(Page 9 of 29) - New Moves in Transnational Advocacy: Getting Labor and Economic Rights on the Agenda in Unexpected Ways authored by Hertel, Shareen.

forms of contentious politics. Segmenting a campaign, for example, into a beginning,
middle and end is critical to interpreting how normative understandings shift over time.
Periodizing contentious action is an ongoing challenge for scholars working on
mechanism-driven theory building.

PRACTICAL RELEVANCE. Gauging how the campaign’s human rights rhetoric

evolves over time on the sending and receiving ends is central to mapping the evolution
of human rights understandings. As a campaign evolves, actors on the receiving-end may
substitute a reference to one particular normative benchmark for another. A narrowly
defined standard of protection may be replaced with a broader one. Or a standard that
focuses on prevention of human rights abuse, for example, may be replaced by one that
emphasizes promotion of access to rights. There are mutual learning and concession on
both ends as the dialogue evolves over what is right and wrong and how to remedy it.

But why does it matter if actors block or make backdoor moves at all? These

moves change the power calculus of the typical transnational advocacy story. They give
actors who otherwise might not be heard – actors on the receiving end of campaign – a
useful resource for making claims. Human rights NGOs based in industrialized countries
are not the “lead voices” in scenarios where blocking and backdoor moves occur. Other
actors play a role in shaping the norms central to a campaign.

And when activists

employ these mechanisms, significant changes can result in how norms are understood
within a campaign, with the potential to affect the interpretation of norms well beyond
the campaign.

For scholars or policymakers observing transnational advocacy, the use of

blocking and backdoor moves as a conceptual framework lends order to what might
otherwise be perceived as a disorderly process. Identifying these moves enables
observers to model advocacy and the twists and turns within it in a more stylized manner.
The concepts travel: the mechanisms observed in one campaign can (and often do) appear
in another. When they don’t, it is possible to look at a range of factors (such as sanctions
or shared interests) and analyze which ones may have influenced the choice of a
particular mechanism.

McAdam, Tarrow and Tilly acknowledge the challenge of timing contentious episodes but leave the

development of “an operational kit bag for demarcating contentious episodes” to other scholars. McAdam,
Tarrow and Tilly, Dynamics of Contention, 33, 85, 309. On working with historical narratives as evidence
in political science, see Tim Büthe, “Taking Temporality Seriously: Modeling History and the Use of
Narrative as Evidence,” American Political Science Review 96, No. 3 (September 2002): 481-493.

Jonathan Fox centrally engages questions of power dynamics among the groups involved in transnational

advocacy in his article “Assessing Binational Civil Society Coalitions: Lessons from the US-Mexico
Experience,” Working Paper No. 26, April 2000 (Santa Cruz, CA: University of California-Santa Cruz).
Heather Williams does so as well in her article “Mobile Capital and Transborder Labor Rights
Mobilization,” Politics and Society 27, No. 1 (March 1999): 139-166. See also Center for the Study of
Human Rights, Capacity Building by Human Rights Organizations: Challenges and Strategies, a report on
a roundtable co-hosted by the Center for the Study of Human Rights at Columbia University and The
Banyan Tree Foundation, September 2002, pp. 9, 14-19.