5 - TRADE PROTEST NETWORKS

Summary

This chapter lays out the networks created among challengers of trade agreements in the Americas in the last twenty years of mobilizations and debates. Based on a combination of data gathered through social network questions answered by informants, document analysis, and semistructured interviews, it presents an analysis of how actors relate to each other, within and across national borders. The embeddedness of actors in these networks tells us much about their strategies and goals, and helps us understand changes in their pathways to transnationality.

Informants from one hundred and twenty-three civil society organizations (CSOs) in Brazil (29), Chile (23), Mexico (30), and the United States (41) answered the same questionnaire (see the lists of organizations in Appendix A and a copy of the questionnaire in Appendix B). This was not meant to be a representative sample of the literally hundreds of CSOs that became involved in challenging free trade agreements at one point or another. However, they do include the major challengers in each country, until the freezing of the Free Trade Area of the Americas negotiations in about 2004.

The mapping of ties among trade agreement challengers focused primarily on the strongest relationships among them, based on the perceptions of intensity of relations among informants at the time of the interview. Thus, the social networks presented in this chapter do not represent all forms of interaction among actors.