Recognition Struggles in Trans-national Arenas: Negotiating Identities and Framing Citizenship

The purpose of this article is to incorporate trans-national actors and institutions into citizenship theory both theoretically and empirically. We analyze three cases of recognition movements promoting gender, ethnic/minority and indigenous rights. Using one societal context, Sweden, we map the processes and mechanisms of power and agency (boundary-making and brokering) that shape how trans-national institutions and actors offer new forms of leverage politics to recognition movements as well as constrain their agency. These mechanisms of power are formalized in a model showing the multi-level effects of leverage politics on recognition movements. Our three cases of recognition politics demonstrate the increasingly complex links between actors in policy communities across regional, national, European and international levels. They also reveal the processes implicit in our model: that policy imports are reframed when translated into specific national political cultures; and more broadly, that national citizenship frames of membership and inclusion are not easily dislodged.