Building regional civil society alliances for migrant rights in the U.S., Mexico and Central America

Daniella Burgi-Palomino (not taking 2^nd module)

Building regional civil society alliances for migrant rights in the U.S., Mexico and Central America

Background/Topic

The use of social network analysis to analyze social movements or civil society networks is neither a new theme nor one which has been studied only recently.

 

A few examples of studies in this area which were particularly interesting to me include;

• “Network Dynamics in the Transition to Democracy: Mapping Global Networks of Contemporary Indonesian Civil Society” (Yanuar Nugroho and Gindo Tampubolon, University of Manchester, Sociological Research Online, Volume 13, Issue 5, http://www.socresonline.org.uk/13/5/3.html);
• “Mapping Networks of Support for the Zapatista Movement-Applying Social Network Analysis to Study Current Social Movements”, (Garrido, M., & Halavais, A. (2003). In M.McCaughy, & M. D.Ayers (Eds.), Cyberactivism: Online Activism in Theory and Practice (pp. 165–184). London : Routledge.);
• “Social Movements and NetworkAnalysis: A Case Study of Nineteenth-Century Women's Reform in New York State” (Naomi Rosenthal, Meryl Fingrutd, Michele Ethier, Roberta Karant and David McDonald, American Journal of Sociology, Vol. 90, No. 5 (Mar., 1985), pp. 1022-1054); 
• and even one which I could not access, Bae, S., & Choi, J. H. (2000, April). Cyberlinks between human rights NGOs: A network analysis. Paper presented to the 58th annual national meeting of the Midwest Political Science Association, Chicago.

After six years of work experience in the field of migration in the U.S., Mexico, Central America region with civil society organizations and major foundations and having tried to connect organizations working on similar issues with the aim of pursuing effective, regional strategies to protect migrant rights; I understand the challenges of the duplication of work among organizations and difficulties in connecting groups which should already be collaborating. These are issues akin to many circles in which nonprofit organizations work, as the above studies demonstrate.

Although there have been studies and reports on the mapping of civil society organizations in the migration/protection of migrant rights field in the U.S.-Mexico-Central America region (mainly driven by funding from major foundations such as the Ford Foundation, see “Report for the Ford Foundation-Mapping Civil Society Networks in Latin America”, Smith, Willian and Korceniwiz, Roberto Patricio, February 2003), these reports tend to be based on surveys, interviews and anecdotal information and compiled in the format of a typical NGO/foundation report. They usually demonstrate the issues each organization is working on, provide information on each organization and even the challenges they might face but do not necessarily identify the linkages between the organizations or detect which organizations are not connected to each other. As far as I know, specific to the field and region I am considering, social network analysis has not been used to complement these studies. I believe, however that using social network analysis would provide new insights into this field by helping us capture these important linkages between organizations, the cliques of organizations, the degree of their connections across countries and issues, identify which organizations serve as bridges and those that are not collaborating but could be.

Research Question

I learned in my work that organizations increasingly need to have international alliances to address migrant rights protection due to the very nature of migration and a migrant’s journey from a sending community through transit countries to arrive at their destination. This means that organizations have to be well connected with NGOs, local and national governments, foundations,  decisionmakers, media and other actors across sending, receiving and transit countries to fully understand this journey, to document rights abuses, target policymakers across countries and to gain access to funding.

I therefore propose to analyze the following questions:

1. Within which area of migrant rights protection are organizations most connected across countries (have the most cross-country alliances)? Which area is the least?
2. What does the degree to which an organization has international alliances reflect about the effectiveness of its work?
3. Which organizations serve as bridges between various organizations?
4. Which organizations are not connected to each other but could be?

Hypothesis
The organizations with the highest number of international connections or those who act as bridges between organizations are also the most well-funded and most effective in their advocacy campaigns.

Data & Methodology

To begin, this study would focus only civil society organizations working in the migration field in the U.S., Mexico and Central America region. For the U.S. region, only organizations located on the U.S-Mexico border, New York City and Washington D.C. would be included. Organizations would categorize themselves according to their country of origin and as belonging to one of the following areas; migration and development; legal protections for migrant rights; gender and migration (includes the issue of child migrants); and migration public policy and research. For the purpose of this study, “civil society organizations” includes any non-governmental, non-profit organization which falls into one of the aforementioned categories. For the social network analysis organizations would be asked to fill in a survey with the total list of the organizations and be asked if they 1) have partnered with the organization on a particular project, 2) communicate with the organization or 3) do not know the organization. These questions would need to be answered based on the last three years of work.

The social network analysis would be complemented by interviews with the staff from of each organization and information publicly available on organizational websites or in recent mappings of these organizations to provide information on their staff size, average annual budget, grants accessed, mission, funders and other information. Complementing social network analysis with interviews and anecdotal information is an approach which the aforementioned social network analysis studies on social movements and civil society networks have used.

Network Measures
For this study, some of the most important network measures to analyze would be cliques, k-cores, eigenvector and betweenness centrality scores of the organizations. I would want to analyze cliques based on issues and determine if cross country ties exist. K-cores would provide us with a neat picture of any one organization’s linkages which perhaps we might to analyze for the most connected (highest number of connections) organizations and to see how many international connections they have. The highest betweenness score would allow us to see the organizations who serve as the brokers between other organizations. Finally, eigenvector would also be useful in determining which organizations are connected to the best connected organizations and if they are always the same ones.

Conclusion

As mentioned previously, applying social network analysis to this study would allow the organizations themselves and major funders to leverage connections between groups better, identify gaps in terms of connections on issues and help foster greater linkages, especially international ones, to build more effective regional strategies on various dimensions of migrant rights in this geographic region.