Global Networks 12, 4 (2012) 525–543. ISSN 1470–2266. © 2012 The Author(s)
Journal compilation © 2012 Blackwell Publishing Ltd & Global Networks Partnership 525
Transnational issue networks in real and virtual
space: the case of women, peace and security
R. CHARLI CARPENTER*
AND BETCY JOSE†
*
University of Massachusetts-Amherst, Department of Political Science,
432 Thompson Tower, 200 Hicks Way, Amherst, MA 01003, USA
charli.carpenter@gmail.com
†
University of Colorado Denver, Department of Political Science,
855 Lawrence Way, Suite 524, P.O. Box 173364, Campus Box 190,
Denver, Colorado 80217-3364, USA
betcyjt@gmail.com
Abstract To what extent do online issue networks serve as a proxy for their realspace
counterparts in structure and substance? This question is significant because a
number of scholars have begun to study transnational advocacy networks through
their representations online. We explored whether this assumption is valid by comparing
the network composition and agenda composition of the advocacy network around
‘women, peace and security’, as operationalized through a web-based survey of actual
activists, and the network’s online representations of itself, as measured through
advocacy websites. Two specific concerns drove the study. First, how closely does the
structure of issue networks, as represented on the World Wide Web, correspond with
actual advocates’ understanding of the players within a specific issue domain? Second,
to what extent does the online issue agenda correlate with the most prominent issues
described by real-space advocates within a transnational network? Our findings
yielded a high correlation between the online issue agenda and activists’ interpretations
of the agenda. However, we found that while hyperlink analysis is an effective
tool for identifying the ‘hubs’ or ‘gatekeepers’ within a specific issue network, the
nature of the World Wide Web makes it is a blunt tool with which to capture the
broader network. This suggests that while the web poses important opportunities as a
data source, scholars of transnational networks must pay closer attention to the
methodological assumptions implicit in their reliance on this and other new media.
Keywords TRANSNATIONAL NETWORKS, ADVOCACY, AGENDA-SETTING, NEW MEDIA,
METHODOLOGY
International relations (IR) scholarship often acknowledges that the ready availability of
the World Wide Web has had a dramatic impact on the ability of civil society
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526 © 2012 The Author(s)
organizations to connect, communicate and disseminate ideas across state borders
(Aronson 2004). In some cases, the success of entire transnational campaigns has been
attributed to their advocates’ ability to leverage online networks to promote their cause.
1
Because of the importance of the World Wide Web and advocacy websites in
connecting activists, framing issues and mobilizing constituencies, scholars of transnational
advocacy networks are increasingly studying the networks themselves
through reference to their representations online (Bae and Choi 2000; Carpenter
2007b; Halavais and Garrido 2003). This reflects the common practice in professional
circles of ‘Googling’: when a student, citizen or policymaker wishes to know who is
‘doing’ conflict diamonds or child soldiers, they are likely to type keywords into a
search engine and access the resulting organizational websites of advocacy organizations.
Researchers who also use representations on the web to ‘describe’ the network
agenda tend to assume that online action can be understood as a proxy for actual
network activities, irrespective of whether it reflects or drives transnational advocacy.
Because studies such as these do not always corroborate their online data with real
world data, their findings reflect an as yet unsubstantiated assumption of close association
between online and offline networks.
Our purpose in this article is to explore the empirical validity of this assumption.
To what extent do transnational online issue networks serve as a proxy for their realspace
counterparts in structure and substance? How valid is online activism as a
substantive proxy for transnational action? Epistemologically, what is going on when
policymakers, students or citizens form impressions of a transnational network
through online representations? Methodologically, can researchers of transnational
advocacy networks confidently rely on advocacy websites as a proxy for interviews or
surveys with actual transnational activists?
We explored these questions by attempting to measure the gap between the realspace
advocacy network around ‘women, peace and security’ (WPS), as operationalized
through a web-based survey of actual activists, and the network’s online
representations of itself, as measured through advocacy websites. Two specific
concerns drove the study. First, how closely does the structure of issue networks as
represented on the World Wide Web correspond with actual advocates’ understanding
of the players within a specific issue domain? To capture network structure, we
compared hyperlinks among advocacy websites in the WPS network with survey
responses from actual participants in that network to determine whether, as a number
of studies have suggested, hyperlinks provide a useful proxy for advocates’ understandings
of who the ‘gatekeepers’ in a network are.
Second, to what extent does the online issue agenda correlate with the most
prominent issues described by real-space advocates within a transnational network?
To study how closely advocacy websites reflect an actual network’s political agenda,
we compared the prominence of specific issues online in this network, as determined
by a content analysis of advocacy websites, to survey responses regarding the ‘most
important issue’. This method follows scholars of domestic agenda setting in attempting
to capture the ‘agenda’ in both online and real-space transnational sites and
examine the extent to which they correlate or, alternatively, seem disconnected.
