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Transnational activism can be defined as the mobilization around collective claims that are: a) related to transnational/global issues; b) formulated by actors located in more than one country; and c) addressing more than one national government and/or international governmental organization or another international actor. While forms of transnational activism have existed since a distant past, economic and political globalization have increased their frequency, as well as attention to them. Within the wider process of global transformations, the global justice movement (sometimes called anti-globalization movements), represents a key, though not unique, instance of transnational activism.

The G7 should address new, unprecedented and highly disruptive issues that characterise our complex world, rather than well‐understood international problems that fit into existing categories. We argue that the G7 can do this by playing to its strengths – informality and like‐mindedness in particular – in addressing emerging and transversal issues such as Artificial Intelligence (AI) and cryptocurrencies.

Around the world, expected climate changes can affect indoor comfort conditions in buildings. Analysing the climate in which buildings are located is the first step towards high-efficiency design, and today it is no longer possible to ignore impending climate change. This study has provided a worldwide picture of how comfort conditions inside a building can change as external climatic conditions change. For the first time, a building is tested worldwide over a long-term period, and not just in a specific climate or a small group of climates. Several cities homogeneously distributed around the world were selected, covering all climates of the Koppen-Geiger classification. A hypothetical building was implemented with the Termolog Epix 11 software in order to monitor the operative temperature (TOP) in free-floating mode on an hourly basis and test its temperature variations in the short, medium and long term. The percentage values of the hours when the TOP is in a comfort or discomfort conditions were compared for all configurations. The results showed that the comfort conditions vary with the climate. Climate zone A displayed for most subclimates high TOP values. Climate zone B showed an irregular trend, from 2020 to 2080 the hours when TOPs fall below 20 °C decreased in most locations. Climate zone C included areas where TOPs are mostly in the comfort range. Some sub-climates in zone D show very cold climates, with an average of about 15–20% of the annual hours in the comfort zone in 2020, then increasing slightly by a few percentage points in 2080.

The text offers a new assessment of Italy’s contribution to international affairs. Through a more pluralist interpretation of Italian action at international level it is possible to outline an image of Italy as a normative power able to influence the formulation of the principles that determine what is legitimate at international level. Italy’s contribution in recent decades has been crucial in a series of transnational campaigns that have had a significant impact globally. These cases illustrate the role played by Italy in the politics of changing international norms related to human rights. The mobilisations have been the result of a combination of factors, including the intense synergy that has been established between the actions of the Italian government and Italian civil-society organisations. This study analyses eight cases in which such synergy has been positive, leading to a significant impact of Italian hybrid diplomacy on international politics.

This chapter surveys the debate on the interaction between governments and civil society organizations in order to set the boundaries for the collection of essays. It looks at both the cooperative and competitive forms of interaction and identifies the key challenges that occupy the center of the debate.

Global democracy is a field of academic study and political activism concerned with making the global political system more democratic. This topic has become a central area of inquiry for established literatures including political philosophy, international relations (IR), international law, and sociology. Along with global justice, global democracy has also been critical to the emergence of international political theory as a discrete literature in recent decades. Global democracy is particularly concerned with how transnational decision-making can be justified and who should be entitled to participate in the formation of global rules, laws, and regulations. As democratic nations increase trade among themselves, policies like isolationism and nationalism make far less sense. Borders blur through free trade agreements and the creation of economic zones. As nations begin to take the interests of their partner nations into consideration when drafting laws and regulations, global democracy begins to take shape. However, due to globalization, the supposed alliance between democracy and the nation-state has come unstuck. The expansion of global connections has functioned in close cooperation with increased efforts to govern global affairs. Many scholars argue that increased transnational activity undermines national democracy. On the contrary, global democrats share the view that individuals should collectively rule themselves—to the extent that decision-making power migrates beyond the state, democracy should follow.

In global governance, cooperation between intergovernmental and civil society organizations takes many forms, including multi-stakeholder initiatives, private–public partnerships, sub-contracting, political alliances, hybrid coalitions, multi-sectoral networks, pluralist co-governance, and even foreign policy by proxy. This chapter identifies the main transformations taking place in global governance to make it more accessible to non-state actors, examines the key characteristics of policy partnerships between international organizations) and non-governmental organizations, and discusses the risks and opportunities entailed in this interaction. In particular, the openings from the United Nations and the European Union are analysed, together with the reasons why civil society organizations seek partnership with such institutions.

There is a need for a reassessment of the Italian contribution to international affairs. If a more comprehensive and pluralist reading of Italian action at the international level is developed, an image of normative power Italy may emerge. Italian input has been crucial in a number of transnational campaigns that have had significant impact at the international level. The cases of the peace in Mozambique, the International Criminal Court, the Moratorium on the Death Penalty and, more recently, the Ban on Female Genital Mutilation all illustrate Italy’s contribution to international affairs, especially the politics of norm change. These cases are all characterised by the presence of intense civil society-government synergy. In order to advance the understanding of the processes and impact of transnational mobilisations, this analysis examines the domestic conditions that facilitated such synergy, intended as key conditions for the empowerment of transnational activism itself.

The European Union (EU) has intensified policy partnerships with civil society organizations (CSOs) in its external action. With regard to democracy promotion and human rights protection in particular, engagement with non-governmental organizations (NGOs) has become a crucial issue in schemes such as the European Instrument for Democracy and Human Rights. However, this ‘foreign policy by proxy’ is becoming increasingly controversial and a number of countries are implementing countermeasures to protect their national sovereignty, such as limits to foreign funding, media censorship, and restrictions to NGO activities. This chapter first explores how the EU engages with CSOs in its foreign actions, and then examines comparatively the main controversies that these policies are generating.

This article examines the different strategies used by transnational actors in advocacy against the death penalty. In particular, it studies the strategies adopted by the transnational campaign for the moratorium on capital punishment in view of the United Nations General Assembly vote of 2007 and subsequent years (2008, 2010, 2012, and 2014). The article shows that a variety of different strategies are used in the organizational, institutional, and communicative domains. Within the broader debate on norm diffusion, this article sheds light on the under-investigated area of specific tactics, which include horizontal networking, multilayered political lobbying, reason-based framing, and emotion-based story-telling, deployed by transnational activists to induce key actors to change their policy preference.

This paper investigates the principal competing visions of global politics that are currently advanced in the public discourse about globalization in opposition to the traditional state-centered perspective. The first part of the paper develops an analysis of ideal models as cultural resources that grounds the different reading of human bonds. The second part applies the notion of ideal models to the new scenario of globalization, and identifies four alternative interpretations of the notion of global politics: namely Neo-liberalism, Cosmopolitanism, Alter-globalism, and Dialogue among Civilizations. The principal characteristics of these four notions are presented in order to map the current debate on the future of global politics.

This article defends the case for a global extension of democracy by deploying a cosmo-federalist theory. As a response to the current state of international exclusion, the radical project of stretching the paradigm of democratic inclusion to the extreme limits encompassing the whole of mankind, is here presented. The article begins by taking position for a choice-based version of consequentialism that generates a principle of political justice centred on political participation. From this, a political project is developed that envisages a cosmopolitan system where all world citizens are included within a scheme of a direct representative participation under an overarching authority governing the process of democratising world affairs. Crucial in this is the establishment of an all-inclusive authority to legitimately delineate jurisdictional boundaries and a multilayered system of political interaction.