Transnational Activism in Support of National Protest: Questions of Identity and Organization

This article considers the question of whether transnational activism supporting national protest attains a cohesive collective identity on social media whilst organizationally remaining localized. It examines a corpus of social media data collected in the course of two months of rolling protests in 2013 against the largest proposed open-cast gold mine at Roşia Montană, Romania, which echoed among Romanian expatriates. A network text analysis of the data supplemented with interview findings revealed concerns with protest logistics as common across the transnational networks of protest localities on both Facebook and Twitter, a finding that testified to the coordinated character of the protests. On the other hand, collective identity emerged as the fruit of attempts to surmount localized protest experiences of geographically disparate but civically-minded social media users.