Chapter 3 focuses on the challenges and opportunities of transnational worker representation and their consequences for the development of more democratic governance institutions. We examine these from two key theoretical perspectives. Starting from the notion of associational democracy, we differentiate between two logics of democratic representation: representation as claim versus representation as structure. The first approach is associated with a discursive or communicative model of transnational democracy as put forward by political theorists. Rather than thinking of representation in terms of representative structures, representation becomes the dynamic and ongoing process of making “representative claims” that reflect certain discourses, categories, concepts, judgments, dispositions, and capabilities. In contrast, structural ideas of representation are grounded in industrial democracy. Here, constituents of an organic political unit defined by voluntary membership, such as a trade union, authorise their representatives to deliberate, negotiate or bargain on behalf of members. We develop their theoretical grounding in structuralist and post-structuralist thinking, and question to what extend these approaches may be reconciled with each other to advance prospects for transnational worker representation.

Legal mobilization refers to the use of law to express claims and desires in order to achieve change or protect interests. It can be carried out by individuals or by a collective of people. Importantly, legal mobilization encompasses more than going to court to litigate disputes, an action that may prove ineffective or even irrelevant in some Asian contexts. In addition to litigation, legal mobilization occurs in other ways, even when an individual or group merely articulates a problem to a confidante in terms of rights or other legal concepts. In Asia, this broader concept of legal mobilization is especially apropos, since so much “legal” activity—broadly construed—takes place far from the justice institutions the state has established. In this chapter, the readings illustrate the range of tactics used by those who mobilize the law to achieve their goals. They also illustrate both the risks and rewards associated with the invocation of legal rights in Asian societies. As the authors make clear, rights can have paradoxical effects, and can simultaneously empower and disempower or stigmatize those who use them. In some instances, however, the results are hugely beneficial to those who felt hopeless in the absence of legal protection.

In the early 1960s, Vietnamese resistance to US aggression galvanized a generation of activists, prompting the French in particular to forge an international antiwar alliance with their peers across Western Europe and North America, especially the United States. Together, they came to believe that the Vietnam War was caused by a broader “system” that made such wars possible in the first place. Searching for a way to not only explain this system, but overthrow it, they increasingly turned to Leninism. Radicals in the North Atlantic named the system imperialism, defined their internationalism as anti-imperialism, and called for a coordinated worldwide revolution based in the principle of the right of nations to self-determination. Following the lead of African American, Latin American, and Vietnamese revolutionaries, they argued that the best way to combat this imperialist system was to open new fronts inside the imperialist centers, triggering a wave of domestic upheaval that reached new heights in May 1968. But when this anti-imperialist front faced state repression and imprisonment in France, the United States, and South Vietnam, these same radicals began to advocate individual rights alongside anti-imperialist revolution in the early 1970s. In so doing, they lent legitimacy to a competing form of internationalism that shared the progressive aspirations of Leninist anti-imperialism but rejected nationalism in favor of human rights. When genocide, internecine war, and refugee crises in Southeast Asia eroded faith in national self-determination in the late 1970s, former French radicals sided with the US government in a global movement championing human rights against the sovereignty of states like Vietnam.

The sweeping changes of the early 1960s gave rise to a new cycle of struggle across the North Atlantic. It was in this context that the United States escalated its involvement in Vietnam. At the forefront of the antiwar struggle were radicals who advanced a systemic critique, arguing that ending the war meant transforming the system that had created it in the first place. Believing that the system exceeded the borders of the United States, these American radicals internationalized the struggle by reaching out to antiwar activists across the globe. Radicals in Western Europe proved especially responsive to the call, with the French in particular insisting on the strategic value of internationalist coordination in the North Atlantic. French activists took a lead in not only uniting activists across borders but creating a new sense of radical internationalism centered around Vietnam. For their part, Vietnamese revolutionaries played a central role in facilitating this new internationalism. By 1967, tens of thousands of activists across North America and Western Europe had come together in a new radical international.

