From labor organizers to immigrant activists, from environmentalists to human rights campaigners, from global justice protesters to Islamic militants, this book shows how ordinary people gain new perspectives, experiment with new forms of action, and sometimes emerge with new identities through their contacts across borders. It asks to what extent transnational activism changes domestic actors, their forms of claim making, and their prevailing strategies. Does it simply project the conflicts and alignments familiar from domestic politics onto a broader stage, or does it create a new political arena in which domestic and international contentions fuse? And if the latter, how will this development affect internationalization and the traditional division between domestic and international politics?

Sidney Tarrow is Maxwell M. Upson Professor of Government and Professor of Sociology at Cornell University. Tarrow's first book was Peasant Communism in Southern Italy (Yale, 1967). In the 1980s, after a brief foray into comparative local politics, he returned to social movements with a collaborative volume with B. Klandermans and H. Kriesi, Between Structure and Action (JAI, 1988); then to a reconstruction of Italian protest cycle of the late 1960s and early 1970s, Democracy and Disorder (Oxford, 1989). His most recent books are Power in Movement (Cambridge, 1994, 1998) (with Doug McAdam and Charles Tilly), Dynamics of Contention (Cambridge, 2001) (with Doug Imig), Contentious Europeans (Rowman and Littlefield, 2001) and (with Donatella della Porta) Transnational Protest and Global Activism (Rowman and Littlefield, 2004). A fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, he is currently Vice-President of the APSA Section on Comparative Politics.

Part 1. Structure, Process and Actors: 1. Introduction; 2. Complex internationalism; 3. Rooted cosmopolitans and transnational activists; Part II. The Global in the Local: 4. Global framing; 5. Internalizing contention; Part III. Transitional Processes: 6. Diffusion and modularity; 7. Shifting the scale of contention; Part IV. The Local in the Global: 8. Externalizing contention; 9. Building transnational coalitions; Part V. Transnationalism at Home and Abroad: 10. Transnational impacts on domestic activism; 11. Internationalization and transnational activism.