Events as Political Infrastructure: Conferences and the Formation of Transnational Advocacy Networks (TANs)

Jeanette Ruiz, Virginia Commonwealth University

Scholarship on transnational advocacy networks (TANs) typically explains their emergence through shared values, norm diffusion, and moral mobilization. Yet this focus obscures the institutional spaces in which dispersed activists become coordinated political actors. This paper examines advocacy conferences as key infrastructures in the historical formation of transnational advocacy networks. Drawing on archival records, conference proceedings, and organizational documents from international human rights campaigns, the paper analyzes how conferences function as sites where activists exchange information, establish evidentiary practices, and construct shared narratives about political crises. These gatherings do more than facilitate communication: they enable participants to consolidate expertise, coordinate strategy, and generate forms of knowledge capable of challenging state narratives and shaping international debates. By foregrounding advocacy conferences as mechanisms of political coordination and knowledge production, the paper recenters modernity in the practices through which global civil society organizes across borders. Rather than peripheral events, conferences emerge as critical infrastructures linking information, expertise, and political mobilization. Understanding these events as political infrastructures provides a new perspective on how transnational actors historically developed the capacity to influence states and international governance.

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 Presented in Session 126. Democratic Vulnerability, Diaspora Mobilization, and Advocacy Networks