Institutional contexts and the geography of collaboration in transnational social movement organizations, 1980--2000

Since the late 1980s, governments around the world have intensified their efforts to formalize regional relationships. The European Union, the North American Free Trade Agreement, and the Association of Southeast Asian Nations are but three examples of the diversity of regional systems that have ascended to prominence in the contemporary world. These systems are enmeshed with the broader institutional dynamics of political and economic globalization and are integral components of the world polity. Within sociology, however, their development and their impact on various forms of social relations have been much neglected. Taking regions as analytic sites, this dissertation advances scholarship on the relationship between institutionalized power relations in the actors. I address two related questions in this dissertation: (1) What are the effects of regionalism on the organization of transnational collective action? (2) How do global and regional institutional processes interrelate to impact the geography of transnational social movement coalitions and networks?; Using data collected from an annual census of international organizations, I examined the main questions of the dissertation in the following steps: I analyzed and compared the development of regionally organized transnational social movement organizational sectors in relation to the institutional contexts of regionalism; employing network analysis, I analyzed the geographic structure of the world network formed through shared membership in transnational social movement organizations (TSMOs) that had global membership; and I compared geographic patterns of co-participation in regional and global human rights and development TSMOs and assessed the extent to which global and regional network processes can be understood as mutually reinforcing.; I found the following: (1) Regionalism supports the emergence of transnational activist networks and coalitions worldwide; (2) Inter-state conflict and cooperation within regions impacts the geography of global activists networks; (3) Global network dynamics influence the development of regional movement sectors. The dissertation contributes to the development of a sociology of transnationalism and advances a more heterogeneous theorization of the world polity.