Societal actors like political parties, trade unions, business organizations and non-traditional non-governmental organizations (NGOs) forge and maintain transnationally constituted informal networks and formalized organizational structures. Much has been said about how they cooperate at the regional level as in the context of the European Union (EU) or globally, where they interact with International Organizations (IOs). Therefore,this exploratory workshop will instead focus on their cooperation at the trans-regional or trans-continental level.
The workshop adopted a globally comparative approach and included relations among transnational societal actors from Western Europe as well as e.g. Latin America, Africa, and South-East Asia. Focussing on the origins, practices and and implications of such cooperation from the 1960s up to the present day, it took as its starting point the consolidation of Western European integration in the late 1950s and the 1960s, de-colonization in the Global South in the same period and the formation of Regional IOs such as the Organization for African Unity (OAU, now AU) in 1963, the Association of South-East Asian Nations (ASEAN) in 1967 and Mercosur created in 1991 after the transition to democracy in Latin America in the 1980s.
This virtual workshop will be hosted on Zoom. If you are interested in participating, please contact events@gcr21.uni-due.de to receive further information.
