CLOSED DOORS, GLOBAL VOICES: OPPORTUNITY STRUCTURES AND THE INTERNATIONALIZATION OF SOCIAL ACTIVISM

Transnational activism has become increasingly visible, yet we lack a systematic understanding of when and why local grievances escalate into cross‐border campaigns. We address this gap by theorizing and testing how the interplay of corporate and political opportunity structures influences the internationalization of activism against multinational enterprises (MNEs). We argue that transnational escalation is most likely when firms have closed corporate structures, especially those that restrict stakeholder engagement and when activists face closed political environments that constrain domestic avenues of contestation. Under these dual constraints, activists lack both organizational allies and institutional outlets, prompting them to internationalize local grievances by mobilizing transnational networks, global media, and external institutions to amplify their claims. Leveraging a novel global dataset of over 150,000 activism events (2010–2022), we examine how corporate structural accessibility and relational accessibility affect the likelihood that local contention becomes internationalized. Our results show that greater corporate accessibility significantly reduces the likelihood of transnational escalation, and this mitigating effect is especially pronounced in countries with more open political opportunity structures