The World Society of Social Movements: How INGOs Shape Domestic Environmental Protest

• In Event: 538 - Section on Global and Transnational Sociology Paper Session. Social Movements and Human Rights

Abstract

Under what conditions do social movements generate disruptive protest that garners international media attention? We explore the question using a new cross-national dataset on environmental protest from 1970-2010, derived from international media outlets. We test conventional social movements arguments regarding domestic resources and political opportunities. We also develop world society arguments, which highlight the importance of international actors and organizations. International NGOs not only act institutionally to vie for movement demands, but also extra-institutionally by facilitating global protests. Using mechanisms such as political connections, media knowledge, framing technique, and shared resources, INGOs encourage and facilitate protest activity on a global scale. Negative binomial regression analyses find support for both domestic and world society arguments. However, among non-democracies, international organizations appear to be more important than domestic ones, presumably due to state repression of local organizations. Our findings provide a conceptual bridge between theories of social movement emergence, social movement society, and world society.

Authors

• Erin Evans, University of California-Irvine

• Ann M. Hironaka, University of California-Irvine

• Evan Schofer, University of California-Irvine

• Sheila Xiao, University of California-Irvine