Social Movements in a Globalizing World: an Introduction

Abstract

Over the last decade, social movement scholars in the United States and in Europe have been paying increasing attention to the political context in which social movements mobilize. In the process, social movement research has not only relied more heavily on political science to complement its original conceptions (mainly furnished by sociology, history and economics), but has also become more comparative, focusing on the impact of the national, regional and local political contexts on mobilization and its outcomes across countries. With cross-national comparison, attention is directed to the effects of the changing international context on national social systems and national polities. In other words, social movement research is slowly becoming aware that the divide between comparative politics and international relations is increasingly anachronistic. Also in social movement studies, the challenge ‘is to combine the insights of both perspectives without losing sight of their unique contributions’ (Garrett and Lange 1995: 654). This is a challenge we try to take seriously in this volume, which focuses on the impact of the increasing interactions between national and international political contexts on social movements in what we refer to as a globalizing world.