THE RISE OF A TRANSNATIONAL MOVEMENT TO PROTECT PRIVACY*
Scholars have long found profound normative and structural differences between the privacy movements of Europe and the United States, alongside incompatible regimes of regulation. After 9/11, both Europe and the U.S. adopted increasingly intrusive digital security measures, which impinged on the privacy of commercial and personal data. Both the overlap in privacy regimes and the securitization of the two regimes were uncovered by Edward Snowden’s revelations in 2013. The eventual result was the passage of a European privacy protection regulation, the General Data Protection Regulation, in 2016 and greater transnational diffusion and transnational cooperation among European and American privacy activists. But has this convergence produced a transnational movement for privacy? Studying three mechanisms of transnational mobilization—externalization, diffusion, and collective transnationalism—this article employs a political opportunity framework to understand how international events have increased the inclination and the capacity of nationally and regionally based privacy groups to come together in contentious collective action.
Contributor Notes
*Emilio Lehoucq is a Ph.D. student at Northwestern University. He has conducted research on social movements and legal mobilization and religion and politics. His current research focuses on the emergence and diffusion of machine learning in the United States. His work has also appeared in Law & Social Inquiry. Sidney Tarrow is Emeritus Professor of Government at Cornell University and Adjunct Professor in the Cornell Law School. He is the author, most recently, of War, States and Contention (Cambridge 2015), and co-editor (with David S. Meyer) of The Resistance: The Dawn of the Anti-Trump Opposition Movement (Oxford, 2018). Please direct all correspondence to Sidney Tarrow (sgt2@cornell.edu).
† This article is an expansion and update of a working paper in the Global Governance Department of the Berlin Social Science Center (WZB) written by the second author (Tarrow 2017). For this version, both authors contributed equally.