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Transnational activism in support of national protest: questions of identity and organization
Author(s) -
MERCEA DAN
Publication year - 2018
Publication title -
global networks
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.685
H-Index - 65
eISSN - 1471-0374
pISSN - 1470-2266
DOI - 10.1111/glob.12179
Subject(s) - romanian , identity (music) , social media , political science , collective identity , national identity , sociology , social identity theory , media studies , character (mathematics) , social movement , public relations , gender studies , social science , social group , law , politics , acoustics , philosophy , linguistics , physics , geometry , mathematics
In this article, I consider the question of whether transnational activism supporting national protest attains a cohesive collective identity on social media while remaining localized organizationally. I examine a corpus of social media data collected during two months of rolling protests in 2013 against the largest proposed open‐cast gold mine at Roşia Montană, Romania, which echoed among Romanian expatriates. A network text analysis of the data supplemented with interview findings revealed concerns with protest logistics as common across the transnational networks of protest localities on both Facebook and Twitter, a finding that testified to the coordinated character of the protests. On the other hand, collective identity emerged as the fruit of attempts to surmount localized protest experiences of geographically disparate but civically‐minded social media users.