ABSTRACT
This chapter examines the question of how and why transnational actors grow and exercise their influence from the perspective of a practitioner at Human Rights Watch. Human Rights Watch has benefited from the growing clout of the nongovernmental organization (NGO) sector as a whole, and over the years it has worked in concert with hundreds, perhaps thousands, of NGOs whose professionalism and vigor have helped to give international civil society a good name. Human Rights Watch, as the largest international human rights organization based in the United States and one of only two in the world, along with Amnesty International, to exercise a truly global scope, has itself contributed to the growth in influence of international civil society. At the end of the 1990s, Human Rights Watch started a separate Advocacy Department and began augmenting its Communications Department, ultimately recognizing these two functions as part of a triumvirate, along with the Program Department, that together constituted the organization's unique methodology.
