This study seeks to understand the mechanisms by which transnational politics influence national social movement organizations. There is growing consensus among social scientists that transnational factors play an increasingly important role in domestic politics, but there is dispute over how they matter and how much they matter. This study helps illuminate the questions by specifying how the United Nations sponsored Fourth World Conference on Women affected women's movement organizations in China, India, and other Asian countries. The emphasis of this research project is to ground the understanding of transnational influences in national contexts and organizational practices. Existing studies look to domestic factors when accounting for organizational change. Those that look at transnational factors focus almost exclusively on the effect on state action and policy. The study thus fills the theoretical gap in existing literature by integrating transnational influences into theories of organizational change. The research design calls for in-depth comparison of the Chinese and the Indian case in order to generate initial hypotheses about how transnational influences work. Comparison with a broader set of country cases will then be employed to evaluate and refine the hypotheses. The project utilizes in-depth interviews, document research, and limited participant observation. The world conference on women is only one among many conferences sponsored by international organizations to tackle a wide range of social problems such as the environment, children's rights, human rights, social development, and racial discrimination. Project results will contribute to social scientists, policymakers, and women's rights groups by illuminating the factors that make the world conferences more relevant to women and other marginalized groups in different societies by providing information about the effectiveness of various national programs as they are implemented in an increasingly interconnected transnational, global organizational and legal environment.
