The fundamental sociocultural change that has increased transnational activism is the growth of a stratum of individuals who travel regularly, read foreign books and journals, and become involved in networks of transactions abroad (Rosenau et al., forthcoming: ch. 1). Underlying these activities are a number of mechanisms that link individuals into webs of interest, values, and technology. Through the use of both domestic and international resources and opportunities, domestic-based activists – citizens and others – move outward to form a spectrum of “rooted cosmopolitans” who engage in regular transnational practices.

This characteristic posture extends from the civil servants who spend a considerable part of their time in transgovernmental committees (Slaughter 2004; Wessels and Rometsch 1996) to the transnational business class examined by Sklair (2001), to the transnational advocates and activists who will be the main subject of this book. We find these activists engaged in a wide variety of transnational politics: from labor and global justice activists and immigrant transnationals to environmental and humanitarian aid workers, from peace activists to anti-landmine campaigners, from advocates for transitional justice to religious advocates. They are a corollary, at the level of agency, of the internationalism that I posited as a structural condition of world politics in the preceding chapter.