Being a Serial Transnational Activist

Abstract

Transnational activism endures as a political practice turning a mirror onto the world’s power-brokers. We analyse a variety of transnational activism best characterized as serial by virtue of an observed systematic time and border-spanning commitment to protest communication. Following statistical disambiguation of a data-set of 2.5 million unique Twitter users, we identified a subset of exceptionally prolific communicators and interviewed 21 of them. We show that a noted prominence in networked communication of otherwise unremarkable Twitter users may be an upshot of purposive strategies intended to publicize, support or help orchestrate collective action. Accordingly, we propose the term "engagement compass" to address the relationship between activists' life-patterns and their personal investment in protest over time.

Keywords: transnational activism, social media, diffusion, celebrity, frame clouding, disengagement