This week’s readings challenge the positive narrative surrounding transnational actors. Dietze and Neumann show that the “transnational” is not a free-floating space, arguing that actors remain embedded in layered socio-spatial contexts even as they build cross-border connections. Similarly, Alcalde argues that space itself is historically constructed and a territorially organised, hence transnational processes unfold within uneven and contested orders.
I believe this becomes particularly revealing when applied to contemporary short-term missionary trips from Europe or North America to African countries. On the surface these missions seem to embody transnationalism, as these individuals that cross borders to build communities and share their faith operate outside of formal state diplomacy, often emphasising solidarity and humanitarism. Nonetheless, when viewed through this week’s spatial lens, these actors are very much intertwined with structures of power. Mission trips are embedded in institutional church networks, as well as visa regimes and global inequalities that enable certain forms of mobility while restricting others. These participants usually travel from economically privileged states with strong passports and they come into regions marked and often scarred by years of colonial intervention, which coexisted with missionary activity. Their mobility is structured by territorial hierarchies that still remain deeply uneven.
In this sense, transnationalism reveals how differently borders operate for different actors. While for missionaries they might function as manageable crossings, for many locals, their mobility, especially towards North America or Europe, is highly restricted. These cross-border encounters therefore, take place within unequal systems of territorial control.
Furthermore, missionary projects often have universalist claims. For instance, like Esperanto, seeking to transcend national divisions through a neutral language, missionary movements make their mission seem as globally applicable and culturally transferable, but such universalism often emerges from historical and cultural contexts. In this case it is Western Christian traditions shaped by imperial pasts. While it appears as spiritual outreach, it may also reproduce/reinforce older hierarchies of knowledge and development.
Nonetheless, this does not mean that all transnational religious actors are consciously reproducing colonial ideologies, but it underscores the key insights of the readings, arguing that transnational actors are producers of space and these spaces they produce are never neutral. Henceforth, while mobility can connect, it can also platform inequality.
It is then safe to say that transnationalism is not inherently emancipatory, as it is embedded and often asymmetrical, unfolding within the very territorial and histoical hierarchies it sometimes claims to transcend