Transnational issue networks in real and virtual space
© 2012 The Author(s) 527
Our initial findings suggest that link analysis is an effective tool for identifying the
‘hubs’ or ‘gatekeepers’ within a specific issue network (Bob 2005; Carpenter 2011).
However, it is a blunt tool for capturing the broader issue network because it produces
false positives and can miss peripheral organizations that lack IT understanding but
nonetheless real-space activists acknowledge as playing an important role in the
network. In addition, survey responses from real-space activists suggest a more
nuanced understanding than the websites can provide of what constitutes a network
‘actor’. With respect to the issue agenda, our findings yield a high correlation between
web-sphere analysis and survey responses regarding the most important issues.
Because the online network does not fully reflect the real world network, we find that
data about issue networks online can be a useful supplement, but not substitute, for
data on real-space networks.
We organize the article as follows. First, we discuss the literature on transnational
advocacy networks and approaches for integrating the study of web-based advocacy
into the study of transnational agenda setting. Second, we explain the methods used to
examine the relationship between online and real-space descriptions of the network
and the network agenda. We outline the findings in the final section.
Transnational advocacy networks and the World Wide Web
A proliferating literature in IR theory now explores the impact of transnational advocacy
networks (TANs) on global public policy making (Burgerman 2001; Florini
2000; Keck and Sikkink 1998; Khagram et al. 2002; Thomas 2002). TANs are
transnational networks of activists motivated by shared principled discourse who aim
to affect political behaviour through moral argument (Price 2003).
Linking insights from social movement theory, IR constructivism and sociological
institutionalism literature on issue networks has documented the role that civil society
actors play as agents of change: they set the international agenda, teach actors new
norms, monitor compliance with standards and shame norm violators (Price 2003).
Examples of such scholarly work include studies on the impact of TANs on the global
diffusion of gender mainstreaming (Mintrom and True 2001); Soviet Jewish
emigration during the cold war (Hagel and Peretz 2005); as well as the prevention of
child labour in Bangladesh and employment discrimination against pregnant workers
in Mexico (Hertel 2006).
Here, we refer to TANs as ‘issue networks’ because they are constituted around
specific issues or issue areas. All social networks are ‘network[s] of meanings’ (White
1992: 67); advocacy networks are networks of principled meanings, which vary by
issue area. For example, in the area of human rights, the principled meanings have to
do with the rights and obligations between political actors and human beings
(Hawkins 2002; Joachim 2003; Keck and Sikkink 1998; Risse et al. 1999; Thomas
2002), and the constitutive actors differ from networks around climate change or
conflict diamonds.
As much of the literature on TANs has long noted in passing, contemporary transnational
advocacy is heavily reliant on global communications networks, including
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528 © 2012 The Author(s)
the internet (Price 2003). Many have said that the World Wide Web has a positive
impact on the abilities of non-governmental organizations to coordinate and communicate
their activities (Juris 2005; Lebert 2003; Postmes and Brunsting 2002).
Deibert (2000: 262) finds the World Wide Web enabled networks to broadcast their
interpretation of an issue to a much wider audience than other forms of media. These
‘“virtual” information booths … seem to confer legitimacy on the information
contained in them simply because they are on the Internet’.
2
These studies suggest
that the web serves as a quick and inexpensive means for NGOs to function
effectively at a global level, yet studies of TANs rarely explore the relationship
between technology and TAN activities explicitly.
Yet, this early and salutary emphasis on the World Wide Web as a conduit for
transnational political mobilization has led to a trend among IR scholars to treat
activist websites as data sources on actual transnational networks. For example, in a
study of the online representation of the European Women’s Lobby, Pudrovska and
Ferree (2004: 118) argue that website analysis offers useful information about an
organization’s identity and priorities ‘because, unlike media representations of the
group, it is self-directed and, unlike many structural features of the organization, it is
relatively resource-neutral’. When explaining their use of hyperlink analysis, Van
Aelst and Walgrave (2004) claim it provides insight into an organization’s place in a
transnational network. Bennett (2003) concludes that patterns of online communication
between NGOs reflect and reproduce the structure of activist networks centred
on the global economic regime. Studies of the civilian protection network (Carpenter
2005) and the children and armed conflict network (Carpenter 2007a) draw on
datasets of content from advocacy websites as an indicator of advocacy discourse.
All these authors assume that websites, and the linking practices among them, are
a useful source of data on advocacy networks themselves, the issues on or off the
agenda, and the nature of advocacy discourse.
