Feminist networkers, human rights campaigners, environmentalists, labor activists, and others have built dense, transnational webs of social-movement alliances that both challenge and are shaped by international and intergovernmental institutions. In Social Movements in the World System, Jackie Smith and Dawn Wiest bring together meticulous empirical research; an intriguing synthesis of social movement, world systems, and world polity theory; and a provocative political argument. The book suggests that to understand social movements in the world system, we need a model for global change that accounts for the ways that civil-society actors interact with the larger world polity in their efforts to advance social justice.

Smith and Wiest make three basic claims. The first is that the decline of U.S. hegemony and related global crises have created opportunities for movements interested in converging and challenging the basic logics and structures of the world economic and political system. Second is that the capacities of transnational movements—including progressive challengers as well as exclusionary and fundamentalist ones—to mobilize antisystemic challenges have increased over recent decades. Finally, and most controversially, they argue that over time, the bases of power, authority, influence, and legitimacy have shifted from territorial sovereignty, based on coercive abilities and assertions, to normative ones, based on actors' conformity to international law (pp. 3–4).

The authors build on Terry Boswell and Christopher Chase-Dunn's articulation of a “spiral of capitalism and socialism” whereby structures shape movements and their possibilities for challenging the social order, and the interactions of movements with states and interstate actors then transform the larger set of structures that form the stage on which social conflicts are expressed (p. 11).

The first of six chapters creates a synthesis of political process/resource mobilization–oriented social-movement theory, work on the political economy of world systems, and that on the world polity. This approach allows the discussion to locate the movements within ongoing debates about the global economic crisis, and within a longer historical time frame—one that sees the current decline of U.S. hegemony as only the most recent chapter in the transformations of the world system.

The second chapter analyzes patterns in international organizations, using a data set that Smith and Wiest built using the Yearbook of International Organizations, published annually since the 1950s. Their careful work shows the growth of international organizations since that time, but also the transformation of the different sectors within the world polity. They show how international organizations are connected to different regions in the world system, and how the structure and form of these connections have become both denser and more decentralized. Of particular interest is the various ways in which movements tied to the Global South are deeply involved in this process of transnational networking.

Next, the authors explore sites where counterhegemonic capacity is shaped and built. These include regional organizations such as the African Union, the Organization of American States, the European Council, or the Association of Southeast Asian Nations, as well as the global conferences around women, the environment, disarmament, and human rights hosted by the United Nations. The authors show how these increased the “organizing capacities of transnational social movements and introduced activists to new ways of understanding and framing global problems” (p. 100). These conferences also facilitated the development of skills and particular models for organizing across cultural, linguistic, and other differences, and were crucial for integrating southern-based activists into transnational social-movement organizations, particularly in the last decades of the twentieth century. However, this does not imply that the UN and other intergovernmental organizations are the engine of transnational social-movement networks. Indeed, one intriguing finding is that movement organizations formed during years whenconferences were organized were less likely to maintain ties to intergovernmental organizations. A reluctance to maintain such relations, one might imagine, could be due to a fear of co-optation by such institutions.

Chapter 5, “Institutional Logics and Paradoxes,” explores the paradoxical effects of participation in intergovernmental fora like the UN conferences and regional bodies on social movements. World polity analysts like Paul DiMaggio and Walter Powell, and Ronald Jepperson and John Meyer, have documented the tendency of states and other organizations, including International nongovernmental organizations (INGOs), to mimic other entities in their environments, a phenomenon referred to as “isomorphism” (p. 31). Subsequent activist and scholarly observers argue that a similar process happens to transnational social movements operating within the intergovernmental system, limiting the effectiveness of their challenges. Smith and Wiest challenge this assumption by disaggregating the sources of isomorphism—the way that the field constrains and channels organizational form and life—into three influences: engagement in professional networks, consultative status at the UN, and embeddedness (number and nature of ties to intergovernmental organizations), and they evaluate them empirically. They do find some evidence of what one might expect—that those that conform most closely with dominant models are less effective at engaging with more marginalized groups (in the Global South or NGOs). However, they also find that those organizations most tied to intergovernmental bodies are more able to forge connections to less powerful actors in the world polity and tend to have more ties to other INGOs as well.

Smith and Wiest explain this paradox by showing how intergovernmental institutions and human rights norms are distinct cosmopolitan projects. Even while intergovernmental institutions are facilitating neoliberalism, human rights norms are providing ammunition for its demise. It is within this paradox that transnational movements and intergovernmental institutions are operating, and it is this tension—between liberal ideologies that are central to the culture of the UN and sustained economic inequalities—that angers and stimulates transnational organizing.

Overall, this compelling book is driven by important questions of political strategy that emerge both from the literature and from the important public sociology of both authors. Smith and Wiest echo the questions of many when they ask how transnational social movements can effectively influence the world system and whether engaging with intergovernmental institutions can be useful. Their conclusion pushes social-movement activists not to reject intergovernmental institutions and human rights frameworks as sites of reformism and co-optation, showing instead that they provide important opportunities for building inclusive movements. The argument also challenges the skepticism of those who neglect social movements in their intergovernmental work for human rights and social justice—showing how movements push institutions in their work. Their data are compelling, the argument is clear and convincing, and one suspects that future work will allow us to better understand how intergovernmental institutions and counterhegemonic movements interact in moments of crisis in greater temporal, sectoral, and geographic detail.

Social Movements in the World System is an important piece of scholarship, one that should be read by those who are grappling with the puzzles of transnational political life. It would make a useful addition to advanced undergraduate or graduate courses on globalization, or on social movements.