Activism Across Borders since 1870. Causes, Campaigns, and Conflicts in and beyond Europe By DanielLaqua. London and New York: Bloomsbury Academic. 2023. 366 pages. $34.95 (paperback). <scp>ISBN</scp>: 978‐1350262799
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Daniel Laqua has written an excellent and historically ambitious book.In eight chapters, Activism across Borders tackles more than a century of transnationalism mostly from the political left and, which is noteworthy, sometimes from the right, as transnationalism pervades the entire political spectrum.Laqua's focus is primarily European but for obvious historical and empirical reasons his examination of twentieth century transnationalism extends "beyond Europe."Anti-colonialism, anti-imperialism and anti-racism, humanitarianism, pacifism, feminism, gender and sexuality, class struggle, human rights, and the environmental cause are all progressive spaces of mobilization that transcend national borders, even if the causes, in a typical scale game, have strong national and local resonances.This book is easy to read and is likely to become a reference for scholars and students interested in the global history of social movements.Laqua uses "four major analytical lenses" (2) to investigate this international commitment: connection, transience, ambivalence, and marginality.The first lens is self-evident because transnational action connects people all over the world, but Laqua also underlines the "connectedness of causes."Indeed, as pacifist and environmental activist Petra Kelly stated in 1982, "It's all interrelated" (quoted on 287).While this is not true for all causes, transnational mobilization often involves the intersection of multiple causes (e.g., pacifism and feminism, leftist internationalism and human rights, and green activism and pacifism).The second lens, which is closely related to the first, is the transitory aspect of transnationalism.Partnerships between causes are inherently transient and, as Laqua correctly points out, "sometimes end in discord" (14).Sandi Cooper and others have demonstrated that nineteenth century pacifists, for example, were unable to resolve the contradictions between their liberalbourgeois and socialist orientations prior to 1914, and this tension resurfaced in the 1930s in response to the fascist threat.The third perspective explores the ambivalence of transnationalism.Laqua highlights "the manifold blind spots" and the "prejudice and exclusionary agendas" of some global efforts (14).This ambivalence is well known to peace historians.Many 1920s pacifists, for example, imbued with their own progressivism, welcomed the "mission civilisatrice" of European empires in Africa and elsewhere without questioning its imperial and racist base (37-45).Many
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.003 | 0.004 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.006 | 0.004 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.007 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".