El Instituto Internacional de Agricultura: España y la «cuestión social», 1905-1923

In the agrarian context of the early 20th century, networks of experts and interest groups were created. These formed institutions across state borders to achieve prestige derived from their supranational character and ostensible technical and scientific capacity. The objective of this article is to analyse the impact in Spain of the International Institute of Agriculture (IIA), from the year of its creation until the advent of the Primo de Rivera dictatorship, through the lens of the “social question”: a concept that popularized the proposals and disagreements surrounding labour regulation. The research draws from the latest contributions in transnational history and internationalism, recent secondary sources about the IIA and primary sources that reflect how transnational IIA networks worked in and with Spain to address agricultural labour issues. The article concludes that the intensely transnational connections between agrarian elites, owners and technicians in the early 20th century transformed social relations in agriculture and agrarian public policies in Spain.

The Significance Role of Community Engagement and Soft Power in Countering Boko Haram in Sub-Saharan Africa

The Boko Haram group in the Nigerian and Lake Chad Basin has gained immense sympathy in the region, appearing to mount political challenges against corruption and social and economic inequalities. Security experts did not anticipate that the group would become violent based on its past actions. However, researchers recently have revealed that the group has had transnational connections to other terrorist groups, such as Al-Shabaab in the Horn of Africa, and Al Qaeda, which have influenced its propensity for violence. This research attempts to understand Boko Haram by examining data supplied by research, documents, and reports from numerous groups. The method implemented here entails a historical approach, including observation, a way by which the historian aims to determine the soundness of observational reports conducted by previous investigators. This research utilizes a historical methodology that requires exploring, documenting, evaluating, and interpreting past occurrences to discover indications that aid in understanding historical and present activities and to a significant but limited extent for projecting the future. This study examines the origin of Boko Haram and speculates as to its future by concentrating on why the group primarily thrives in some parts of Nigeria and the Lake Chad region. It also looks at responses to security challenges from American, Nigerian, and neighboring governments. Additionally, it looks at the use of community engagement and soft power as a possible means to mitigate violence in the region. Finally, the document identifies implications for the group's continued existence and stability in the area based on data analysis. This research also offers policy recommendations for the United States, Nigeria, and the surrounding countries that could minimize the threats of Boko Haram.

Transnational Cross-Border Family Ties: Diasporic Lives of Bangladeshis in Italy and Beyond

The scope of this paper is to gain a better understanding of how Bangladeshi migrants in Italy maintain transnational family attachments, across multiple destinations, with the home country as well as with several host countries. The data comes from fieldwork in Northeast Italy. Research methods include in-depth interviews and participant observation. The findings reveal that a high proportion of Bangladeshi migrants maintain a variety of transnational and diasporic ties with their family and friends living in the country of origin and different European countries. These include family obligations, remittances, establishing businesses back home, visits and communication. They also preserve their national identity in this host society by maintaining cultural ways of belonging and through religious practices and involvement in Bangladeshi politics. The findings have also shown that Italian Bangladeshi families work to foster transnational family ties among the new generations born in Italy, who have little knowledge of their ancestral country. On a final note, this paper argues that transnational connections with the homeland play an important role in shaping the diasporic lives of Bangladeshis in Italy.

The Diva's Gift to the Shakespearean Stage

The Diva’s Gift to the Shakespearean Stage traces the transnational connections between Shakespeare’s all-male stage and the first female stars in the West. The book is the first to use Italian and English plays and other sources to explore this relationship, focusing on the gifted actress who radically altered female roles and expanded the horizons of drama just as the English were building their first paying theaters. By the time Shakespeare began to write plays, women had been acting professionally in Italian troupes for two decades, traveling across the Continent and acting in all genres, including tragicomedy and tragedy. Isabella Andreini, Vittoria Piissimi, and Barbara Flaminia became the first truly international stars, winning royal and noble patrons and literary admirers beyond Italy; their artistry enabled mixed companies to expand in foreign markets, especially in France and Spain. Elizabeth and her court caught wind of the Italians’ success, and soon troupes with actresses came to London to perform. Through contacts direct and indirect, English playwrights grew keenly aware of the mimetic revolution wrought by the skilled diva, who expanded the innamorata and made the type more engaging, outspoken, and autonomous. Some Englishmen pushed back, treating the actress as a whorish threat to the all-male stage, which had long minimized female roles. Others saw a vital new resource. Faced with rising demand for Italian-style plays, Lyly, Marlowe, Kyd, and Shakespeare used Italian models from scripted and improvised drama to turn out stellar female parts in the mode of the actress, altering them in significant ways while continuing to use boys to play them. Writers seized on the comici’s materials and methods to piece together pastoral, comic, and tragicomic plays from mobile theatergrams—plot elements, star scenes, roles, stories, and speeches, such as cross-dressing, mad scenes, and spoken and sung laments. Shakespeare and his peers gave new prominence to female characters, marked their passions as un-English, and devised plots that figured them as self-aware agents, not counters traded between men. Playing up the skills and charisma of the boy player, they produced stunning roles charged with the diva’s prodigious theatricality and alien glamour. Rightly perceived, the diva’s star persona and acclaimed performances constituted challenging and timely gifts that provoked English playwrights to break with the past in enormously generative ways.