3
There is, of course, some theoretical
support for these assumptions. Nevertheless, more importantly perhaps, important
methodological incentives exist for using the visualizations offered by the web as a
proxy for transnational space.
First, arguably, web analysis may tell us something about the constituent actors
within a transnational network. A common methodological difficulty in studying
advocacy networks is identifying a population of constituent organizations. The
nebulous nature of advocacy networks presents a challenge when attempting to
sample advocacy discourse in a particular issue area or drawing a representative
sample of respondents for survey or focus group research. Methodologies such as
hyperlink analysis provide a possible solution: they provide a means of identifying the
constitutive organizational actors within a network as it exists online (Wasserman and
Faust 1994). Hyperlink analysis is a form of network analysis in that it studies the
structure of a social system through the shared links among communication partners;
the key difference between hyperlink analysis and traditional network analysis is the
use of hyperlink data collected from websites (Park 2003). According to Han Woo
Park (2003: 49), a hyperlink is the basic structural element of the web, which we can
define as a ‘technological capability that enables one specific website (or web page)
Transnational issue networks in real and virtual space
© 2012 The Author(s) 529
to link to another’. Park (2003: 50) goes on to state that people ‘in a hyperlink system
can be linked together, exchange information and maintain cooperative relationships
by means of hyperlinks around a common background, interest or project’.
The assumption is that hyperlinks between online organizations are not simply an
instrumental means by which to navigate from one cyber-locale to another: they also
constitute recognition of organizational membership in a community of understanding
(Barabasi 2002: 5; Henzinger 2001: 45).
4
In a sense, one can consider websites as
actors and their hyperlinks as conscious relational links (Park et al. 2004). Within
advocacy communities, linking practices between organizational websites function
much like academic citations in that they provide indicators of whom to consider as a
member or a player within a specific community of shared knowledge and practice.
Thus, one can use hyperlinking practices as one indicator of the constitutive elements
and boundaries of advocacy networks (Adamic and Adar 2001).
Second, it is argued that we can learn something about structural relations within
those boundaries: hyperlink analysis tells us who the leaders or authorities are
within the network, as represented by the relative number of incoming and outgoing
links (Park and Thelwall 2003). Of major importance to studying the agenda are
identifying the network ‘hubs’,
5
expected to play a disproportionate role in agendasetting
and therefore of importance in drawing a weighted sample of sites to study.
This is because, as Lake and Wong (2005: 2) have demonstrated, in transnational
advocacy networks, ‘nodes in networks are not equal’: that is, some entities have
much greater influence, operationalized as relative connectivity to the others. Since
it is these ‘key’ organizations or ‘gatekeepers’ whose adoption of a specific issue
weighs in most in the process of international agenda-setting and advocacy (Bob
2005), it is important to identify these particular actors relative to others in a
particular issue network.
Third, websites arguably provide researchers with a rich sample of advocacy network
discourse they can convert to text files and, using computer assisted qualitative
data analysis techniques, systematically analyse their content. The rhetorical content
of websites, the accompanying images, the way content is categorized, and how
different themes and frames are connected online are said to affect the construction of
advocacy frames in transnational civil society. Such content analysis allows
researchers to study the rhetoric of those specific organizations, as exemplified by
their advocacy presence online, to determine the salient themes and absences. This
combination of hyperlink analysis with systematic qualitative analysis of web content
resembles what Foot and Schneider call ‘web sphere analysis’, namely an analytical
strategy for studying ‘communicative actions and relations between web producers
and users developmentally over time’ (Schneider and Foot 2005: 158). This
methodology rests on the notion that the World Wide Web is more than a means of
enabling network actors to associate and signal membership in a community of
meaning; it is also a virtual context in which to construct shared meanings. ‘In
creating an online persona, NGOs engage in framing activities … by shaping the
ways that issues are conceptualized and understood’ (Warkentin 2001: 36–7).
The common assumption underlying these approaches is that a significant
R. Charli Carpenter and Betcy Jose
530 © 2012 The Author(s)
correlation exists between the structure and content of online advocacy and the
structure and content of real-space advocacy networks. Websites are thought both to
reflect (Carpenter 2007a; Pudrovska and Ferree 2004; Van Aelst and Walgrave 2004)
and to construct (Bennett 2003) organizational actors, their relations and the
transnational agenda; they are therefore helpful, if imperfect, proxies for actual
transnational networks. Thus, studies that probe how networks utilize the web
implicitly assume that online networks reflect their offline counterparts. They do so
when they take online information about the transnational agenda or network structure
as definitive without validating it with what occurs in real space.
However, there are several reasons to question whether websites accurately reflect
actual network relations. First, much of the literature on online ‘issue networks’ is
web specific in focus, treating issue networks as clusters of websites that emerge in
the web tissue rather than necessarily reflections of real-space networks (Rogers and
Marres 2000). The association between the two needs to be tested rather than automatically
assumed.
