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The case of the Bulgarian Esperanto movement under state socialism demonstrates a social movement can survive under authoritarianism by establishing a legitimate activist culture acceptable to the regime while pursuing its intrinsic goals. Bulgaria, a close Soviet ally, was a difficult case of movement survival. In the early years following World War II, the national Esperanto periodical Bulgara Esperantisto was a key organizing tool for the movement reporting on its activities, reaching out to potential recruits, and legitimizing the movement under the new communist-led regime. Examining the periodical’s discourse over a two-year period, I find that the movement managed to carve a space for itself in the new political context by advancing a form of what I term “nationalized cosmopolitanism.” Bulgarian Esperantists were able to maintain activist networks nationally and internationally, pursue intrinsic Esperanto goals, and sustain cosmopolitan identities under unhospitable conditions. The movement successfully legitimated itself by drawing from three cosmopolitan sources: Esperanto cosmopolitanism, communist internationalism, and Bulgarian peasant universalism. In the context of the nation-state system, invoking the nation was an effective legitimation strategy, even for a movement with cosmopolitan orientations, even under a regime justified in universal terms. Espousing pragmatism and partnerships while avoiding conflict, Bulgarian Esperantists were able to thrive under the new communist regime, recruit new members, and reconnect with the global Esperanto movement. I conclude that a legitimate activist culture can adapt to a regime’s ideology and institutional environment without necessarily being co-opted.

Contemporary thinkers are pessimistic about the endurance of transnational communities. The deviant case of the century-and-a-half-old transnational Esperanto community features a process that can explain transnational community survival: rationalization. Rationalization manifests in Esperantists reproducing a form of community logic integrating symbols, principles (justifications, values, etc.), communication practices and technologies, and organization centered on the Esperanto language. The Esperanto language and community logic enable unifying Esperanto activities across space and time. The Esperanto case suggests that community rationalization and language rationalization – an element thereof – are global phenomena integral to modernity. Having affected communities and language too, rationalization as a global process appears to be more extensive than previously suggested. Transnational communities can endure as manifestations of a global community institutional order organizing social life alongside but largely independently of nation-states, science, professions, and religion.

Extrapolating a recent conceptualization of caste from India to the global level, this article argues that persons experience cross-national inequalities via their citizenship as a caste marker. Rather than imagine castes as features of the fixed pre-modern Hindu social order, the article posits that castes are variable modern ascriptive social hierarchies subject to contestation and change in which economic and social distinctions are maintained through physical and symbolic violence. The study shows how, globally, nation-states exert physical and symbolic violence to normalize cross-national inequalities instituting a global citizenship-based caste order. This approach recognizes the importance of both global material relations emphasized by world-systems approaches and of symbolic structures central to global institutionalist approaches. The study also underscores persons’ positions and experiences confronting nation-states’ might. Power struggles concentrated on nation-states result in variability of global relations’ mutually reinforcing material and symbolic dimensions. The author uses caste features that appear ‘essential’ (i.e. ascriptive social closure, ‘ethnic,’ ‘religious,’ and ‘purity’ distinctions) as heuristics for identifying possible locations of caste construction and contestation, and identifies citizenship rules, nation-states’ territorial nature, nationalism, and visa, border, and naturalization rituals as such caste development sites. Vulnerable groups (stateless persons, refugees, migrants) both challenge the citizenship caste order and experience viscerally its physical and symbolic violence.

This essay provides three windows on the Ninth World Social Forum in Belem, Brazil. We show the multiple ways in which the World Social Forum's plurality and reflexivity challenge traditional dichotomies to build the foundation for a new politics. We argue that the social forum process has developed mechanisms for remaining an open space while simultaneously creating opportunities for unified collective action. We show that the Forum produces complex analyses and comes up with strategies that correspond to these analyses. We provide some evidence for how the social forum process is trying to overcome organizational challenges related to resource distribution and specialization by capitalizing on the network structure of its participants. Finally, we argue that the social forum process is also working on addressing spatial and temporal challenges by trying organizational innovations.

This study proposes a micro-institutional theory of political violence, according to which citizens' participation in political violence is partially an outcome of tight coupling of persons' practices and self-identifications with institutional logics opposed to dominant logics associated with world culture, such as the nation-state and gender equality. The study focuses on two types of institutional carriers through which persons adopt institutional logics: routine practices and self-identifications associated with three institutional logics: the familial, the ethnic, and the religious logics. Using a 15-country survey data from early twenty-first-century sub-Saharan Africa, the study finds evidence in support of the theory. Reported participation in political violence is associated with practices and self-identifications uncoupled from dominant world-culture logics but tightly coupled with the patriarchal familial logic, with an oppositional ethnic logic, and with a politicized oppositional religious logic.