The New Transnational Activism

This 2005 book argues that individuals move into transnational activism which links domestic to international politics.

Sidney Tarrow (Author)

9780521616775, Cambridge University Press

Paperback, published 1 August 2005

278 pages, 12 b/w illus. 8 tables
23 x 15.5 x 1.6 cm, 0.41 kg

'… Tarrow's book is highly valuable. It provides a taxonomy of forms of transnational activism that is certain to be taken up by other scholars of global social movements. His account of the range and variety of processes that characterise contentious politics at the international level seems very plausible. He also sends out an important warning to those who would see transnational activism merely as a reflex response to globalization.' Democratiya

The New Transnational Activism, first published in 2005, shows how even the most prosaic activities can assume broader political meanings when they provide ordinary people with the experience of crossing transnational space. This means that we cannot be satisfied with defining transnational activists through the ways they think. The defining feature of transnationalism in this book is relational, and not cognitive. This emphasis on activism's relational structure means that even as they make transnational claims, transnational activists draw on the resources, the networks, and the opportunities in which they are embedded, and only then - if at all - on more distant transnational links. But we can no more sharply draw a line between domestic and international politics in studying transnational activism than we could ignore local politics in studying its national equivalent. Understanding the processes that link the local, the national and the international is the major undertaking of the book.

Part 1. Structure, Process and Actors: 1. Introduction
2. Complex internationalism
3. Rooted cosmopolitans and transnational activists
Part II. The Global in the Local: 4. Global framing
5. Internalizing contention
Part III. Transitional Processes: 6. Diffusion and modularity
7. Shifting the scale of contention
Part IV. The Local in the Global: 8. Externalizing contention
9. Building transnational coalitions
Part V. Transnationalism at Home and Abroad: 10. Transnational impacts on domestic activism
11. Internationalization and transnational activism.

Subject Areas: Comparative politics [JPB], Sociology & anthropology [JH]