Some studies have empirically demonstrated that domestic issue networks mimic
their online counterparts to a surprisingly high degree (McNutt 2006). However, this
may be less true in the transnational sphere, where wide discrepancies exist between
the abilities of network members to access the web or the skills required to build and
maintain the types of websites likely to attract traffic and reciprocal links.
Moreover, linking practices between websites (or their absence) may or may not
be systematic indicators of network membership, as some advocacy sites link to their
targets of influence as much as to their counterparts. In addition, since some advocacy
organizations are members of multiple issue networks, link analysis may overrepresent
or distort the constitutive actors in a specific network. In his comparison of
collective identity, a revealing component of network structure, Ayers (2003) found
little congruence between online and offline feminist activists. Could the same be true
of TAN structure in general?
The extent to which the online issue agenda keeps pace with the agenda within
real-space networks is also an open question. For example, one informant from a
leading human rights organization told one of the authors that the content of that
organization’s website was idiosyncratic as much as systematic, and often outdated.
She thus cautioned against relying on web content as an indicator of transnational
network politics.6
In short, we should study, not assume, the relationship of advocacy
organizations to the World Wide Web.
In this study, we explore the extent to which the World Wide Web is a viable
proxy for heavily transnational communities of meaning. We focus on two dimensions
of a single transnational advocacy network – the constituent nodes and the issue
agenda. How accurately does the analysis of online networks allow us to operationalize
both transnational networks themselves and the set of meanings prevalent within
their discourse over a particular time, relative to data gathered from actual activists
within the network? The answer to this question will tell us something about whether
and how well studying advocacy websites can substitute for conventional social
science methods of studying transnational communities themselves.
Transnational issue networks in real and virtual space
© 2012 The Author(s) 531
Methodology
We explored this question by gathering data from both the web and real space for the
transnational network around ‘women, peace and security’ (WPS) in spring 2007.
‘Women, Peace and Security’ is a recently defined issue area within global politics,
forged out of a coalition that sought to place women’s concerns on the agenda of the
United Nations Security Council. This campaign resulted in the adoption of Security
Council Resolution 1325 in October 2000, which called for greater representation of
women in national and global security institutions, peace negotiations and peace
operations, and for a mainstreaming of gender concerns in security sector reform.
Women’s groups have both lauded the resolution for representing a heightened
commitment by international institutions to consider women’s concerns a component
of ‘high politics’ and criticized it for essentializing women and gender issues. Since
2000, the same network has focused on lobbying for implementation of the resolution
in various policy fora, which has turned out to be more difficult.
This particular issue network is suitable for our purposes insofar as it combines a
strong online presence with a well-organized set of email listservs that connect the
players in the core network, enabling us to gather data on both the online network and
a part of the real-space network. We aimed to measure not the entire transnational
network (which, due to the digital divide, would have required a non-web sampling
method) but rather those actors most likely to interface regularly with the network on
the World Wide Web – in other words, the real-space counterparts for those organizations
identifiable online. This allowed us to control to some degree for the effect of
the digital divide. Our goal was to determine whether advocates’ perceptions of the
network in which they were embedded and the issue agenda for that network coincided
closely with representations online. If a gap existed between even such central
and technologically privileged network players and the online network, it would cast
doubt on the empirical value of using the web as a proxy for transnational activism.
We gathered four types of data on the WPS issue network – data on the network
itself, as represented on websites and as reported by activists, and on the issue agenda,
again online and in survey responses.
Table 1: Data sources/methods
Online Real-Space
Actors Hyperlink analysis
Surveys:
‘Most Involved Organizations’
Issues
Content analysis of website
mission statements
Surveys:
‘Most Important Issues’
First, we performed co-link analysis to identify the organizations composing the
network and to rank them according to their centrality within it. Since centrality often
correlates with perceptions of power or influence (Danowski et al. 1987), this
R. Charli Carpenter and Betcy Jose
532 © 2012 The Author(s)
measure would reveal who the ‘gatekeepers’ or ‘hubs’ were in terms of network
agenda setting. The link analysis was performed using IssueCrawler, an algorithm
developed by Govcom.org at the University of Amsterdam.
7
IssueCrawler permits the
graphical representation of online issue networks by identifying those websites
receiving at least two links within a cluster of sites relative to two or more ‘starting
points’. It also generates a ranked list of actors based on the number of incoming links
(in-links) an actor receives. As starting points for the analysis, we used the organizations
listed as members of the NGO Working Group on Women, Peace and
Security. As an umbrella organization that coordinated NGO lobbying efforts within
the UN Security Council to push for the passage of the aforementioned Resolution
1325, the working group represented a natural starting point. Since the resolution’s
passage the group has continued to work towards monitoring and ensuring that the
provisions are fully implemented.
