Abstract
The trends outlined in this book can hardly be said to be specific to the United Kingdom. Clearly volunteering and philanthropy takes place all around the world. The types of new social movement associated with the 1960s emerged throughout Europe and North America. The spread of economic globalisation and the expanding infrastructure of global governance (that is, the United Nations and its myriad offshoots) gave rise to numerous transnational activist networks and international NGOs. And in more recent decades, NGOs have become more than just a Western or Northern phenomenon. Social movements, NGOs and advocacy groups have appeared in huge numbers across Africa, Asia and Latin America: following the end of the Cold War too and the creation of a civil society in the former Soviet bloc, the growth has been seemingly exponential.
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Further reading
Some of the most useful publications coming out of this include the UIA’s Yearbook of International Associations, available at: www.uia.be/yearbook; the LSE’s Global Civil Society Yearbook, of which the most recent is Martin Albrow and Hakan Seckinelgin, Global Civil Society 2011: Globality and Absence of Justice (London, 2010)
and the overviews provided by Johns Hopkins University: Lester M. Salamon, S. Wojciech Sokolowski and Associates, Global Civil Society: Dimensions of the Non-Proft Sector (Baltimore, MD, 1999), and Global Civil Society: Dimensions of the Non-Profit Sector, Vol. 2 (Bloomfield, CT, 2004).
For work on NGOs and the UN, see William Korey, NGOs and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights: ‘A Curious Grapevine’ (Basingstoke, 1998), pp. 29–50
Chadwick Alger, ‘The Emerging Roles of NGOs in the UN System: From Article 71 to a People’s Millennium Assembly’, Global Governance, 8 (2002), pp. 93–117
Peter Willets (ed.), ‘The Conscience of the World’: The influence of Non-Governmental Organisations in the UN System (London, 1996)
Harold K. Jacobson, Networks of Interdependence: International Organisations and the Global Political System, 2nd edn (New York, 1984)
and Kerstin Martens, NGOs and the United Nations: Institutionalisation, Professionalisation and Adaptation (Basingstoke, 2005).
More generally, there is a historical literature emerging that acknowledges the role of NGOs on the global politics stage: Akira Iriye, Global Community: The Role of International Organisations in the Making of the Contemporary World (Berkeley, CA, 2002)
John Boli and George M. Thomas, ‘INGOs and the Organisation of World Culture’, in John Boli and George M. Thomas, Constructing World Culture: International Nongovernmental Organisations since 1875 (Stanford, CA, 1999), pp. 13–49
Helmut Anheier, Marlies Glasius and Mary Kaldor (eds), Global Civil Society 2001 (Oxford, 2001)
Bruce Mazlish, The New Global History (New York, 2006)
Bruce Mazlish and Akira Iriye (eds), The Global History Reader (New York, 2005)
Paul M. Kennedy, The Parliament of Man: The United Nations and the Quest for World Government (London, 2006)
and John Bayliss, Steve Smith and Patricia Owens, The Globalization of World Politics: An Introduction to International Relations, 4th edn (Oxford, 2007).
For a literature on transnational activism, see Margaret E. Keck and Kathryn Sikkink, Activists beyond Borders: Advocacy Networks in International Politics (Ithaca, NY, 1998)
John Clark (ed.), Globalising Civic Engagement: Civil Society and Transnational Action (London: Earthscan, 2003)
John Keane, Global Civil Society (Cambridge, 2003)
Mary Kaldor, Global Civil Society: An Answer to War (Cambridge, 2003)
John Clark, Worlds Apart: Civil Society and the Battle for Ethical Globalisation (London, 2003)
and Manuel Castells, The Information Age: Economy, Society and Culture: Vol. I. The Rise of the Network Society, 2nd edn (Oxford, 2000).
For work on international social movements, see David A. Snow, Sarah A. Soule and Hanspeter Kriesi (eds), The Blackwell Companion to Social Movements (Oxford, 2004)
Sydney Tarrow, Power in Movement: Social Movements and Contentious Politics, 2nd edn (Cambridge, 1998)
Donatella Della Porta and Mario Diani, Social Movements: An Introduction (Oxford, 1998)
and Steven M. Buechler, Social Movements in Advanced Capitalism: The Political Economy and Cultural Construction of Social Activism (Oxford, 2000).
And for an introduction to Ingelhart’s post-materialism, see Ronald Inglehart, The Silent Revolution: Changing Values and Political Styles among Western Publics (Princeton, NJ, 1977)
But see also Frank Parkin Middle-Class Radicalism: The Social Bases of the British Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (Manchester, 1968)
Alain Touraine, The Voice and the Eye (Cambridge, 1981)
Alberto Melucci Nomads of the Present (London, 1988),
and Alberto Melucci, Challenging Codes: Collective Action in the Information Age (Cambridge, 1996).
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© 2012 Matthew Hilton, Nicholas Crowson, Jean-François Mouhot & James McKay
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Hilton, M., Crowson, N., Mouhot, JF., McKay, J. (2012). International Comparisons. In: A Historical Guide to NGOs in Britain. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137029027_10
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137029027_10
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