This year marks the 31st anniversary of the Tiananmen protests and their violent crackdown in 1989. Since then, many of the Tiananmen activists succeeded in leaving their home country and settling...Show moreThis year marks the 31st anniversary of the Tiananmen protests and their violent crackdown in 1989. Since then, many of the Tiananmen activists succeeded in leaving their home country and settling in the U.S., choosing the country known as one of the most prominent advocators for democracy (Béja 2003:440). In the U.S., individual activists as well as organized groups have lobbied for their interest of democratizing China, forming a movement that is called Overseas Chinese Democracy Movement (OCDM). The OCDM organizations have played a major role in influencing bilateral relations between the U.S. and China (Chen 2014a:1). However, observers around the world have witnessed in recent years that governments have increasingly opposed democracy and rights organizations, constraining organizations’ activities by erecting legal barriers (Wolff & Poppe 2015:i). This phenomenon is called the “Closing Space phenomenon” (ibid.) and describes the growing resistance against democracy and human rights promotion. Closing Space has been mostly studied in authoritarian and semi-authoritarian countries, yet scholars have noted a similar trend in some democratic countries, including the U.S. (Celermajer & Avnon 2019:674). Thus, the question is whether the U.S. government still supports groups promoting democracy in China, or whether it has also started to oppose democracy and rights organizations such as those of the OCDM. Currently, there is a major research gap on a potential Closing Space in the U.S. This means that a potential increasingly hostile political and civil climate is not addressed nor understood by academia. This lack of knowledge can contribute to a fundamental erosion of civil society organizations which provide essential democracy and rights advocacy both within and outside the U.S. With regards to OCDM organizations1, increasing barriers to their work can lead to very tangible deteriorations of human rights in China. By investigating the Closing Space phenomenon in the U.S., we can better understand which challenges U.S. based human rights organizations face. With regards to the current power struggles between the central Chinese government and democracy activists in Hong Kong, as well as continuing human rights violations against Uighur minorities in Xinjiang, the question of democracy and human rights in China is more relevant than ever. Hence, OCDM organizations’ relentless fight for democracy and human rights in China is of utmost significance. By raising this research problem, the thesis aims to target two underserved bodies of literature: first, the Closing Space phenomenon in democracies such as the U.S. (Chaudhry & Heiss 2018), and second, theoretical research on the OCDM and its members (Chen 2018:110). Scholarly literature on civil society organizations reflects three major perspectives, namely Social Movement Theory, Political Opportunity Structure, and the Closing Space phenomenon. These research fields provide valuable insight, especially in understanding social movements as “collective efforts to pursue [common] interests” (Flacks 2004:135), viewing political opportunity structures as ‘filters’ between movement mobilization and the choice of strategies and movement impact (Kitschelt 1986:59, Teräväinen 2010:197), as well as the Closing Space phenomenon that sees the recent assertive pushback against democracy and human rights advocacy as a defensive reaction of mostly authoritarian leaders that fear popular uprisings (Carothers 2016:358, 364). Despite providing key insights, these bodies of literature do not provide a satisfactory understanding of current challenges faced by democracy and rights organizations in the U.S. This master thesis will address this research gap and contribute to an improved understanding of OCDM organizations’ struggles specifically and research on Closing Space and POS more generally. The thesis argues that the Closing Space concept offers a valuable advancement of POS theory as it overcomes the structural determinism of POS and acknowledges organizations’ individual differences and subjective interpretations.Show less
Since the end of the Cold War industrial relations (IR) in Central and Eastern Europe (CEE), on top of inherited ideological-institutional legacies from the Soviet era, have undergone significant...Show moreSince the end of the Cold War industrial relations (IR) in Central and Eastern Europe (CEE), on top of inherited ideological-institutional legacies from the Soviet era, have undergone significant structural changes that are widely believed to have diminished organized labor’s power and significance. According to leading political economy and IR approaches, the pattern is the most pronounced in what are referred as neoliberal Baltic states, featuring among the weakest labor movements across CEE that are resembled in lagging behind IR regimes institutionalization, trade union density and collective bargaining coverage. However, when we turn our focus to the public sector explicitly, the manner and degree in which IR regimes have changed across CEE varies in ways that stand in tension with broad widely accepted labels, leading to mistaken ideas. To prove the inconsistency of the exaggerated regional patterns and typologization, this research will assess a strange case of relatively substantive, but varied public healthcare and education organized labor performance in the past few years in Lithuania, discussing both external and internal factors that make up the capacity of trade unions.Show less
