The picture of transnational society presented here challenges both radical and liberal visions of globalization. Critics decry globalization's pernicious effects on the weak. In this view, overbearing states wield powerful new technologies to control their citizens. Rapacious corporations roam the world for the least regulated production sites, exploiting workers and despoiling environments. International financial institutions impose ruinous structural adjustment programs and heartless market policies. And a homogeneous global culture drains the globe of diversity. In all of this, the world's most vulnerable populations are relentlessly ground down.

Yet globalization has also opened the field of combat on which local movements resist these forces. Most obviously, it has widened conflict geographically. With the Internet, CNN, and the wide-bodied jet, talented marketers make their causes known overseas more easily and quickly than ever before. More subtly, globalization has expanded the ideological terrain on which small-scale disputes play themselves out. Christianity and Islam long served this purpose. For centuries, their global aspirations drew outsiders to distant corners of the globe. Since the nineteenth century, democracy, capitalism, Marxism, and nationalism have played similar roles. Insurgents, cognizant of these ideologies, have tapped them to draw intervention. Today, supplementing and in some cases supplanting them are other world-encompassing doctrines: environmentalism, human rights, and perhaps “global justice.” All provide toeholds for astute challengers seeking to internationalize their causes: new sets of grievances, different names for old injuries, and a ready vocabulary for alerting distant audiences to local issues. Together, these developments create a climate primed for activism.