alternative to state-based thinking. That debate withered away as state-centric
approaches to international relations thinking came to dominate. But as Thomas
Risse-Kappen put it in his edited volume onBringing Transnational Relations Back
In 2 ( 1995 , xi), ‘‘The end of the Cold War and the dissatisfaction with prevailing
approaches to international relations have opened new space for theorizing about
world politics.’’
Thus, the 1990 s saw an explosion in the number of scholarly works examining
the causes and consequences of the rapid rise of transnational citizen-group ties.
Because the dominant strands of theory in international relations simply assume
that non-state actors play little if any role in the world, much of this early literature
was aimed at proving those theories wrong, or at least incomplete (Boli and
Thomas 1999 ; Florini 2000 ; Keck and Sikkink 1998 ; Risse-Kappen 1995 ; Smith,
ChatWeld, and Pagnucco 1997 ).
The scholarly literature frequently used in-depth case studies in a theoretical
framework aimed at understanding whether, how, and when NGOs mattered in
international politics. The Risse-Kappen volume, for example, set out to ask
‘‘under what domestic and international circumstances do transnational coalitions
and actors who attempt to change policy outcomes in a speciWc issue-area succeed
or fail to achieve their goals?’’ (Risse-Kappen 1995 ; see also Edwards and Gaventa
2001 ). The volume incorporated cases ranging across disparate issue-areas,
including international economics, environment, security, and human rights.
The actors examined included not only formal international NGOs but also
multinational corporations, transgovernmental ties, and loosely connected social
groups. The theoretical bases of the volume brought together insights from
theories focused on domestic structures within polities and from theories looking
at degrees of international institutionalization, such as regime theory.
Other works have drawn on theoretical traditions in sociology that address
broad social movements. Boli and Thomas ( 1999 ), for example, interpreted
the history of INGOs through the framework of a sociological theory known as
world-polity institutionalism. This edited volume used eight case studies, four on
social movements (environment, women, Esperanto, and the International Red
Cross) and four examining technical, scientiWc, and development sectors. The
volume concluded with an analysis of a core theoretical problems—how can
INGOs exercise inXuence given their lack of resources and coercive enforcement
capabilities?—arguing that the authority of INGOs is legitimated by their
structures, their procedures, their purposes, and the credential and charisma of
their members.
Some scholars have crossed disciplinary boundaries to combine the insights of
sociology with theories taken from the international relationsWeld to examine
2 This title was a reference to the inXuential edited volume by P. B. Evans, D. Rueschmeyer, and
T. Skocpol,Bringing the State Back In(Cambridge University Press, 1985 ).
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