Virtual Library

From the early 1990s when the EZLN (the Zapatistas), led by Subcommandte Marcos, first made use of the Internet to the late 1990s with the defeat of the Multilateral Agreement on Trade and Investment and the anti‐WTO protests in Seattle, Quebec, and Genoa, it became evident that new, qualitatively different kinds of social protest movements were emergent. These new movements seemed diffuse and unstructured, yet at the same time, they forged unlikely coalitions of labor, environmentalists, feminists, peace, and global social justice activists collectively critical of the adversities of neoliberal globalization and its associated militarism. Moreover, the rapid emergence and worldwide proliferation of these movements, organized and coordinated through the Internet, raised a number of questions that require rethinking social movement theory. Specifically, the electronic networks that made contemporary globalization possible also led to the emergence of “virtual public spheres” and, in turn, “Internetworked Social Movements.” Social movement theory has typically focused on local structures, leadership, recruitment, political opportunities, and strategies from framing issues to orchestrating protests. While this tradition still offers valuable insights, we need to examine unique aspects of globalization that prompt such mobilizations, as well as their democratic methods of participatory organization and clever use of electronic media. Moreover, their emancipatory interests become obscured by the “objective” methods of social science whose “neutrality” belies a tacit assent to the status quo. It will be argued that the Frankfurt School of Critical Theory offers a multi‐level, multi‐disciplinary approach that considers the role of literacy and media in fostering modernist bourgeois movements as well as anti‐modernist fascist movements. This theoretical tradition offers a contemporary framework in which legitimacy crises are discussed and participants arrive at consensual truth claims; in this process, new forms of empowered, activist identities are fostered and negotiated that impel cyberactivism.

The authors integrate social movement outcomes research and the world society approach to build a theoretical model to examine the impact of global and local factors on movement outcomes. Challenging the current research on policy change, which rarely examines the effects of global norms and local activism in one analysis, they argue (1) that global regimes empower and embolden local social movements and increase pressure on target governments from below, and (2) that local activists appeal to international forums with help from international activists to pressure the governments from above. When the pressures from the top and the bottom converge, social movements are more likely to succeed. Furthermore, these pressures are stronger in countries integrated into global society and on issues with strong global norms. The empirical analysis of social movements by resident Koreans in Japan advocating for four types of human rights—civil, political, social/economic, and cultural—demonstrates that the movements produced more successes as Japan's involvement in the international human rights regime expanded since the late 1970s, and that activism on issues with strong global norms achieved greater successes. The analysis also shows that lack of cohesive domestic activism can undercut the chances of social movements' success even with strong global norms on the issue.

Evidence of protest expansion both in the United States and abroad has stimulated theoretical discussion of a “movement society,” with some arguing that protest activities are becoming a standard feature of democratic politics. In advancing this claim, many have highlighted the role of domestic factors—for example, generational change or economic affluence—without fully accounting for the possibility that international dynamics may play an important role as well. The lack of work is surprising not only because the trend in protest is international in scope, but also because work in comparative sociology suggests globalization may make an important contribution. This study addresses the empirical gap by examining how political globalization (as measured by memberships in international organizations) and economic globalization (as measured by trade activity and foreign investment) influence trends in protest participation. Using data from World Values Surveys of 37,716 respondents in 17 advanced democracies merged with data on several national and international indicators, this study examines how the probability of participating in protest has changed over time as a result of these two forms of globalization. The results of multivariate, multilevel analysis combined with simulations indicate that trends in political globalization have expanded protest activity, while trends in economic globalization have limited that expansion. These results suggest that social movement scholarship should continue to examine the implications of globalization for protest behavior and other social movement dynamics.

Sovereignty and the sovereign state are often seen as anachronisms; Globalization and Sovereignty challenges this view. Jean L. Cohen analyses the new sovereignty regime emergent since the 1990s evidenced by the discourses and practice of human rights, humanitarian intervention, transformative occupation and the UN targeted sanctions regime that blacklists alleged terrorists. Presenting a systematic theory of sovereignty and its transformation in international law and politics, Cohen argues for the continued importance of sovereign equality. She offers a theory of a dualistic world order comprising an international society of states and a global political community in which human rights and global governance institutions affect the law, policies and political culture of sovereign states. She advocates the constitutionalisation of these institutions, within the framework of constitutional pluralism. This book will appeal to students of international political theory and law, political scientists, sociologists, legal historians and theorists of constitutionalism.

This article delineates trajectories of the glocalization of law and maps the changing contours of legal pluralism using empirical material on World Bank financed infrastructure and biodiversity projects in India. The role of international institutions, social movements and NGOs, which challenge the monopoly of the state over the production of law and the definition of the common good, is analysed with reference to conflicts over privatization of natural resources, struggles against forced displacement and loss of livelihood as well as the complaints on behalf of indigenous communities before the World Bank Inspection Panel. It is argued that despite scattered sovereignties in the new architecture of global governance, the state remains a central albeit contested terrain. Its pivotal role in selectively transposing conditionalities, law and policies into the national arena as well as its strategies to avoid accountability are foregrounded against the attempts by civil society actors to use national and international legal platforms to enforce compliance with environmental and human rights standards.

