The New Transnational Activism

Description

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.

Sidney Tarrow is Maxwell M. Upson Professor of Government and Professor of Sociology at Cornell University. Tarrow's first book was Peasant Communism in Southern Italy (Yale, 1967). In the 1980s, after a brief foray into comparative local politics, he returned to social movements with a collaborative volume with B. Klandermans and H. Kriesi, Between Structure and Action (JAI, 1988); then to a reconstruction of Italian protest cycle of the late 1960s and early 1970s, Democracy and Disorder (Oxford, 1989). His most recent books are Power in Movement (Cambridge, 1994, 1998) (with Doug McAdam and Charles Tilly), Dynamics of Contention (Cambridge, 2001) (with Doug Imig), Contentious Europeans (Rowman and Littlefield, 2001) and (with Donatella della Porta) Transnational Protest and Global Activism (Rowman and Littlefield, 2004). A fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, he is currently Vice-President of the APSA Section on Comparative Politics.

'... 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