Latin America as a Multistate Region

This chapter discusses ongoing debates about the conceptual constructs used to approach Latin America. While recognizing it as a region of multiple nation-states, each with its own unique historical and political backgrounds, this opening chapter stresses the relevance of considering the entwined histories and transnational connections of the region. The process of state construction left a legacy of cross-border networks and a protracted involvement in the affairs of neighboring states. With porous borders and a series of diasporas, migrations, and relocations, all the while facing similar challenges of postcolonial development, Latin America experienced a profound spillover of people and ideas. Repeatedly, transnational dynamics operated within national contexts. Moreover, the region has long witnessed cross-border movements and struggles, prompting international agreements on issues of common concern, including human rights, working out regional mechanisms even before those principles reached a global scale. The chapter suggests that adding transnational analysis provides deeper understanding of the region’s political, cultural, and social dynamics.

Social Mobility and Spatialised Slowness

This article analyses the individual aspirations of Sierra Leoneans living in France in relation to normative expectations related to mobility. It argues that aspirations and expectations are expressions of spatialized forms of social becoming situated within broader norms concerning socially-valued forms of mobility. Aspirations to social mobility link up distinct places in a fragmented transnational field, transform them as value-laden spaces, and inform migrants’ assessment of their own trajectory within them. Individual aspirations are formulated with regard to spaces migrants have left, spaces they live in, and spaces they would like to reach. Sierra Leoneans living in France have reached a ‘destination country’ and yet, do not experience their situation as the ideal migratory path. Their achievements are measured with regard to expectations of social mobility as imagined in English-speaking spaces, thereby reinforcing the narrative of mobility and the persistence of local idioms of ‘success’ based on historical transnational connections.

Precarious Transnationality in Family Relations on the Finnish-Russian Border during the Soviet and Post-Soviet Periods

The article develops the view of transnational familyhood as an affect of precarity. Transnationality itself is viewed as being defined by state actors and border regimes which make transnational connections fragile and vulnerable. The precarity is compared here with “the lease that is not in your pocket”. The text assembles the authors’ ethnographic work in Finnish-Russian border areas from two decades. Using the methodology of narrative ethnography, the study creates a picture of the atmosphere and affects in which transnational familyhood has been kept alive from the early 1920s until today. The historical context of transnational familyhood is divided into four periods: the period of confrontation and wars, 1920s–1940s; the period of friendly cooperation and a selectively open border, 1950s–1980s; the post-Soviet period of a conditionally open border and migration, 1990s–2010s; and the post-Crimean period of rebordering and the securitization of the transnational everyday since 2014. The everyday reality of transnational familyhood is portrayed through the constructed figures of “Aili” and “Vera”, who represent women belonging to transnational families from different generations.

Understanding the Sustainability of the Energy–Water–Land Flow Nexus in Transnational Trade of the Belt and Road Countries

Increasing economic and population growth has put immense pressure on energy, water and land resources to satisfy national and supra-national demand. Through trade, a large proportion of such a demand is fulfilled. With trade as one of its key priorities, the China Belt and Road Initiative is a long-term transcontinental investment program. The initiative gained significant attention due to greater opportunities for economic development, large population and different levels of resource availability. The nexus approach has appeared as a new viewpoint in discussions on balancing the competing sectoral demands. However, following years of work, constraints exist in the scope and focus of studies. The newly developed multi-regional input–output (MRIO) models covering the world’s economy and its use of resources permit a comprehensive analysis of resource usage by production and consumption at different levels, and bring more knowledge about resource nexus problems. Using the MRIO model, this work simultaneously tracks energy, water and land use flows and investigates the transnational resource nexus. A nexus strength indicator is proposed which depends on ternary diagrams to grade countries based on their combined resources’ use and sectoral weighting. Equal sectoral weighting is assigned. The analysis presented a sectorally balanced nexus approach. Findings support existing work by recognizing energy, water and land as the robust transnational connections, from both production and consumption points of view. Resource nexus issues differ from country to country owing to inequalities in industrial set-up, preferences in economic policy and resource endowments. The paper outlines how key resource nexus problems can be identified and prioritized in view of alternative and often opposing interests.

The Kobane Generation: Kurdish Diaspora Mobilising in France

A small Kurdish city located in northern Syria, Kobane, became symbolically significant when ISIS laid siege to the city between September 2014 and January 2015. This pivotal moment in the fight against ISIS threw the international spotlight on the Kurds. The Kobane Generation analyses how Kurdish diaspora communities mobilised in France after the breakout of the Syrian civil war and political unrest in Turkey and Iraq in the 2010s. Tens of thousands of people, mostly but not exclusively diaspora Kurds, demonstrated in major European capitals, expressed their solidarity with Kobane, and engaged in transnational political activism towards Kurdistan. In this book, Mari Toivanen discusses a series of critical events that led to different forms of transnational participation towards Kurdistan. The focus of this book is particularly on how diaspora mobilisations became visible among the second generation, the descendants of Kurdish migrants. The book addresses important questions, such as why second-generation members felt the need to mobilise and what kind of transnational participation this led to. How did the transnational participation and political activism of the second generation differ from that of their parents, and is such activism simply diasporic or also related to more global changes in political activism? The Kobane Generation offers important insights on the generational dynamics of political mobilisations and their significance to understanding diaspora contributions. More broadly, it sheds light on second-generation political activism beyond the diaspora context, analysing it in relation to global transformations in political subjectivities. Mari Toivanen (PhD) currently works as Academy Research Fellow at the Swedish School of Social Science, University of Helsinki. She has conducted ethnographic research on a wide range of migration-related topics, focusing on diaspora mobilisation, transnational connections and activities, second generation migrants, and questions of identity and belonging.