A key challenge to understanding the eruption of globalization protest since the late 1990s is the lack of data on the protesters themselves. Although scholars have focused increasingly on these large protest events and the transnational social movements that play a role organizing them, information about the protesters remains scant. We address this research gap by analyzing survey data collected from a random sample of protesters at five globalization protests in three countries. By disaggregating protesters from the local area and protesters who traveled to the protest event, the role that organizations play becomes clear: SMOs mobilize non-local participants and coordinate travel to protest events. These data also suggest answers to the broader questions that have emerged about global civil society. In contrast to the expectations in recent scholarship, we find very few protesters came from outside of the countries in which the protests were taking place. Instead, we conclude that SMOs use the Internet to connect domestically grounded activists to transnational struggles and to mobilize them to participate in large-scale protest events. In other words, organizations do, indeed, matter in the globalization movement and have significantly expanded the protesting population beyond local citizens.

In the last decade, human trafficking has emerged as a new area of research for sociologists and other scholars across a wide range of fields. Globalization has exacerbated the illicit trade of people and their parts within and across territorial borders, generating concern among activists and academics and prompting the development of a burgeoning literature with varying concerns and viewpoints. This article reviews what we know about human trafficking dynamics and trends, its causes, and current responses, including critiques of anti-trafficking efforts. While much work remains to be done in simply mapping current trafficking activities, a transnational sociological framework can help to move theory and research on trafficking forward.

Adopting a long-term historical perspective, this article examines the growing complexity and the internal tensions of state protection in Western Europe and North America. Beginning with Charles Tilly's theory about state building and organized crime, the discussion follows with a critical analysis of T. H. Marshall's article on citizenship. Arguing that state protection has become far more multifaceted than what Marshall's triadic model suggests, the article shows how this protection frequently transcends the logic of individual rights while increasing the reliance of citizens on the modern state. The last section formulates a critique of the idea formulated by theorists like Manuel Castells that globalization favors a rapid decline of state power. Yet, state protection may not necessarily grow indefinitely, and tax cuts, for example, the ones recently enacted in the United States, could seriously jeopardize a state's capacity to raise revenues and effectively fight older and newer forms of insecurity.

This essay is one of the first collaborative efforts to identify the underlying norms embedded in diverse traditions of Islamic law as these apply to contemporary Muslim communities experiencing conflict or transitioning from conflict. This long overdue endeavor draws upon comparative legal analyses, postconflict justice traditions, global governance, and empirical conflict studies to explore why Islamic legal norms are not often used as a resource for restraint and guidance in contemporary conflict settings. In exploring this puzzle, the authors make the case for strengthening commensurate Islamic and international conflict norms for complex conflicts and postconflict tradition. They also situate Islamic postconflict justice norms—which are too often confined to religious and natural law discussions—into contemporary problems of security policy, conflict prevention, and problems of governance. They indicate the many benefits of such a comparative approach for citizens of diverse Muslim and Arabs states and communities, trying to build pathways out of conflict, and for humanitarian and human rights practitioners working in such arenas toward similar goals. An additional, important benefit in excavating such shari’a norms is in providing the intellectual basis to counter politicized, extremist, and instrumentalist uses of Islamic law to justify extreme uses of political violence across the Middle East, Central and South Asian, and African regions.

What determines the flow of labor and capital in this new global information economy? Who has the capacity to coordinate this new system, to create some measure of order? What happens to territoriality and sovereignty, two fundamental principles of the modern state? And who gains rights and who loses rights?

Losing Control? examines the rise of private transnational legal codes and supranational institutions, such as the World Trade Organization and universal human rights covenants, and shows that though sovereignty remains an important feature of the international system, it is no longer confined to the nation-state. Other actors gain rights and a kind of sovereignty by setting some of the rules that used to be within the exclusive domain of states. Saskia Sassen tracks the emergence and the making of the transformations that mark our world today, among which is the partial denationalizing of national territory. Two arenas in particular stand out in the new spatial and economic order by their capacity to set their own rules: the global capital market and the series of codes and institutions that have mushroomed into an international human rights regime. As Sassen shows, these two quasi-legal realms now have the power and legitimacy to demand action and accountability from national governments, with the ironic twist that both depend upon the state to enforce their goals. From the economic policy shifts forced by the Mexico debt crisis to the recurring battles over immigration and refugees around the world, Losing Control? incisively analyzes the events that have radically altered the landscape of governance in an era of increasing globalization.