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NGOs and Social Movements: A Study in Contrasts*
From the perspective of research on new social movements, NGOs present a challenge because, like the social movements, they are also often grassroots organizations. They act autonomously, they form networks, and they pursue partially similar goals such as environmental protection, support of people in the developing countries, and gender equality.
Social movements are bound to a national social space, even when they deal with global interdependence, or the "planetarization" of action.l They presuppose a national political public through which they are mediated and sometimes even created. The mobilization of protest is aimed at influencing local or national political institutions. Usually, specifically national forms of problems and conflicts are being attacked; for example, federal or state projects such as nuclear power plants, roads or airports. Even deeply rooted and enduring power mechanisms, such as sexism, appear in the context of national patterns of the welfare state and the political public sphere. As a result of language difficulties, scarce resources and different political circumstances, transnational cooperation between social movements is, as a rule, laborous and shortterm.2 This has epistemological consequences: As a rule, social movement research focuses on national social movements and engages in comparative studies at the most. Transborder social movement cycles are rarely the object of analysis.
In contrast, NGOs are associated with what is described in the German press as a new internationalism. In addition to purely local NGOs, there are international and supranational NGOs and northern NGOs which interlink with southern NGOs. For example, organizations such as Greenpeace or Amnesty International, which have members in any number of countries and not only think globally, but also act globally. Thus, certain categories of NGOs, distinct from social movements, operate at an international level right from the start.
The appearance of such NGOs has caused some authors to speak of a "non-governmental movement" in the Third World, and even worldwide.3 NGOs are considered by many to be a form of global social movement. Ulrich Beck argues in this way with respects to the actions of Greenpeace against the sinking of Brent Spar and the atomic tests in the Pacific. These types of NGOs take on specifically global political, ecological and social problems and mobilize a world-wide public...