Customer Reviews

Transnational Protest and Global Activism (People, Passions, and Power: Social Movements, Interest Organizations, and the P)

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This book is probably the best overview of academic--particularly sociological--theory on the global justice movement. Indeed, to my knowledge, there is only one other book--Bandy and Smith's /Coalitions Across Borders/, and it focuses mainly on transnational coalition building in the global justice movement; this book, on the other hand, tries to take in all the issues that might be of concern to academic theorists. Like most such collections, it's a mixed bag, with individual chapters varying in quality from three to five stars. There is only one really bad one, Johnson and McCarthy's piece, which uses organziational ecology or organizational population theory, an approach I find to be shallow. The really oustanding chapters are Sikkink's on how nation-states and intergovernmental organizations (IGOs, like the EU and IMF) interact to create complex, multi-level opportunity structures; della Porta's on how global justice activists are forging a new type of activist identity, one that is inclusive, tolerant, and flexible, rather than being narrowly defined; and Bennett's on the two generations of transnational activism, the first organized around professional advocacy groups, the second around voluntary direct action groups, and the tensions between them. Della Porta and Tarrow do a nice job in the final chapter of bringing the strands from the various chapters together to create an overall theoretical picture of this second generation transnational activism. They elaborate on Sikkink's ideas, describing what they call a complex internationalism, that includes the interactions of nation-states, IGOs, and "non-state actors"; they discuss the highly networked, participatory-democratic organization of the global justice and peace movements, and reaffirm della Porta's ideas about flexible identities; and they note that, rather than a global civil society emerging, what we are seeing is the emergence of rooted cosmopolitans--most activism remains locally rooted, but activists are concerned with the state of the world and so join transnational networks. The biggest weakness of this volume is its almost total focus (except in Sikkink's chapter) on the movement in the first world, a long standing problem with social movement theory in sociology. Given the importance of third world movement in the new transnational activism, this is really something prominent scholars like the ones in this volume should do something to address.