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“Responsibility to protect (R2P) is not yet dead, but it is fragile” concludes a recent “Economist” article (5/15/08), which is in my view an accurate description of R2P. R2P establishes a responsibility to protect civilians from severe human rights viol ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Since the 1990s, Canada has taken the initiative on several pressing human rights issues. Canada was a key actor in the global effort to ban landmines and cooperated closely with the International Campaign to Ban Landmines. Canada also sponsored the Inter ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Research on transnational advocacy networks (TANs) has applied the theoretical literature on social movements to transnational activism. One of the central concepts in social movement theory is the structure of political opportunities (political opportunity structure or POS). The POS refers to the structural and contextual factors that encourage or inhibit social movement mobilization, and social movement scholars have examined how political opportunities affect both the emergence and the outcomes of social movements.Like so many of the other approaches and concepts in social movement theory, the POS is a concept that was originally developed to understand the mobilization and outcomes of social movements in national contexts. It has recently been modified and adapted to study international phenomena. In this paper I review the ways that the international structure of political opportunities has been conceptualized. I then draw on other theoretical formulations to propose an alternative conceptualization of the international political opportunity structures. Using examples of TANs, I demonstrate how drawing on both social movement approaches and other theoretical frameworks in international relations can enhance our understanding of the structures of political opportunity that TANs face and how these structures vary across issue areas. This variation in the POS can in turn help explain the variation in the political outcomes of TAN campaigns. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Transnational advocacy networks (TANs) are among the most salient new actors in international politics and an important part of a novel and growing research agenda focusing on issues of transnationalism and global governance. Despite the increasing attention social scientists have devoted to the study of transnationalism and TANs, there have been relatively few comparative studies of TANs. Moreover, different aspects of TANs have been studied in different subfields of political science, and there have been few attempts to integrate the sub-disciplinary perspectives.What is needed, therefore, are more comparative and theoretically grounded studies that integrate the theoretical and empirical insights of the relevant literatures in international relations and comparative politics. Arguing that research on TANs can be fruitfully grounded in the theoretical literatures on social movements and international regimes, this paper draws on the theoretical lenses developed by these literatures to compare three TANs: The International Campaign to Ban Landmines, the Kimberley Process and the International Action Network on Small Arms. These three TANs have had varying degrees of success, and the paper explores two related questions: What are the dynamics and processes that underlie and explain their success or the lack thereof? How and under what circumstances do transnational advocacy networks contribute to global governance? Using data gathered in interviews with NGO staff and activists involved with these TANs, the paper finds that a combination of concepts and variables advanced by these two bodies of literature to explain the emergence/outcomes of social movements/international regimes can explain when and how TANs can be successful in introducing new instruments of global governance. ..PAT.-Conference Proceeding [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]