Abstract
With the end of the Cold War, military security issues declined on the international agenda as environmental, economic, and social issues rose. As superpower con?ict faded from the international agenda, space was created for new attempts at multilateral problem-solving. How have these changes a?ected the prospects for transnational organizing? Using data from the Yearbook of International Associations this paper explores changes in the size, issue focus, geographic makeup, and organizational structure of the population of transnational social movement organizations (TSMOs) in recent decades. While not the only form of transna-tional cooperation, these formal organizations provide important infrastructures for sustained transnational political work. Key ?ndings are that while the transnational social movement sector has continued to grow since the mid-20th century, its rate of growth has slowed in the 1990s. Also, human rights and environment predominate on TSMO issue-agendas, but during the 1990s more groups emphasized economic issues and adopted multi-issue organizing frames over single-issue focuses. Newer groups were more likely to be organized regionally, that is within the global North or South, which may re?ect e?orts to develop structures to better connect local settings with global networks.
Highlights
With the end of the Cold War, military security issues declined on the international agenda as environmental, economic, and social issues rose
We find here that human rights remains the major issue around which the largest numbers of transnational social movement organizations (TSMOs) organize, and a consistent quarter of all groups work principally on this issue
We examined whether structural inequalities in the world system are mirrored in the transnational social movement sector and whether this has changed in recent decades
Summary
The Seattle protests against the World Trade Organization and subsequent resistance to global trade and investment negotiations highlight the growing centralization of economic and political power in entities that transcend nationstates. These protests challenge traditional understandings of social movements as bounded by national or sub-national political arenas. The most recent protests are especially important in that they demonstrate strong opposition to global trade liberalization from a variety of constituencies within the countries that have benefitted the most from liberal trade policies They build upon a more extensive network of transnational organizational and informational ties among activists in a wide range of countries. This organizational infrastructure began to expand in the latter half of the 20t century, and its roots took hold and generated more rapid transnational organizational expansion in the 1970s and 1980s (Sikkink and Smith 2002)
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