Grant funds study of political activism

Cornell has received a two-year $224,575 research grant from the Ford Foundation for the study of "grassroots activism and transnational contention."

The grant, administered by the Program for the Study of Contentious Politics in Cornell's government department, will investigate non-state forms of collective action that cross national boundaries. Program director Sidney Tarrow, the Maxwell M. Upson Professor of Government and Sociology, will oversee the project.

"More and more often, contentious politics crosses national borders, involves coalitions of actors from different countries and makes claims on foreign actors or international institutions," Tarrow said. "Protesters often claim to represent grassroots social interests, but they are often accused by their targets and in the media of being irresponsible, unrooted cosmopolitans. We wish to examine who these transnational activists are, what are the links among grassroots activism, transnational social movements, states and international institutions. We are concerned with issues of representativeness, accountability, coalition-building and the effectiveness of transnational civil society groups."

The grant will help fund a two-year Workshop on Transnational Contention, through which Cornell graduate students and faculty will join major scholars from other universities to discuss various forms of transnational mobilization, its interactions with domestic social movements and its relations to international institutions. Workshop members will meet each week and also assist in the development of a scholarly database on forms of transnational mobilization.

The collaborative project involves the Cornell departments of Government, Sociology, City and Regional Planning, and Science and Technology Studies and is linked to Syracuse University's Global Studies Institute, which will be organized in spring 2003 around the transnational contention workshop.

For more information, visit the following Web site: http://falcon.arts.cornell.edu/sgt2/contention/default.htm. Or contact Jennifer Gomez at jkg24@cornell.edu.