Globalization and Movements

Has globalization revolutionized contentious politics? Starting in the 1990s, a number of researchers announced that the growing internationalization of economic, cultural, and political exchanges, combined with nations' growing loss of control over these flows, had led, or would lead in the near future, to profound changes in social movements. The emergence of “transnational advocacy networks” (Keck & Sikkink 1998) and “transnational social movement organizations” (Smith, Chatfield, & Pagnucco 1997) foreshadowed the rise of the “global public sphere” (Guidry, Kennedy, & Zald 2000) and the “transnational civil society” (Florini 2000). These global social movements had seemingly moreover invented a third repertoire of actions (Cohen & Rai 2000), defined by its transnational character and solidarity. In the same way as the growth of market capitalism and liberal ideology, and the rise of the nation‐state, had reconfigured national protest movements in the nineteenth century (Tilly 1986), economic globalization and the free‐enterprise culture that accompanied it, together with the forecast decline of nation‐states, had apparently produced another substantial transformation in contentious politics at a global level