From the “battle of Seattle” to the movement against the Iraq war, the extraordinary international protests of the late 1990s and the early years of the new century suggest that something is new on this planet of ours. We are witnessing, if not a full-blown global civil society or an integrated transnational polity, at least a trend toward new forms and new levels of transnational contention. It was to reconcile my growing sense that new actors are appearing with my belief that states remain the fundamental framework for contentious politics that I decided to write this book. It is dedicated to the task of identifying those actors, trying to understand their relationships, and charting their impact on domestic and international politics.

Those who have followed my work in the past may wonder that someone who linked social movements so closely to the modern national state would now see them in transnational terms. If the world has changed, social scientists must be prepared to understand it. Besides, the forms of transnational activism that I examine in this book do not float above the earth but are shaped by states' domestic structures and by the international institutions that they have created. Although it has been made before, I hope to specify this argument through attention to the processes that link “the local with the global.”