The New Transnational Activism

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.

The New Transnational Activism shows how even the most prosaic activities - like immigrants bringing remittances back to their families - 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. Understanding the processes that link the local, the national and the international politics 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.