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?

"Sidney Tarrow draws on his broad knowledge and sympathetic preoccupation with social movements to illuminate the new frontier of transnational contention. This book is a must read for social movement scholars!" Frances Fox-Piven, City University of New York"Tarrow's tour de force persuasively specifies the processes that link actors and institutions across the local, national and global public spheres. The New Transnational Activism compares an impressively broad array of cases and regions to produce an impressive balance between analytical breadth and depth. Tarrow's conceptual contribution reminds political scientists that the borders between comparative and international relations subfields are increasingly obsolete." Jonathan Fox, University of California, Santa Cruz"Tarrow is a wonderful tour guide through a world in which rooted cosmopolitansa are blending domestic, international, and transnational political action in complicated new ways." William Gamson, Boston College"The New Transnational Activism is a fine study that crosses the obsolete boundaries among comparative politics, international politics, and transnational relations. Sidney Tarrow shows vividly how "rooted cosmopolitans" engage in transnational contention, within structures largely created by states, and thereby affect the politics of our time. " Robert O. Keohane, Princeton University"The New Transnational Activism is Sidney Tarrow at his contentious best. Globalization, he shows, has hardly transformed the face of radical politics. The sources of the change that have taken place are not transnational visionaries, but rather "rooted cosmopolitans" whose mobilizations for global justice, though increasingly fused with internationalist movements, never lose contact with coalitional partners at home. The thesis is illustrated with priceless vignettes and an engaging style." David D. Laitin, Stanford University"This major contribution to the literature on transnational movements and organizations is also a wonderful read. Lively, literate, and full of arresting material, it uses the past to help illuminate the present. It uses the present to help understand where we are and where we might be going. Tarrow takes us around the world and makes us sensitive to and cognizant of similar mechanisms and processes at work in a dizzying array of places and groups." Margaret Levi, University of Washington"Jewish sages emphasized that there are four types of students: the sponge absorbs everything, the funnel passes everything, the strainer retains the sediment and lets the fine wine pass, and the sifter retains the wheat and lets the chaff pass. Tarrow's strength is wisdom and judgment. He sifted through the growing literature on transnational activism, retained the important parts, and then erected a new political process theory of world politics. His approach to transnational contention represents the next major theoretical challenge to the fields of international relations and comparative politics." Mark Lichbach, University of Maryland"This is a superlative work, and should be required reading for all students of social movements, globalization and world politics." Choice"The New Transnational Activism will prove a watershed in the analysis of global activism, even despite the notoriety of its author. Read it now and be prepared for the onslaught of studies that it will most certainly spawn." Karen Stanbridge, Memorial University of Newfoundland, for Canadian Journal of Sociology Online"The New Transnational Activism is engagingly written, appropriate for advanced undergraduates, graduate students--and activists. All can learn from its conceptual formulations and the many apt examples with which Tarrow illustrates his argument. For scholars, the book is pregnant with ideas. Without doubt, its clear conceptual formulations and theoretical eclecticism will produce numerous hypotheses about the causes and consequences of transnationalism. The New Transnational Activism is a major addition to the transnational relations and social movements literatures." International Studies Review

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.

Argues that individuals move into transnational activism which links domestic to international politics.

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.