STATUS: Not yet ready.

Advocacy networks are nonstate actors that interact with each other, with states, and with international organization. They are networks of activisits, distinguishable largely by the centrality of principled ideas or values in motivating their formulation. Activities of advocacy network run counter to the established theory of Westphalian sovereignty, where state authorities are considered to have supreme, independent authority over their territory. Much international network activity presumes the contrary - that it is both legitimate and necessary for states or nonstate actors to be concerned about the treatment of inhabitants of another state. (Keck & Sikkink, 36) Advocacy networks are therefore significant transnationally and domestically. By building links among actors in civil societies, states, and international organizations, they multiply the channels of access to the international system. (Keck & Sikkink, 2)

At the core of the activities of advocacy networks is is information exchange. Traditionally, this information exchange was done through telephone calls, e-mail and fax communications, and the circulation of newsletters, pamphlets and bulletins, and by using these means, they have been able to provide information that would not otherwise be available, from sources that might not otherwise be heard, and they must make this information comprehensible and useful to activisits and publics who may be geographically and/or socially distant. (Keck & Sikkink, 18) Apart from these tools however, the internet has emerged as an invaluable resource in the activities employed by advocacy networks. Instead of studying success stories, it may be useful instead to explore a case where the internet strategies of the advocacy network have not been optimal, in the case of the claim of advocacy groups against the United Nations ("UN") on behalf of Kosovo refugees.

A network of advocacy groups (the "Kosovo groups") filed claims against the UN alleging that the UN Mission in Kosovo settled refugees from the Kosovo-Serbian conflict in land that the groups allege the UNMIK knows are lead contaminated toxic land. Actions were also filed by these groups with the Ombudsmans office and the local Kosovo Human Rights Advisory Board. The portion of the campaign pursued by the Kosovo groups through web-based media consisted to a website created by the group, "Toxic Waste Poisons Children of Kosovo", features of the claims in websites including the European Roma Rights Center? , the New Kosova Report, Human Rights Watch, and write-ups on the work of one of the lawyers working on the case, features of the circumstances of the Kosovo refugees in BBC and the Guardian, and e-mail writing campaigns to various persons in the UN.

The web-based strategies of the Kosovo groups have not been successful. First, while the claims against UNMIK were filed as of 2006, based on the information provided by the Society for Threatened Peoples and the Kosovo Medical Emergency Group, no action has been taken on the claims filed. Second, the news articles available on the internet about the claims of the Kosovo refugees against UNMIK are found in sources that are "friendly" to the cause of the Kosovo refugees, such as those of the European Roma Rights Center, the New Kosovo Report, and Human Rights Watch, as well as on profiles of the lawyers working on the case. Third, the claims against UNMIK has not received heavy mainstream media coverage. The articles found on mainstream press are few and far in between. There is no sustained coverage of the claims. Thus, from the relatively light coverage of the claims in mainstream media, the focus of heavy coverage of the claims on sources "friendly" to the Kosovo refugees and the groups working on their behalf, and the lack of action taken on the claims, it can be said that the groups have not been successful in using strategies available on the internet that have otherwise been used by other successful advocacy networks in pursuing their causes. To be sure, there has been calls on the UN to act on the situation of the refugees recently by in a report from Australian Dateline, but this coverage was not obtained by the Kosovo groups, but by a group acting independently of them.

The first tool that the Kosovo groups have not been able to utilize fully is the information spreading power of the internet. Even as the groups have been successful in spreading information regarding their case through websites friendly to their cause, they have not been able to break into mainstream media. While mainstream media may not be gatekeepers of the truth in reporting, when their status is compared to websites friendly to the groups, they may be considered less biased to the cause, and a more credible source of information compared to friendly websites. A powerful tool that has not been used by the groups on the Kosovo case is the power of blogs. Just as mainstream media may suffer from conflict of interest when reporting on certain stories and are under commercial pressure to keep the attention of readers, bloggers do not have a similar constraint. Bloggers have the luxury of obsessing on issues, focusing and getting serious on topics. (Lessig, 43) If a particular blogger writes a particularly interesting story, more and more people link to that story. And as interest in the matter increases through the aggregation of interest through blogs, the story can be picked up and break into mainstream media. The failure of the Kosovo groups is that the information they release in the website is not a sustained reporting of facts that would establish their case. They report on individual cases that do not display whether or not their case is truly grave. The sustained reporting that is captured in a blog can create a case of sustained non-action, as they allege.

Another tool that the Kosovo groups have not been able to use is the ability to use the internet to create collaborative networks and coalitions. Advocacy groups have been able to benefit from the use of the internet through reduced transmission costs, access to new and relevant information, and greater contact with their own field sites and partner organizations. (McConnell? , 163) Since advocacy networks usually have minimal resources to pursue their causes, they must use the power of their information, ideas, and strategies to alter the information and value contexts within which states makes policies. (Keck & Sikkink, 16) Some advocacy networks are internet-based networks, or "dotcauses" which present an extreme case of virtual organizations. But the challenges of dotcauses which have no physical infrastructure and those of the Kosovo groups are similar -- they need to tackle the main challenges of Internet-based mobilization and of the difficulty of generating trust in the absence of face-to-face communications. (Alfredson & Themudo, abstract) The connection between the Kosovo groups and the constituencies on behalf of which they are making their claims is further made difficult by the seeming disconnect between them.

