"There's a couple of reasons I think that it slipped attention. Partly because International Relations has tended to focus on large professionalized international NGOs, groups that many of your listeners are probably familiar with, like Greenpeace, Oxfam, Human Rights Watch, Amnesty International, but in being focused on those now well-established professional NGOs, our scholarship had missed, in my view, the rise of new forms of organization, which the digital era had enabled. So scholars since the nineties had written about how digital communications could be useful for sharing messages and tactics between different activists around the world, but they hadn't asked how is it going to change the very form? The very organizational structure, and this is where I think political communications scholars who really got interested in digital technology and how it was shaping political communications had done some writing and they had spelled out the ways that we were seeing new, what they called hybrid forms of organization that were blurring the boundaries between social movements or media or political parties.

Most of their literature was focused on national impact. So for IR scholars, it was flying under the radar because these were organizations that might be shaping national debates, but they weren't seen to have an international impact. And one of the things my book does is spell out how, even though these groups might be targeting national actors - ministers, government officials, prime ministers - they can influence public opinion in important ways on international issues like trade, climate, and refugees."

Nina Hall is an Assistant Professor in International Relations at Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies (Europe). She previously worked as a Lecturer at the Hertie School of Governance, where she published her first book Displacement, Development, and Climate Change: International Organizations Moving Beyond their Mandates? Her latest book is Transnational Advocacy in the Digital Era: Think Global, Act Local. She holds a DPhil in International Relations from the University of Oxford and is the co-founder of an independent and progressive think tank, New Zealand Alternative. She has been a Senior Fellow at the Weizenbaum Institute (the German Internet Institute) and a Faculty Affiliate at the SNF Agora Institute, Johns Hopkins University.

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