A series of fundamental transformations in global politics calls for an equally fundamental rethinking of how we have come to understand this central aspect of contemporary life. Processes of globalisation have led to various cross-territorial interactions that render the political and mental boundaries of the existing international system increasingly anachronistic. Nation-states no longer play the only role in a world where financial, productive and informational dynamics have come to disobey, transgress and challenge the deeply entrenched political principle of state sovereignty. This book is to be read in the context of recently undertaken efforts to understand these and other changing dimensions of global politics. Its prime task has been to scrutinise the role that dissent plays at a time when the transgression of boundaries has become a common feature of life.

A conceptual break with existing understandings of global politics is necessary to recognise trans-territorial dissident practices and to comprehend the processes through which they exert human agency. A long tradition of conceptualising global politics in state-centric ways has entrenched spatial and mental boundaries between domestic and international spheres such that various forms of agency have become virtually unrecognised, or at least untheorised. The centrality of dissent can thus be appreciated only once we view global politics, at least for a moment, not as interactions between sovereign states, but as ‘a transversal site of contestation’.