Globalization and Transnational Social Movement Mobilization, 1963-2003

Suny At Stony Brook, Stony Brook NY

Investigators

Abstract

SES0-0241017 Jackie Smith SUNY Stony Brook The protests against the World Trade Organization in Seattle and subsequent resistance to global trade and investment liberalization highlight the growing centralization of economic and political power in entities that transcend nation-states. The growing importance of global institutions demands a greater understanding of the ways that global changes affect human societies and the prospects for social change. This research seeks to advance both the empirical and theoretical work on globalization processes and their impacts on social movements and will contribute to a growing social science research agenda on the ways that global integration and institutions affect transnational political mobilization. The first component of the study will examine the broad population dynamics over time using longitudinal time-series data to assess how changes in the global political environment and in the transnational social movement sector impact growth and change in the population of TSMOs. The second phase will cover the same time period, but it will use data organized at the country level to assess the relative importance of domestic and international factors (and their interactions) for explaining varying levels of national participation in transnational social movement organizations across different countries. The project expands existing cross-sectional data sets into a longitudinal data set on transnational social movement organizations including data from theYearbook of International Associations. The broader impacts of this study lie in its promise to identify relationships between changes in the population of transnationally organized SMOs and the global political environment, characterized by increasingly intertwined national and global level polities, to uncover patterns of conflict mobilization and change in the contemporary global political system, and to contribute to theory-building by relating a rich literature on national social movement mobilization to the broader sociological study of global social change. The project also will provide important foundations for future research on how globalization affects political mobilization (and visa versa) and the datasets produced for this study will be made available to other researchers.