Transnational Actors in War and Peace ─ Militants, Activists, and Corporations in World Politics

Transnational Actors in War and Peace explores the identities, organization, strategies, and influence of transnational actors involved in contentious politics, armed conflict, and peacemaking over the last one hundred years. While the study of transnational politics has been a rapidly growing field, to date, the disparate array of actors have not been analyzed alongside each other, making it difficult to develop a common theoretical framework or determine their relative influence on international stability, war, and peace. This work seeks to fill this gap by bringing together a diverse set of scholars focused on a range of transnational actors, such as: pirates, foreign fighters, terrorists, private military security companies, criminal networks, religious groups, diasporas, political exiles, NGOs, environmental activists, global news agencies, and feminist advocacy networks. Each chapter examines a different transnational actor and is structured around five components: how the actor is organized; how it interacts with other actors; how it communicates both internally and externally; how it influences conflict/peace; and how it reflects developments in transnationalism.

David Malet is Director of the Security Policy Studies program of the Elliott School of International Affairs at the George Washington University. He is the author of Foreign Fighters: Transnational Identity in Civil Conflicts and Biotechnology and International Security. Miriam J. Anderson is an associate professor in the Department of Politics and Public Administration at Ryerson University, Canada. She is the author of Windows of Opportunity: How Women Seize Peace Negotiations for Political Change.