Transnationalization of Victims' Movements in an Era of Globalization: A Case Study of Apartheid Victims
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概要
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A number of victims of human rights violations and their groups have lately launched campaigns to seek reparations from multinational corporations by gaining access to foreign judicial systems. They have formed transnational advocacy networks with other non-governmental actors to mobilize international support for their campaigns. The advent of these transnational victims' movements reflects that the victims have become less insistent on seeking reparations from their own governments and that there is a growing tendency for the issues of reparation payments to be settled through interactions between private actors across national borders.The purpose of this paper is to explore factors underlying the transnationalization of victims' movements by employing the concept of “political and legal opportunity structures.” The paper also examines how the “political and legal opportunity structures” has been affected by two developments ushered in by economic globalization, namely, structural changes in the international political economy, and the advent of new social movements opposing globalization. Finally, the paper presents a case study on the Khulumani Support Group, the largest organization of Apartheid victims in South Africa.In the late 1990s, the South African government adopted neoliberal economic policies in order to cope with the mounting pressure of globalization. As the government gave priority to helping boost corporate activities and to encouraging inflows of foreign capital, it became reluctant to collect wealth taxes from domestic and multinational corporations to pay reparations to Apartheid victims. Within the country, this narrowed down the “political and legal opportunity structures” through which Apartheid victims could press for reparation payments.Internationally, however, economic globalization spurred the emergence of new types of transnational social movements around the world dedicated to the cause of anti-globalization. Economic globalization has also raised international awareness about the legal responsibilities that multinational corporations must assume for their complicity in human rights violations in developing countries. Khulumani managed to team up with one of the new transnational movements and a group of U.S. lawyers active in filing lawsuits against corporations involved in human rights abuses. This transnational network gave Khulumani access to the U.S. judicial system. In other words, a new “political and legal opportunity structure” was opened at an international level, enabling Khulumani to seek reparations from multinational corporations. And Khulumani actually filed a case with a U.S. court against a group of multinational corporations.The economic globalization process transformed the existing “political and legal opportunity structures” both at the domestic and at the international levels, and induced the Apartheid victims' movement to go multinational.