Why did people petition and why did they continue to do so when petitions were rarely successful in securing immediate change? The point of petitioning was extensively discussed within nineteenth-century political and social movements. Critics questioned the wisdom of petitioning and argued in favour of electioneering or more direct forms of protest. Tellingly, however, many of these alternatives were either petitions by another name or were facilitated by subscriptional activity. Even if they were ignored or rejected by authorities, petitions were indispensable to political campaigns and social movements, including Chartism, anti-slavery, women’s suffrage, anti-Catholics, and the Anti-Corn Law League, for a variety of reasons. This explains why so many Victorian activists were indefatigable petitioners. Petitioning was the key method for mobilising popular support and pressuring Parliament; an important way of recruiting activists and developing formal political organisation, at both national and local level; raising public awareness and political consciousness; and finally, for forging valuable networks with elite politicians. Petitioning thus underpinned and made possible a broader repertoire of modern campaigning.

The imagination depends not on pictures but on experiences. When we imagine something we conjure up past experiences. This explains the vividness of the imagination, and how it can serve as a creative force. Collective imagination relies on movements and on shared props. Historical examples include German nationalism, social movements, the suffragette movement, movements for decolonization. Today we experience many movements only vicariously, for example, as we watch sports.

Regarding this Lefebvrian framework, the political struggles of the 1940s and the early 1950s in Tehran pose significant questions that this chapter seeks to examine. After decades of spatial abstraction and the (re)production and development of the city through abstract spaces, how did the people of Tehran transform state spaces into a political arena to contest the hegemony of the state? What was the relationship between spaces of daily life produced in the Reza Shah era and the new spaces of protest in Tehran? Why did people choose the new streets and squares of the city for protesting against the monarchy? Why did they not take bast in the mosques of the old city as they did in the constitutional era? To analyze this spatial shift, this chapter scrutinizes political groups and forces of this era and their political gatherings, protests, demonstrations, and parades in public spaces of Tehran. This examination suggests a dynamic political scene that cannot be dichotomized into the conventional binary opposition of people against the state, as was examined during the constitutional era.

Forstenzer gives an account of Cornel West’s prophetic understanding of gratitude, itself a distillation of West’s existentialist world-view. As Forstenzer shows, gratitude is the foundation upon which West builds the conditions for overcoming the injustices of racism and inequality which are achieved through the mobilization of social movements. Westian gratitude is, above all, a recognition of those who came before, as well as a hope that sustains the long road to justice.

Chapter 10 turns to the sociology of social movements, the psychology of collective action, and the histories and tactics of prominent grassroots group to examine how to grow and empower a movement and increase broader advocacy.

This chapter focuses on struggles to dwell in the city that characterised a strand of both racist practice and responses to it. From attempts to purchase collectively housing to the rarely told stories of organised squatting and the emergence of the black housing movement, the forces of racist exclusion produced a Newtonian response; collective endeavours to claim the right to find somewhere to live in the cities of post-war Britain. These social movements racialised both the claim to dwell in the city and the challenges to patterns of discrimination. But the struggles which emerged from the grassroots and grew over the 1970s and 1980s also in some ways ran their course over time for reasons that are also considered in this chapter.

Our scholarly understanding of “representative democracy” is often defined by two major actors: voters and the representatives they elect. This two-way interaction of democratic governance has its perils. And the critiques of this type of governance have been multifaceted. Just to name a few, not all members of the public have an opportunity to engage in the electoral process to elect representatives. In addition, elected officials of representative democracies often ignore minority concerns in the hope to capture majoritarian preferences voiced by voters. Robert Dahl (1989) astutely points out that there is actually no nation that meets all the requirements of a true democracy, which should consist of inclusiveness, enlightened understanding, equal participation, equal say, and citizens’ control of the agenda. What many nations have managed to achieve is representative democracy – an inferior second choice. Others have encouraged an expansion of our understanding of representation. Saward (2006), for example, argues that the acceptance or rejection of representative claims provides another way for scholars to understand representation that moves beyond elections and political parties.