8
A list of the resulting WPS network web pages,
ranked by in-link density, appears in Appendix 1; a visual representation of the network
appears in Figure 1.
Figure 1: Cluster map: women, peace and security network
Transnational issue networks in real and virtual space
© 2012 The Author(s) 533
Second, between February and April 2007 we compared these data with results
from surveys conducted with real people self-identified as within the WPS network.
We constructed a web-based survey using SurveyMonkey software and disseminated
it through several listservs identified as specific to the issue of ‘women, peace and
security’ or ‘gender and security’.
9
We asked respondents to name the three organizations
that came to mind when they thought about the network. We then asked them
to rank a set of organizations drawn from the co-link analysis results to see how
accurately link analysis predicted the perceptions of actual network advocates about
how central different organizations in the network are. We collected 47 surveys
between February and April 2007, after which we compared responses with the
analysis of the same network as represented online.
Third, we sought data from both online and survey sources about the issue agenda.
We asked survey respondents similar questions about the agenda as about the network
per se – what issues came to mind and then which issues among a list were more or
less prominent in the network. We converted the open-ended questions to .txt files for
analysis. We compared this text with a content analysis of mission statements and
issues/advocacy programmes from organizational websites appearing in the
IssueCrawler output.
We constructed a code list by using a grounded theory analysis of the raw data to
draw on the ‘issues’ listed by the organizations appearing among the first ten hits on
Google for a search of the terms ‘Women, Peace and Security’.
10
The grounded
theory returned a variety of concepts and themes that had emerged from the text, but
the ultimate code list was more refined and combined these concepts and themes to
reflect issues related to WPS. We examined how frequently these ‘issues’ appeared in
both the open-ended survey responses about ‘the most prominent issues’ and the
mission statement and issues/advocacy programme web-pages of a sample of the
organizations returned by IssueCrawler.
11
Codes were applied at the document level
using Atlas.ti software if wording or phrases approximating the meaning of a code
appeared in the web data or in a single respondent’s survey answer.
12
For example,
references to refugees or IDP issues were coded ‘Displacement’; references to
women’s participation in diplomacy to resolve conflicts were coded ‘Peace Processes’
and ‘Participation’ concurrently. Two graduate student coders coded each primary
document independently and then we gauged inter-rater reliability using the Fmeasure
metric.
13
Codes with lower than .6 inter-rater reliability were discarded after
two pre-tests. The average inter-rater reliability for the web-data set was .83. We then
selected one set of these codes at random to yield a single frequency list indicating the
relative salience of specific issues within the Women, Peace and Security online and
real-space issue spheres. For a comparison, see Table 2.
Findings
The key finding of this study is that online issue networks provide a more accurate
view of their real-space counterparts on some dimensions than on others. Co-link
analysis accurately depicts (and perhaps constructs) activists’ understanding of who
R. Charli Carpenter and Betcy Jose
534 © 2012 The Author(s)
the key network ‘hubs’ or ‘gatekeepers’ are. Of the organizations, the United Nations
Development Fund for Women (UNIFEM) and Women’s International League for
Peace and Freedom (WILPF) are by far the most often cited in unprompted openended
questions, as well as most prominent in ranked responses. These two organizations,
as well as their key subsidiary websites concerning this issue (UNIFEM’s
WomenWarPeace.org and WILPF’s Peacewomen.org and ReachingCriticalWill.org
websites), are also among the top hits in IssueCrawler’s in-link density rankings. In
other words, in no case did IssueCrawler miss any organizations that survey results
would suggest are central to the network.
Figure 2: Screenshot of UNIFEM women, war and peace web portal homepage
and issue links
However, hyperlink analysis also yields false hub positives: organizations that
real-space activists would deny are part of a network may end up appearing as highly
central organizations in a hyperlinked network. For example, survey respondents felt
strongly that the World Bank and World Trade Organization are ‘not very involved’
in the network, yet both these organizations appear high on the in-link density list
produced by IssueCrawler (see Appendix 1).
One reason for the appearance of these false positives in the co-link density list is
that the list fails to differentiate between positive and negative links. Using the above
examples, UNIFEM will link positively to WILPF as another organization within the
network that pursues similar objectives and goals; these organizations might link to
Transnational issue networks in real and virtual space
© 2012 The Author(s) 535
the WTO to criticize its policies and their impact on WPS issues. This suggests that
researchers might still be required to employ traditional research methods and use
discretion and insight gained from further research into the network issue area to
understand which organizations might be considered false positives. There is a feature
within IssueCrawler that can allow for reciprocal link analysis. This may allow us to
differentiate between negative links and aspirational links, but, in all probability, it
would still require some analysis by the researcher and not a total reliance on the
technology.
