The Nature of Transnational Networks: Wild and Complex

Abstract

NGOs and Transnational Networks: Wild Cards in World Politics. By William E. DeMars Pluto Press, 2005. 256 pp., $80.00 cloth (ISBN: 0-7453-1906-8), $25.95 paper (ISBN: 0-7453-1905-X). The growing number of nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) and transnational networks—and their reported impact around the world—have spawned considerable research and debate about the role that these networks play in areas such as global politics and development. The majority of what we read is bifurcated into two camps. The first camp supports the notion that NGOs are important global actors (see, for example, Kaldor 2003). The second camp devalues their influence (see, for example, Mearsheimer 1994/1995). NGOs and Transnational Networks: Wild Cards in World Politics , by William DeMars, gives us another option. Specifically, DeMars argues that NGOs are quite influential—but not in the ways that their organizers and the general public understand them to be. In laying out his argument, DeMars provides the reader with an interesting walk through the origins of transnational NGO networks and the modern day pressures that both drive them and complicate our efforts to understand what they are and what they do. In an attempt to improve the ways in which we study NGOs and transnational networks and the influence they have, DeMars offers extensive theoretical work in what he describes as both a structural and a political view of such groups. His efforts integrate a broad range of ideas put forward by international relations scholars from the 1970s onward. …