational advocacy networks through their representations online. We explored whether this assumption is valid by comparing the network composition and agenda composition of the advocacy network around ‘women, peace and security’, as operationalized through a web‐based survey of actual activists, and the network's online representations of itself, as measured through advocacy websites. Two specific concerns drove the study. First, how closely does the structure of issue networks, as represented on the World Wide Web, correspond with actual advocates' understanding of the players within a specific issue domain? Second, to what extent does the online issue agenda correlate with the most prominent issues described by real‐space advocates within a transnational network? Our findings yielded a high correlation between the online issue agenda and activists’ interpretations of the agenda. However, we found that while hyperlink analysis is an effective tool for identifying the ‘hubs’ or ‘gatekeepers’ within a specific issue network, the nature of the World Wide Web makes it is a blunt tool with which to capture the broader network. This suggests that while the web poses important opportunities as a data source, scholars of transnational networks must pay closer attention to the methodological assumptions implicit in their reliance on this and other new media.
R. Charli Carpenter (2012) Vetting the Advocacy Agenda: Network Centrality and the Paradox of Weapons Norms International Organization, 65(1), 69-102 PDF
While a number of significant campaigns since the early 1990s have resulted in bans of particular weapons, at least as many equivalent systems have gone unscrutinized and uncondemned by transnational campaigners. How can this variation be explained? Focusing on the issue area of arms control advocacy, this article argues that an important influence on the advocacy agenda within transnational networks is the decision-making process not of norm entrepreneurs nor of states but of highly connected organizations within a given network. The argument is illustrated through a comparison between existing norms against landmines and blinding laser weapons, and the absence of serious current consideration of such norms against depleted uranium and autonomous weapons. Thus, the process of organizational issue selection within nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) and international organizations (IOs) most central to particular advocacy networks, rather than the existence of transnational networks around an issue per se, should be a closer focus of attention for scholars interested in norm creation in world politics.
R. Charli Carpenter (2019) Norms for the Earth: Changing the Climate on “Climate Change” Volume 4, Issue 4, October 2019, Pages 413–429, PDF
Climate change poses a grave security threat to national borders, habitats, and vulnerable people. Plagued by asymmetries in both states' vulnerability to climate impacts and their capacity to mitigate them, climate change presents states with a “wicked” problem that poses significant obstacles to interest-based solutions. Yet, most global climate change policy involves rationales and mechanisms grounded in an interest-based logic of consequences: information-sharing, reciprocity, and exchange. We argue that strategies that promote ethics-based discourse and policies offer considerable promise for hastening stronger global climate governance. We argue that successes in human security norm-building, including bans on land mines, cluster munitions, and nuclear weapons, provide climate scholars and practitioners with alternative governance models that rely on activating a logic of appropriateness and spearhead faster, more effective climate action. We identify five strategies that previous scholars have shown fostered efforts to promote a logic of appropriateness in human rights, humanitarian law, and disarmament. We examine the empirical experience of those strategies and particularly highlight the recent success of efforts to negotiate a treaty banning nuclear weapons. Given the success of these strategies in other issue areas, we argue scholars of climate change could fruitfully focus greater attention on political efforts that promote strong global ethical norms for climate action.
R. Charli Carpenter (2005) "Women, Children and Other Vulnerable Groups": Gender, Strategic Frames and the Protection of Civilians as a Transnational Issue International Studies Quarterly 49 (2), 295–334. PDF
This article offers an explanation for the use of gender essentialisms in transnational efforts to advocate for the protection of war-affected civilians. I question why human rights advocates would rely upon such essentialisms, since they arguably undermine the moral logic of the civilian immunity norm on which their normative claims are based. This can be understood, I argue, as part of a strategic framing process in which pre-existing cultural ideas, filtered through an environment characterized by various political constraints, impact the rhetorical strategies available to advocates. In-depth interviews with civilian protection advocates reveal that many believe that warring parties, the global media, transnational constituencies and partners in the international women's network will all be more receptive to their message if it is couched in terms of protecting "women and children" specifically. Network actors believe that while this may undermine the protection of adult male civilians and while it may reproduce harmful gender stereotypes, these problems are outweighed by the gains in access to needy populations and the benefits of getting "civilians" on the international agenda. I conclude by considering the extent to which this cost/benefit analysis is being contested and reconsidered by some actors within the civilian protection network.
R. Charli Carpenter. (2007) “Studying Issue Non-Adoption in Transnational Advocacy Networks: The Case of Children and Armed Conflict.” International Organization 61: 643-667. PDF.
Why do some issues but not others galvanize transnational advocacy networks? To gain insight into this question, I studied how advocates in the human rights sector think and talk about an issue that has received little advocacy attention to date: stigma against children born of wartime rape. Focus groups with humanitarian practitioners were coded and analyzed for evidence of a variety of explanations for issue adoption drawn from the literature on advocacy networks. The analysis suggests that the conditions for issue adoption are constituted by dynamics across, rather than primarily within, issue networks.
Other Writings
How Do We Solve Structural Inequality in Global Networks?
It’s time to relocate power centres in the top-heavy human rights network. The savvy use of network tactics is the best approach: cultivating southern “hubs”, empowering global south activists to access northern centres, and thinking broadly about network power in global civil society.
The Politics of Advocacy: Setting and Vetting the Global Agenda
Why did humanitarian campaigners set their sights on banning a category of weapons that doesn’t yet exist and about which the public is barely aware, rather than banning, for example, depleted uranium munitions, said to harm the health of thousands in conflict zones, or pilotless drones, an issue with widespread resonance in the public eye? Why do some issues and not other get global attention? The answer: it's all about the structural characteristics of global advocacy networks.