International Advocacy Campaigns
How advocacy crosses borders, the strategies that have won landmark international agreements, and why transnational campaigns face unique challenges of coordination, legitimacy, and power.
Transnational Advocacy Networks
Political scientists Margaret Keck and Kathryn Sikkink identified 'transnational advocacy networks' as a distinctive form of international organizing. These networks connect domestic activists who face repression with international allies who can exert pressure from outside. The 'boomerang model' describes how a blocked domestic group appeals to international allies, who pressure the domestic government from above.
The international campaign to ban landmines, which resulted in the Ottawa Treaty of 1997, is a classic case. The International Campaign to Ban Landmines (ICBL), a coalition of over 1,000 NGOs in 60 countries, mobilized public opinion, worked with sympathetic governments (particularly Canada and Norway), and used graphic images of landmine victims to create moral pressure. The campaign won the Nobel Peace Prize and produced a treaty signed by 164 countries, though major powers including the US, Russia, and China have not joined.
