Transnational Contention: Seattle and After

西雅图针对世界贸易组织的抗议活动不仅受到了媒体的广泛关注，还表明公众要求国际经济机构承担政治责任的压力越来越重要。这种压力的重要性引发了国内社会运动、跨国组织和国际机构之间的关系的几个问题。社会运动在与跨国对手的竞争中面临着集体行动的特殊问题。他们可以通过在国内组织起来对抗全球经济行为者的后果，通过支持跨国伞形组织，或者通过创建跨越两个或更多国家的运动组织来应对这些问题。本项目研究国内活动家如何以及为什么选择某些渠道成为跨国行动者。在研究社会运动的“跨国化”方面，该项目重点关注跨国激进主义的五个部门(劳工、宗教/人权、土著群体、全球变暖和基因食品)和三个国际机构(联合国、欧盟和世界贸易组织)。它从现有的《国际组织年鉴》档案中创建了一个量化数据集，并将关于国际会议上的抗议活动、积极分子团体的成立和政府资助以及国内运动、跨国组织和国际机构之间的网络联系的信息添加到数据集中。对数据集的分析使调查人员和其他对跨国流动感兴趣的人能够理解国内形式的争执如何让位于跨国动员。

The Seattle protests against the World Trade Organization not only received much media attention, but also demonstrated the growing importance of public pressure for political accountability of international economic institutions. The importance of such pressure raises several issues about the relationships among domestic social movements, transnational organizations, and international institutions. Social movements face special problems of collective action in contending against transnational opponents. They may deal with the problems by organizing domestically against the consequences of global economic actors, by supporting transnational umbrella groups, or by creating movement organizations that span two or more nations. This project examines how and why domestic activists select certain channels to become transnational actors.In studying the "transnationalization" of social movements, the project focuses on five sectors of transnational activism (labor, religious/human rights, indigenous groups, global warming, and genetic foods), and three international institutions (the United Nations, the European Union, and the World Trade Organization). It creates a quantitative data set from the existing archive of the Yearbook of International Organizations, and adds to the data set information obtained on protests at international conferences, on founding and government funding of activists groups, and on network links among domestic movements, transnational organizations, and international institutions. Analysis of the data set allows the investigators and others interested in transnational movements to understand how domestic forms of contention give way to transnational mobilization.