Globalization and Social Movements

The issue of how globalization affects social movements and vice versa is very complex and heavily debated in social movement research. Given that globalization takes place within economic, political and cultural spheres of human action, we organize our chapter by focusing on these three spheres separately. Since movements that operate across the entire globe are rare phenomena, we refer mainly in this chapter to transnational rather than global movements. Transnational movements are movements with operations in more than one country at any particular time. They consist of informal networks and formal federated organizations with national chapters. Our primary emphasis in this chapter is on how globalization affects movements and how transnational movements, in turn, emerge and react. In what follows, we will address the socio‐economic, political and cultural dimensions of globalization and transnational movements.