Social Movements and the Multilateral Arena

Abstract

Most social movement research privileges the state as the main, if not the sole arena where social movement contestation takes place. By drawing from work in political sociology, international relations, and political economy of the world-system, scholars can improve understandings of the ways political conflicts are embedded in extra-local contexts. This essay clarifies some assumptions embedded in state-centric approaches and explores ideas at the borders of social movement scholarship and related fields about how the world beyond states impacts conflicts at local, national, and global scales. Having engaged the inter-state arena in unprecedented ways during the 1990s, many activist groups saw more clearly this system's limited capacities for responding to deepening global crises. The early twenty-first century thus saw a growth in transnational social movement activity outside the inter-state arena. This encourages us to rethink relationships between social movements and not just the state, but also the inter-state system itself. Keywords:Transnational activism, inter-state politics, academic disciplines, constructivism, United Nations, corporate globalization, world-systems analysis, World Social Forums Globalization, the process of expanding and intensification of transnational exchanges and relationships, affects social movements. As states have become more inter-connected, ideas, goods, people, money, and communications flow more quickly and easily across national borders. This has shaped both the grievances around which people organize as well as the resources with which challengers can wage their struggles. Nevertheless, much social movement research continues to privilege the state as the main, if not the sole arena where social movement 2 contestation takes place. By drawing from work in political sociology, international relations, and political economy of the world-system, scholars can improve understandings of the ways political conflicts are embedded in extra-local contexts. This essay clarifies some assumptions embedded in state-centric approaches and explores ideas at the borders of social movement scholarship and related fields about how the world beyond states impacts conflicts at local, national, and global scales.