Sidney Tarrow is Maxwell M. Upson Professor of Government and Professor of Sociology at Cornell University. Tarrow's first book was Peasant Communism in Southern Italy (Yale, 1967). In the 1980s, after a brief foray into comparative local politics, he returned to social movements with a collaborative volume with B. Klandermans and H. Kriesi, Between Structure and Action (JAI, 1988); then to a reconstruction of Italian protest cycle of the late 1960s and early 1970s, Democracy and Disorder (Oxford, 1989). His most recent books are Power in Movement (Cambridge, 1994, 1998) (with Doug McAdam and Charles Tilly), Dynamics of Contention (Cambridge, 2001) (with Doug Imig), Contentious Europeans (Rowman and Littlefield, 2001) and (with Donatella della Porta) Transnational Protest and Global Activism (Rowman and Littlefield, 2004). A fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, he is currently Vice-President of the APSA Section on Comparative Politics.

'… Tarrow's book is highly valuable. It provides a taxonomy of forms of transnational activism that is certain to be taken up by other scholars of global social movements. His account of the range and variety of processes that characterise contentious politics at the international level seems very plausible. He also sends out an important warning to those who would see transnational activism merely as a reflex response to globalization.' Democratiya

• Part 1. Structure, Process and Actors: 1. Introduction; 2. Complex internationalism; 3. Rooted cosmopolitans and transnational activists; Part II. The Global in the Local: 4. Global framing; 5. Internalizing contention; Part III. Transitional Processes: 6. Diffusion and modularity; 7. Shifting the scale of contention; Part IV. The Local in the Global: 8. Externalizing contention; 9. Building transnational coalitions; Part V. Transnationalism at Home and Abroad: 10. Transnational impacts on domestic activism; 11. Internationalization and transnational activism.