Globalizations and Social Movements: Culture, Power, and the Transnational Public Sphere (review)

Globalizations and Social Movements: Culture, Power, and the Transnational Public Sphere. Edited by John A. Guidry, Michael D. Kennedy, and Mayer N. Zald. University of Michigan Press, 2000. 418 pp. Cloth, $72.50; paper, $29.95.

With Globalizations and Social Movements, Guidry, Kennedy and Zald have made an important contribution to a rapidly growing collection of edited books that examine relationships between globalization and political mobilization. Their work stands out in its emphasis on the cultural aspects of globalization and mobilization processes, and more specifically it helps uncover the ways that globalization's various manifestations (thus, "globalizations") shape collective identity formation as well as the cultural framings of conflicts at local and national levels. The editors and contributors draw from cultural studies to bring attention to the ways that power relations affect the mobilization of identities and other cultural elements. Each of the chapters provides insights — in more or less explicit terms — into the workings of a "transnational public sphere," and there is a coherence to the volume that is not always found in such collections.

By demonstrating the ways that Habermas's concept of the public sphere applies in a globalized political arena, and by compiling a rich body of diverse case material to explore the relations between globalizations and social movements, this volume serves as a notable building block for theorizing in this area. The transnational public sphere is defined as the "space in which both residents of distinct places (states or localities) and members of transnational entities (organizations or firms) elaborate discourses and practices whose consumption moves beyond national boundaries." The first set of chapters (by Margaret Keck and Kathryn Sikkink, Patrick Ball, and Dieter Rucht) provides convincing evidence of the existence of a transnational public sphere, identified in the manifestation of transnational practices, organizational forms, and goals. As activists invoke claims of a common global destiny in their struggles to protect the environment or as they appeal to international norms of human rights or solidarity, they reflect the presence of a transnational public sphere with its own set of norms, values, and discourses that cannot be explained in terms of national politics alone.

The bulk of the book, however, is contained in the section "Globalizations and Movements in Nation-States," demonstrating the editors' recognition that "the transnational public sphere is realized in various localized applications, potentially quite distant from the original production of the discourse or practice in question." The cases used to illustrate this include an unusually rich collection of postcolonial contexts that are conspicuously underrepresented in the social movement literature. Chapters on Palestinian refugees, anticolonial struggles in Taiwan, Cuba, and the West Indies, the struggles of Nicaraguan women and street children in Brazil, and of religious or nationalist mobilizations in India and the former Soviet Union and Poland provide a much more diverse range of perspectives on globalization (or rather, on multiple "globalizations") than is found in similarly edited collections. Most importantly, the book's emphasis on some of the most marginalized of actors in the world system fills a major empirical gap in the research on social movements and globalization. The case selection also highlights the ways that an older and enduring form of globalization — colonialism — has continuing influences on social movement dynamics alongside newer "globalizations."

The transnational public sphere portrayed in this book, and defined in the editors' introductory chapter, is expanding because of the greater mobility of people as well as because of the expansion of social infrastructures (organizations such as intergovernmental organizations, transnational corporations, and nongovernmental associations) that cross national boundaries. This expanding public sphere alters both the strategic options as well as the potential resource bases of social movements. It is also a contentious space that is characterized not only by multiple globalizations but also by multiple transnational publics with potentially conflicting aims. Contention among a variety of global actors drives a dialectical change process, where social movements are both the subjects...