This article addresses the question of how to be an activist in the dynamic postsocialist field of power by focusing on anti-corruption actors in two policy-mediating knowledge institutions with transnational ties in the Czech Republic. Drawing upon sixteen months of participant observation research and interviews, I argue that a new generation of civic activists has sought to carve a niche in the competitive field by crafting an authoritative professional image. They have accomplished this through the performance of new international codes of neoliberal professionalism to both a Czech and international/ western audience in order to gain social recognition. At the same time, however, they risk alienating (and being alienated from) their local counterparts and public if they appear too much the global de-nationalized professional. The discomfort with having to craft their sense of self between globalizing cultures of professionalism and local conditions is a core tension these actors experience in the context of broader changes in the building of civil society and democracy (in the international image), the postsocialist labor market, and the role of the intelligentsia. It demonstrates the limits to the accumulation of global cultural and symbolic capital.