Dissident citizen diplomacy: Rethinking transnational activism in 1990s Nicaragua

This dissertation examines the reframing process of transnational social movement organizations that challenge global economic politics from the "grassroots up." The Central America peace movement built on indigenous organizations in the U.S. and Central America and forged new transnational networks that served as the basis for new activist strategies in the 1990s. Witness For Peace and the Wisconsin Coordinating Council were key organizations in the movement to change U.S. policy in Central America, focusing on the U.S. supported Contra war in Nicaragua. Their activist strategies of dissident citizen diplomacy and international accompaniment during the war were reframed in the 1990s to include activist work on labor rights, violence against women and gender and economic development. The social relations that occurred across national boundaries, the political and economic environments of the countries involved and the master frames of the organizations shaped the reframing process of Witness For Peace and The Wisconsin Coordinating Council on Nicaragua. This feminist institutional ethnography contributes to studies of transnational social movements, women's grassroots activism and the Central America Peace movement by demonstrating that responses to the inequalities of globalization by First World social movement organizations are being reconfigured by active agents in the Third World. The study demonstrates that citizen activism in an international context produces new political arrangements between Northern, middle class progressive organizations and community activists in the South that are gendered, dynamic and contested.