In a globalized and networked society, civic involvement and social mobilization become increasingly more connected to issues of communication, culture and consumption. Transnational communication flows add to the complex organization of political and social life and offer new ways to engage within and between local and global realms. The aim of this paper is to explore the communicative practices embedded in local as well as global social and political activism and the new practices and power relations that emerge from new ways of organizing and networking. The study applies a critical ethnographic approach to look at how this applies to Nicaraguan civil society organizations and their work to advocate human right and gender equality in a context marked by religious and political tensions (not least around the issue of abortion). The analysis will show how social, cultural and political affiliations are articulated through expressive means of communication as local power struggles mix with global feminist and critical discourses. The study rests on a multifaceted perspective on the relation between communication and power where class, ethnicity, gender, cultural identity and ‘cultural difference’ become battlefields in which dominant epistemologies are both contested and reproduced.