Empowerment through participation? Collective mobilization and transnational women's movements as actors in the European sphere

The notions of wellbeing and empowerment are, in their political participation dimension, interlinked with civil society activism and collective mobilisation. Usually these ideas are discussed in relation to either the national or the global level, but they are relevant as well to the emerging transnational European sphere. This paper analyses the role of transnational civil society actors as mediators of wellbeing for the ones active within the organisations and networks. The objective is to assess wellbeing as the ability to participate in political activities both in terms of who participates and how the organisations are structured as well as the European institutional set-up surrounding their actions, thereby restraining or enhancing their opportunities of participation. The paper, thus, addresses both the possibilities of access and generation of wellbeing and argues that political participation as wellbeing and empowerment is both a matter of representation and recognition.