In general, however, IssueCrawler’s results also map onto the survey respondents’
characterizations of the network periphery: 78 per cent of low-prominence organizations
appearing in the open-ended questions (but ranked as ‘not very involved’ by a
majority of survey respondents) also fail to appear as central to the online network.
These findings suggest that co-link analysis provides a helpful indicator of both the
most and least prominent organizations in an issue area.
The co-link analysis seems to do a less perfect job of capturing ‘core’ organizations
in a network than it does in capturing ‘hubs’ or ‘peripheral’ organizations.
We considered organizations to be in the real-space network ‘core’ if, unprompted,
between two and five survey respondents identified them in open-ended questions.
14
Only three of these fourteen ‘core’ organizations appear in the IssueCrawler results, in
comparison with the network ‘hubs’. In other words, a gap exists between the
organizations IssueCrawler identifies as constituting the core network and those that
activists identify as ‘very/somewhat involved’ in it.
Regarding the issue agenda, with only a few interesting exceptions (see Table 2), web
analysis correlates very well with the survey respondents’ ranking of the ‘most prominent
issues’. Of the issues activists were asked to rank, ‘gender-mainstreaming’ tops the list in
both the real-space and online networks, followed by ‘HIV-AIDS’ among survey
respondents and ‘health’ in the coded web data; ‘girls’ and ‘physical violence’ follow
closely in frequency in both lists. Moreover, online web content also maps onto
activists’ understandings of the least prominent issues: ‘nuclear weapons’, ‘militarization
of space’, and ‘cluster munitions’ were at the bottom of the list in both networks;
‘landmines’, ‘small arms’ and ‘disarmament’ also scored low both in code frequency
and number of respondents listing them as prominent issues. Interestingly, however,
‘environment’ appeared more prominently on websites than in survey responses, and
survey responses ranked ‘trafficking’ more prominently than did the websites.
Some additional patterns in the data bear mentioning. While one of the goals of
this study was to examine synonymity between the representations of advocates and
online network actors, the advocates’ understanding of who constitutes an ‘actor’
mapped unevenly onto the structure of the World Wide Web. We find evidence in
favour of this position in the number of respondents who mentioned web pages within
organizations as actors rather than the organizations themselves. For example, in
open-ended questions, respondents often listed ‘PeaceWomen’ as an actor, though it
is actually a website run by a separate organization, Women’s International League
for Peace and Freedom. This suggests that the web sphere helps to construct activists’
understanding of the players and information ‘hubs’ within a network.
R. Charli Carpenter and Betcy Jose
536 © 2012 The Author(s)
Table 2: Code frequency: ranked survey answers versus web analysis
Ranked survey answers*
Ranked web content frequencies†
Gender-Mainstreaming 63.9%
HIV-AIDS 63.8%
Trafficking 63.8%
Girls 62.9%
Physical Violence 61.2%
Peace Processes 61.1%
Justice 58.3%
Displacement 51.5%
Health 48.6%
Demobilization/Reintegration 44.4%
Reconstruction 38.9%
Reproductive Health 38.8%
Small Arms 25.0%
Landmines 27.0%
Disarmament 22.2%
Nuclear Weapons 22.2%
Environment 11.4%
Cluster Munitions 05.8%
Militarization of Space 05.7%
Gender-Mainstreaming 12
Health 11
Physical Violence 10
Justice 10
Girls 9
Reconstruction 9
Environment 7
HIV-AIDS 6
Reproductive Health 6
Peace Processes 5
Displacement 5
Trafficking 4
Small Arms 2
Landmines 2
Disarmament 2
Demobilization/Reintegration 1
Nuclear Weapons 1
Cluster Munitions 0
Militarization of Space 0
*
Ranked by percentage of respondents answering issue is ‘extremely’ or ‘very’ prominent.
†
Ranked by frequency of codes applied to web content dataset.
However, some respondents did the opposite. They listed umbrella actors such as
the ‘United Nations’ rather than referring to the specific UN agency actively involved
in the network, in this case UNIFEM or INSTRAW, much less a specific issue web
page, which in UNIFEM’s case would be the ‘WomenWarandPeace’ project. In fact,
some respondents referred to both, making responses non-comparable. Many survey
respondents also listed publications as ‘actors’, such as the Women Waging Peace
Digest, or specific web pages within organizational websites, rather than either
organizations or websites. Some ‘actors’ listed in open-ended questions were actually
sub-networks of actors, such as the NGO Working Group on Women, Peace and
Security. All this suggests a complicated understanding on the part of advocates of
what exactly constitutes an institutional ‘player’ in an advocacy network; and the
emphasis on subnational players among the survey responses, such as the UK
PeaceWomen chapter rather than PeaceWomen broadly, complicates our understanding
of advocacy networks as primarily transnational.
