Transnational Advocacy: New Spaces, New Voices

There are many examples today of transnational advocacy groups, and much scholarship to identify how their growing presence contributes to understanding new and complex forms of global governance. This article seeks to present a corrective to the general trend to regard the "transnational" as a specific site of political engagement, and instead it draws principally on the work of Henri Lefebvre and scholarship from Human Geography to find ways to examine transnational advocacy as the ongoing process resulting from intersecting and diverse experiences of individuals and groups. In so doing, it aims further to redefine the spatiality of activism, by questioning how advocates determine the physical borders within which they function alongside those cognitive borders to which they attach themselves, and how those very borders are constantly redefined by their interactions. Using illustrative examples from Asia, this article proposes the need to rethink the transnational along three intersecting dimensions.