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Representation as practice: agency and relationality in transnational civil society

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Abstract

This paper argues that political representation in transnational civil society networks needs to be investigated as practice with regard to its flexibility, relationality and dialogical agency. Analysis of transnational representation from a practice-theoretical perspective can facilitate a better understanding of the actual representation practices of civil society actors in a transnational setting. The question raised is this: how do representation practices ensue, change or shift within the broader structures in which they are embedded? By focusing on flexibility, relationality and dialogical agency as the key theoretical concepts for representation practice, this study delves deeper into those aspects through empirical analysis of qualitative interviews with activists from two major transnational civil society networks: the Clean Clothes Campaign and Friends of the Earth. The study finds that transnational representation in civil society networks evolves in a non-linear fashion, is characterised by shifting agency, discursive claims and a disembodiment of representation. The paper concludes with a discussion of how future research can pursue such critical engagement without falling back into standard, static notions of political representation.

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Notes

  1. Aggregative accounts of representation clearly adhere to the realist assumption of an authentic and static political constituency with fixed interests and preferences, but the trusteeship model leaves room for a more dynamic way of doing representation through deliberation and persuasion. The trusteeship model does, however, still hold to the idea of unity of the constituency and a coherent and unified common good that can be achieved in the process of representation.

  2. Discursive representation operates under the assumption that people have multiple interests and ideas which change dynamically. Such ideas and interests are then subsumed in certain discourses (Dryzek and Niemeyer 2008: 8‒10).

  3. See https://cleanclothes.org/about/mission (last accessed on 24 October, 2019).

  4. See http://www.foei.org/en/who-we-are (last accessed on 24 October, 2019).

  5. Interviews are numbered consecutively—for the FoE: F1, F2 …; for the CCC: C1, C2 …

  6. This interview analysis was part of my dissertation. The empirical data and parts of the analysis are taken from that work (see Knappe 2017). The interviews were conducted in 2012 and 2013.

  7. Because the interviews were transcribed with intonations and accentuations, excerpts from them read differently compared to standard English-language quotations. The quoted material here tries to replicate spoken language to the degree that it is still readable and understandable. Accentuations are marked using upper-case letters; all other non-accentuated words, including nouns and pronouns such as ‘I’, are written exclusively in lower case.

  8. Interview data are of course limited in analysing the very micro-level material or bodily practices of everyday interaction in meetings, discussions, etc. However, since this paper is interested in the broader ensembles of practice in transnational civil society networks, there is some justification for sticking to this data.

  9. Author’s translation.

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Acknowledgements

Earlier versions of this paper were presented at the 2017 ECPR panel on ‘Representation Studies Beyond the Constructivist Turn’ and the 2017 EISA Panel on ‘Translating International Practices’—I want to thank the organisers and participants of these panels and other smaller fora, in particular, Henrik Enroth, Alejandro Esguerra, Frank Gadinger, Anna Holzscheiter, Frank Nullmeier, Vincent Pouliot and Daniel Schade as well as two anonymous reviewers and the editors of JIRD for their valuable comments. I would also like to thank Mary Elizabeth Kelley-Bibra for her excellent language editing.

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Correspondence to Henrike Knappe.

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Appendices

Appendix

Clustered list of interviewees

Clean Clothes Campaign:

Large Western European organisations

C1

 

C2

 

C6

 

C9

 

C10

Smaller Western European organisations

C4

 

C5

Southern European organisations

C3

Northern European organisations

C11

Central-and Eastern European organisations

C7

 

C8

Asian organisations

C12

 

C14

Friends of the Earth:

Large Western European organisations

F1

 

F2

 

F4

 

F5

 

F10

Southern European organisations

F6

F8

Northern European organisations

F9

Central-and Eastern European organisations

F3

F7

F11

South American organisations

F13

African organisations

F12

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Knappe, H. Representation as practice: agency and relationality in transnational civil society. J Int Relat Dev 24, 430–454 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1057/s41268-020-00197-6

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