The data suggest that actual advocacy networks, like online networks, follow a
Transnational issue networks in real and virtual space
© 2012 The Author(s) 537
power law: a few major hubs dominate them, with a larger number of organizations
occupying mid-range but by comparison much more marginal ‘core’ network space,
and numerous interested organizations only peripherally connected to the network.
The broad comparability of evidence from the surveys and the web analysis here
stands counter to the view promulgated by earlier literature on advocacy networks
that these were essentially distributed networks, with multiple points of access and
leverage, in which civil society actors operated cooperatively and on an equal footing
with one another vis-à-vis the sovereign state’s system. This might also lend credence
to the so-called ‘digital-divide’ discussed above. The evidence here, drawn from a
network concerned with women’s issues, would also lend scepticism to the view that
women’s transnational mobilization is different in kind from that of other social
movements. Informal conversations with activists in this network suggest that
fundamental hierarchies exist within the network that, in important ways, have an
impact both on the access of Southern or minority women in the North and on the
advocacy agenda itself.
15
One needs traditional research methods, such as focus
groups, to explore these broader issues.
Conclusion
We embarked on this research to determine if advocacy websites are a reliable proxy
for interviews or surveys with actual activists. This question arose because of the
practical difficulties of employing more traditional social science methods to carry out
research on transnational advocacy networks, an agenda with expanding appeal. We
strove to answer this question by measuring the gap between the real world network,
via web-based surveys of actual activists, and the online networks as represented by
advocacy websites. In measuring the gap, we specifically examined how closely
online structure and substance resembled its offline equivalent.
Our findings reveal interesting patterns in the relationship between online and
real space networks. On the issue of structure, hyperlink analysis correlates well with
activists’ understandings of ‘gatekeepers’ or ‘hubs’ and of peripheral organizations.
This implies that hierarchies exist both in the web and in women’s movements.
However, it is less accurate in mapping the broader network because it yields false
positives as well as excludes certain organizations perceived by activists to be part of
the ‘core’. Furthermore, activists possess a more complex understanding of what
constitutes an actor in the network than hyperlink analysis would suggest. In terms of
substance, web-sphere analysis can accurately establish the most prominent and least
prominent issues in actual advocacy networks.
These findings suggest that those studying TANs can reliably use the web to
pursue certain research questions but not others. For instance, an unstable environment
and expensive travel may force researchers interested in the causes of political
unrest to turn to the web to study, for example, the ‘Arab Spring’.
16
Even if a
researcher is able to find the funds, secure leave of absence to travel to, say, Egypt,
and arrange protective measures on the ground, because of the rapid pace in which
events there unfolded he or she may miss important data while travelling and
R. Charli Carpenter and Betcy Jose
538 © 2012 The Author(s)
settling in. However, because of the heavy use of the web during the political unrest
there, researchers could use this medium to pursue certain research questions
without leaving their desks. For example, they could use the web to determine the
gatekeepers in the network during the political event in question. They may also be
able to use it to establish the most and least important issues underpinning the antigovernment
movement. However, to capture the intermediate, yet still important,
issues, as well as establish the identities of the peripheral members of the network,
researchers would need to supplement this data with more traditional social science
methods.
In addition to conducting focus groups with activists, using other methodological
techniques would broaden our understanding of the relationship between online and
real space networks. For example, in compiling a list of the most important issues or
NGOs within a particular network, one could incorporate other sources along with
Google in the research design. Furthermore, while we analysed the mission statements
of NGOs to determine their issue agenda, an examination of other web pages updated
more frequently than mission statements may offer a more current picture of the
subjects on which an NGO is focusing.
Adaptation of our research design can also probe some of the questions the data
raised. For instance, one could utilize alternative measures besides an in-link count to
designate a ‘gatekeeper’ or ‘hub’ to see if ‘core’ organizations would be included.
Relatedly, use of IssueCrawler’s ‘snowball’ feature to keep track of reciprocal links
would allow researchers to differentiate between critical links (those to targets of
influence like the World Bank) and cordial or aspirational links (links to network
members). Furthermore, one could distribute surveys via alternative avenues besides
listservs, which may provide a higher response rate or reach a wider audience.
Finally, survey questions could elicit more information from respondents such as their
workplace, the nature of their work and their position in the organization.
