The Transnationalization of Social Movement Organizations and its Determinants : An Overstudied Deviation or Transformative Trend?

Although a number of studies on transnational social movements have been published, empirical evidence on the transnationalization process remains rather weak. Mostly, case studies of specific transnationalized organizations, activist sectors, and international campaigns are available. However, whether these ‘success stories' of transnationalization represent a general pattern or include only deviant cases is still unclear. Therefore, the first goal of this paper is to analyze the whole population of social movement organizations and their level of transnationalization in one country, the Czech Republic. The typology of transnational activism that distinguishes among disruptive action, international networking and lobbing is presented. Second, the paper asks why some organizations perform specific types of transnational activism. It tests the main social movement theories explaining transnational activities of social movements: resource mobilization and mechanisms of resource access, domestic and transnational issue-specific political opportunity structures, the level of organizations' national rootedness, and their orientation towards politics. The paper relies on an original data set, the organizational survey of 150 social movement organizations in the Czech Republic representing the most important activist sectors: environmental, human rights, global justice, gay and lesbian and women's movement, agrarians and trade unions