AS THE WORLD becomes ever more tightly integrated, rapid economic, political, and technological changes create urgent new needs for global rules. Those needs raise pressing questions about who gets to make the rules. A swiftly growing number of coalitions of civil society groups now claim the right to have a say in everything from nuclear arms control negotiations to the operations of multinational corporations. These transnational networks are much in the limelight, alternately portrayed as rock-throwing anarchists disrupting the serious deliberations of governments or as the last remaining hope for global peace and justice. Despite the hype, there has been...

IN LATE 1999, tens of thousands of people filled the streets of Seattle in one of the most visible manifestations of civil society in recent decades. They had gathered to show their opposition to the World Trade Organization (WTO) and the broader forces of economic integration that it represents. The WTO, which was meeting to set an agenda for a proposed new round of global trade negotiations, found itself under scrutiny as never before. For several days, television news shows around the world displayed protesters being gassed and arrested by the hundreds. Although media reports portrayed the protesters as a...

IN 1999, AN ARGENTINE group called Poder Ciudadano (Citizen Power) negotiated an integrity pact with the city government of Buenos Aires. Under the agreement, Poder Ciudadano is monitoring a $1.2 billion subway construction project to root out corruption. In other words, a nongovernmental organization (NGO) is now playing a crucial role in ensuring that there is scrupulous compliance with the legal and ethical principles of the procurement procedure, that government and the companies are fully responsible for the actions of their employees, and that there will be greater openness through public hearings and access to all documents and files related...

IT WAS JUST PAST MIDNIGHT in New York on May 13, 1995. Diplomats from the 178 countries that were party to the 1968 Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons (NPT) had agreed on a package of decisions to strengthen and extend the treaty indefinitely. More than 700 representatives from 195 nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) had spent the previous four weeks attending the conference at which the treaty was evaluated and renewed, the culmination of years of work for some of them. When the conference president, Jayantha Dhanapala, closed with his tribute to NGOs, he was paying a well-deserved compliment, albeit...

AROUND THE WORLD, perhaps the most dramatic conflicts over how to pursue sustainable development with democratic governance have occurred in the contestation over big dams.¹ The massive scale of these projects, and their seeming ability to bring powerful and capricious natural forces under human control, historically gave them a unique hold on the social imagination.

For proponents, dams symbolize temples of progress and modernity, from a life controlled by nature and tradition to one in which the environment is ruled by technology, and tradition by science. But a growing number of opponents see the same projects as destructive of nature...

OVER THE PAST DECADE, armed insurgencies have abounded around the world. Most are lucky to garner an occasional headline abroad. However, a visit to the Zapatistas in Cyberspace web site¹ suggests that the uprising by the Zapatistas in Mexico is no ordinary one. The web site provides access to an impressive collection of worldwide resources on the Ejercito Zapatista de Liberacion Nacional (EZLN), with links to pro-Zapatista groups in Austin, Texas; Melbourne, Australia; Torino, Italy; Quebec, Canada; Amsterdam, the Netherlands; and Dublin, Ireland. The domestic politics of Mexico, it seems, has become the focus of an extensive transnational network.

The...

IN DECEMBER 1997, the International Campaign to Ban Landmines (ICBL) and its coordinator Jody Williams jointly received the Nobel Peace Prize for helping to establish an international convention that bans antipersonnel land mines. Half the prize money went directly to Williams, but the other half had to wait nearly a year to reach the ICBL. Why? Because the ICBL did not legally exist. It was an amorphous network of nongovernmental organizations (NGOs), not registered as an entity anywhere in the world. Yet this network achieved what critics had derided as a “utopian” objective, and it did so less than five...

IN OCTOBER 1998, a Spanish judge requested that Britain arrest and extradite to Spain the former Chilean dictator General Augusto Pinochet to stand trial for genocide, torture, and executions. During the 1970s, Pinochet had been responsible for some of the worst human rights abuses in the history of his country. When Chile returned to democracy in 1990, few perpetrators of human rights abuses were brought to justice. General Pinochet became a member for life of the Chilean Senate, enjoying diplomatic immunity as a former head of state. But are torture and genocide part of the job description for heads of...

THE PREVIOUS SIX CHAPTERS have provided an in-depth examination of how transnational networks arise and operate and what they accomplish. This chapter evaluates the answers they provide to the questions outlined in chapter 1: how powerful the networks are, whether the sources of their power are sustainable, and what role for transnational civil society is desirable.

If the previous six chapters make any one thing clear, it is this: the growing attention to transnational civil society is not mere hoopla. It reflects a real, and considerable, increase in the number and effectiveness of transnational nongovernmental networks. The power of transnational...