allegiances and normatively affect networks of civil society actors involved in normative, trans-
spatial collective action (Keck and Sikkink, 1998). “State” actors may inhabit spaces of political
community inside or outside, above or below or around, the terrain of the state in their daily
practice. The same holds true for “non-state actors,” powerful and disenfranchised alike:
grassroots movements, corporations, civil society actors, transnational advocacy networks,
cross over boundaries of the state, in practice and in the way their normative influences have
effect. To move beyond this, this article argues for a conceptualization of the state as an
“arena/locus of struggle,” a “terrain of contestation,” or “an amalgamation of contentious politics”
constantly re-formulated and reconstructed from without and from within, by both hegemonic
and counter-hegemonic globalizaing processes, and by both state and civil society actors.
As anthropologist Derick Fay observes:
States are not unitary entities. Likewise, there is no singular official knowledge. Just as
the concept of “the state” compresses complex social and institutional relationships in a
single entity, so the concept of “knowledge” implies a single body rather than a socially
distributed set of understandings (Fay, 2003, p. 1).
In a Gramscian sense, this paper argues that hegemonic and counter-hegemonic
influences are not bounded within traditional units of analysis, categories or spatial arenas. A
non-governmental organization, or certain actors within it, can be agents of hegemonic
construction. On the flipside, counter-hegemonic challenges may originate from within the guts
of the same state – from the daily practices of certain actors, shaped by historical social
arrangements, who are part of the same state which in other arenas is constructing hegemony.
As this case reveals, lawyers and social scientists working for a government entity – precisely
because of their historically embedded “socially distributed set of understandings” may present
positions that challenge the state status quo. As for corporations, a corporate whistle-blower’s
actions can challenge the hegemonic practices and power of the company within which s(he) is
3
In this sense, I am partially challenging the frame from which this panel is derived – specifically the petition to
analyze how “global interlocutors foster the reframing and resignification of local actors’ agendas within the terms of
reference in use among the transnational community.” The social construction of power relationships is inherent to –
and can be reinforced by -- our analytical categorizations (See Michael Root, The Philosophy of Social Science). I
would argue that the causal arrows of “reframing” and “resignification” run in multiple directions, trans-institutionally.
4
Convention