The overall analysis suggests that web analysis is a helpful way of identifying the
hubs or ‘gatekeepers’ within specific issue networks, as well as the most and least
prominent issues within a network, but may be a blunter tool for capturing the larger
networks around these hubs or the dynamic and evolving issue agenda within
transnational advocacy space. Students of advocacy networks who aim to operationalize
and track changes in network composition should combine web analysis with
conventional methodologies for gauging real-space understandings of the network and
the issues. This would enable them to arrive at a comprehensive picture of how
transnational advocacy networks connect and construct the global agenda.
Acknowledgements
Earlier drafts of this article were presented at the New Network Theory Conference in
Amsterdam, at the University of Pittsburgh’s Women’s Studies Brown Bag, and at the
Networks in Political Science Conference at Harvard University, 2009, benefiting from helpful
comments by participants. We would also like to thank Dehua Lea, Peace Medie, Alexander
Montgomery, Richard Rogers, Benjamin Rubin and Rebecca Wall for helpful suggestions and
research assistance.
Transnational issue networks in real and virtual space
© 2012 The Author(s) 539
Notes
01. For example, see Drohan (1998).
02. However, some studies have found that the internet is less helpful to NGOs (see van der
Laan et al. 2009; Zhang et al. 2002).
03. This is not to say that all studies of online issue networks make this assumption. Some
authors focus solely on the internet as a site of research and a source of data about society
(Hine 2000; Rogers 2009; Rogers and Marres 2000). For instance, Rogers and Marres
(2000) explore the climate change debate on the World Wide Web. They do not compare
these online representations with offline representations. Rogers (2009) explores the
‘groundedness’ of online content. He explores what internet information can reveal about
the offline world. This contrasts with our study, which examines how accurately the offline
world, in this case, transnational networks, is depicted online.
04. Bae and Choi (2000) suggest that this type of linking practice is particularly relevant to the
transnational human rights sector.
05. Hubs are critical nodes that are well connected and ‘direct users to various authorities
embedded within that network’ (McNutt 2006).
06. Personal conversation, Oslo Norway, June 2006.
07. See http://www.issuecrawler.net.
08. See http://www.peacewomen.org/un/ngo/wg.html, as well as their new website http://
www.womenpeacesecurity.org/.
09. These included Women-Peace-and-Security@list.web.net, run by the Gender and
Peacebuilding Working Group of the Canadian Peacebuilding Coordinating Committee;
and genderssr@un-instraw.org, the Gender and Security Sector Reform listserv of the
United Nations International Research and Training Institute for the Advancement of
Women.
10. See http://www.womenwarpeace.org/index.htm. For an example of web content, see
Figure 2.
11. To qualify for our initial dataset, an organization had to appear both in the IssueCrawler
output and in the survey responses. For a list of the websites analysed see Appendix 2.
12. Atlas.ti is a qualitative data analysis software package that allows coders to apply codes to
segments of text within documents as well as allowing for a variety of analysis tools to
assess various trends in the coded text. For more information, see http:\\www.atlasti.com.
13. The F-Measure metric rates the overlap between two coders’ annotations on a scale
between ‒1 and 1, where 1.00 represents 100 per cent synonymity between two coders’
independent annotations; see van Rijsbergen (1979).
14. This compares with ‘hubs’ that often had more than 20 responses and peripheral organizations
that only one respondent mentioned.
15. In an interview with one of the authors, one activist stated that ‘I don’t know too many
American women of colour who were involved in the 1325 work – I don’t get invited to
very many of these conferences. The group of frankly white American women who are
creating these agendas and running things are excluding many voices … there is too little
focus on domestic issues in this movement, people always want to look at what is going on
in other societies.’
16. It should be noted that the widespread term ‘Arab Spring’ is misleading since not all the
populations involved would consider themselves Arab. A better way to phrase might be
Middle East and North African (MENA) Spring.
R. Charli Carpenter and Betcy Jose
540 © 2012 The Author(s)
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APPENDIX 1
Actor Rankings, core and periphery by page, WPS PeaceWomen NGO Working
Group (Ranked according to number of incoming hyperlinks)
Transnational issue networks in real and virtual space
© 2012 The Author(s) 543
APPENDIX 2
Organizational websites analysed
Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom
PeaceWomen
Building Critical Will
UN Development Fund for Women
NGO Working Group on Women, Peace and Security
Women Waging Peace
Women’s Human Rights Net
Global Fund for Women
Amnesty International
Women’s Environment & Development Organization
International Committee of the Red Cross
Women’s Commission for Refugee Women and Children
International Women’s Tribune Centre
Femmes Africa Solidarité
UN High Commissioner for Refugees
UN Children’s Emergency Fund
Human Rights Watch
International Alert
UN Population Fund
UNAIDS
World Bank
Isis International
Madre
Femnet
International Action Network on Small Arms