ABSTRACT
Over the past three decades, NGOs have exploded in number and become influential players in world politics. Although largely ignored by scholars for many years, the academic literature has now caught up with these trends and the topic of global activism has emerged as a major new focus of research in political science and sociology. In the past five to ten years, countless studies have appeared that explore the influence of NGOs and transnational networks in many different areas of global politics, ranging from social and economic issues such as human rights, the environment, and trade, to security issues such as nuclear proliferation and humanitarian crises.1 As these studies show, NGOs through their various roles and actions – as agenda setters, policy advocates, watchdogs and providers of services – have often reshaped politics and contributed to the expansion of global governance. Despite this rapid growth of scholarly interest in NGOs, however, there have been relatively few works that have systematically examined how and why NGOs have emerged and grown in the first place. This is the central question of this book. Focusing on transnationally active NGOs based in industrialized countries, this book uses the comparative case of Japan to analyze the forces driving the emergence and recent spread of transborder citizen activism.