The successes of

References:

Alfredson, Lisa. and Themudo, Nuno. "Virtual Trust: Challenges and Strategies in Internet-based Mobilization" Paper presented at the annual meeting of the International Studies Association 48th Annual Convention, Hilton Chicago, CHICAGO, IL, USA, Feb 28, 2007 . 2009-05-24 <http://www.allacademic.com/meta/p178920_index.html>.

Margaret Keck & Kathryn Sikkink, Activists Beyond Borders, Cornell University Press, 1998.

Lawrence Lessig, Free Culture - How Big Media Uses Technology and the Law to Lock Down Culture and Control Creativity, The Penguin Press, 2004.

Internet Use by Transnational Advocacy Networks: a Case Study of the “No Software Patents” Campaign Breindl, Yana (2009) Internet Use by Transnational Advocacy Networks: a Case Study of the “No Software Patents” Campaign. In: Proceedings of the WebSci? '09: Society On-Line, 18-20 March 2009, Athens, Greece. (In Press)

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This paper proposes to examine Internet use by transnational advocacy networks - also referred to as global activism (Benett, 2003) - by studying the case of the “No Software Patents” campaign of 2002-2005 that relayed on conventional and non conventional lobbying techniques in order to influence the European Union policy-making. Transnational advocacy networks can be defined as being composed of “relevant actors working internationally on an issue, who are bound together by shared values, a common discourse, and dense exchanges of information and services.” (Keck & Sikkink, 1998: 2). Examples of such advocacy groups include the alter-globalisation, the human rights or the environment movement yet precursors - such as the anti-slavery movement - existed already in the early nineteenth century. Following Chadwick, “campaigns that transcend the boundaries of a single nation-state existed long before the rise of the Internet. However, it is undeniable that during the last ten years transnational campaigns have proliferated, and the vast majority of these have involved significant use of the Internet” (Chadwick, 2006: 115). Indeed, for many scholars, there is a clear parallel between the network character of these movements and the underlying infrastructure of the Internet, which enables them to effectively use the various potentialities of the Internet in their struggle for social change. Since the emergence and the growing adoption of ICTs and above all the Internet, scholars suggest that hierarchical and institutionalised organizations will increasingly be replaced by more flexible forms of decentralised organizational structures (Garrett, 2006). These loose forms of protest organisations are generally characterised as networks, that is to say a “set of nodes, linked by some form of relationship, and delimited by some specific criteria.” (Diani & McAdam? , 2003: 6). The nodes represent individuals, organizations or any other relevant entity (such as communities or events). The relationships between these nodes can be either direct or indirect, depending on the nature of the relation. The boundaries of the network may be defined by the analyst or include only those nodes that are related to each other (Ibid.). Based on social network analysis and additional techniques of data collection (such as in-depth interviews and online observations), the following paper analyses the role the Internet played in the “No Software Patents” campaign that mobilised a vast array of individuals, organisations and corporations who fought against the directive on “computer-implemented innovations” (generally referred to as “software patents” by its opponents) proposed by the European Commission in 2002. For over three years, opponents fought a fierce battle against this directive that resulted in various amendments made to the initial proposition and its final rejection by the European Parliament in September 2005. The Internet and other electronic devices played a major role in this battle as certified one campaigner: “for a pressure group that consists of activists throughout and even beyond the EU, there is no alternative to the extreme use of electronic communication. There is no way to meet physically, at least not frequently” (Mueller: 2006: 47). Indeed, the technological infrastructure of the Internet - and other ICTs - enabled the encounter, organisation and collaboration of a vast array of individuals, groups and organisations. Yet, a detailed analysis of this campaign makes clear that online techniques alone were not sufficient for groups wishing to influence the political process. In order to mobilise a broader public on a rather technical issue, the campaigners were forced to rely on an effective combination of offline and online protest techniques. Furthermore, the question of movement entrepreneurs will be addressed. Following Castells, the various actions of networked organization will no longer be defined around prominent leadership but by a common political agenda (Castells, 1996). Similarly, van de Donk et al. suggest that the Internet does not “demonstrate an inherent tendency to be concentrated and controlled in the hands of a few movement entrepreneurs (van de Donk et al., 2004: 9). However, evidence from the case study suggests that even in highly decentralised - and virtualised - movements such as the “No Software Patents” community, strong leaderships emerge. This is not only the case in this particular community. Evidence from the alter-globalisation movement confirms that basic technologies such as email lists can constitute new sources of power and leadership inside these networked structures (Kavada, 2008). The technological structure of the Internet may be decentralised and open yet the social structures that use it remain somewhat more vertical as leaders emerge and tend to increase their power.