The New Transnational Activism

Cambridge Studies in Contentious Politics

by Sidney Tarrow

From labor organizers to immigrant activists, from environmentalists to human rights campaigners, from global justice protesters to Islamic militants, this book shows how ordinary people gain new perspectives, experiment with new forms of action, and sometimes emerge with new identities through their contacts across borders. It asks to what extent transnational activism changes domestic actors, their forms of claim making, and their prevailing strategies. Does it simply project the conflicts and alignments familiar from domestic politics onto a broader stage, or does it create a new political arena in which domestic and international contentions fuse? And if the latter, how will this development affect internationalization and the traditional division between domestic and international politics?

Genres: International Relations, Social Science, Politics

278 pages, Paperback

First published December 1, 2005

Reviews

[Lukáš · Rating 2 out of 5]

In this piece, Tarrow offers some fine overview of some literature and cases that are in different ways linked to the problems of trans-national political activism. The whole book is quite well-organized and moves from the "local in the global" to the "global in the local", building some conceptual tools to discuss the ways how the "rooted cosmopolitans" (people active in their local context, yet with an international sentiment) affect domestic and international processes. As well, the book offers some readable case studies, suggesting the directions in which this works. So far, so good.
However, the drawbacks are quite striking. First, the author does not build any toolkit through which to assess the concepts which he has used. In this sense, it makes the book 'too comfortable' to stay with a macrosociological lens. Peel it off and you'll discover an unwillingness to deal with serious political questions. For example, the book itself fails to give any better hint about what is really new about the New Transnational Activism.
The author as well seems to stay with a relatively closed domain of references, most of the time quoting just the research of his colleagues like della Porta, Keck and Sikkink, or Tilly. Of course, this is not to say the quoted research is bad, but it opens questions, whether the Ivy League people even care about looking for some detailed research from outside the view of their Ivory Towers. Then, one may get easily confused about claims such as that with the 9/11 events, the n.t.a. will, according to the author, be in decline, due to security concerns, etc., etc., etc., yet this may lead to questions such as: what are the political momenta that trigger certain processes (activisms) and make them succeed (the "landmine" campaign), while others, often better felt (like environmentalism) seem stagnant? In what ways would the War on Terror (or to borrow from Julian Reid the "Terror on War") affect the economical and informational logistics that connect people? What about the roles of televisual and virtual spaces in political mobilization? In short, peel away a conformist 'positivist' epistemology and you'll find a relatively non-offering piece.
In short, if you check the pieces by the above-mentioned colleagues of Tarrow, or perhaps some further works like Wallace's Non-state actors in World Politics there's not much of a point in reading the whole book, as peeling off some layers may feel like an onion that may eventually make you cry a bit.

[Brandon Wu · Rating 4 out of 5]

In this work, Tarrow gives us a well-thought-through, if fairly skeletal, theoretical framework for examining transnational social movements. Expanding on existing typologies such as, for instance, Keck and Sikkink's boomerang model, Tarrow's broader model is capable of encompassing a broader variety of movements, coalitions and networks. There is a lot to think about here, and innumerable jumping-off points for further research.