Blackwell Reference Online

Extract

Social movements emerged in tandem with modern nation-states, as groups of people organized to alternately resist new claims being made by national authorities (such as taxes or military conscription) or to advance their own claims that states provide a variety of public goods and services (such as education, health care, and various forms of financial assistance). Ongoing competition between authorities and citizen challengers generated new structures – including parliaments, bills of rights, and bureaucratic checks and balances – to routinize public participation in national politics and to otherwise enhance the accountability of political leaders to citizenry (see, e.g., Tilly 1984 ; Markoff 1996 ). Today, as states increasingly turn to international political arenas to manage their economies and ecologies as well as other aspects of social life, we find that social movements are becoming increasingly transnational in their structure and focus. Movements are assisted in their transnational organizing efforts by the same rapidly advancing technologies that have assisted in the expansion of a global economy. Relatively cheap airline tickets, more widely available telephone and Internet access, expanding use of English as a global working language, and a globalized mass media help enable people from more diverse classes and geographical origins to share information and cultivate ... log in or subscribe to read full text