In the mid-1990s, when the United Nations adopted positions affirming a woman's right to be free from bodily harm and to control her own reproductive health, it was both a coup for the international women's rights movement and an instructive moment for nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) seeking to influence UN decision making. Prior to the UN General Assembly's 1993 Declaration on the Elimination of All Forms of Violence against Women and the 1994 decision by the UN's Conference on Population and Development to vault women's reproductive rights and health to the forefront of its global population growth management program, there was little consensus among governments as to what constituted violence against women and how much control a woman should have over reproduction. Jutta Joachim tells the story of how, in the years leading up to these decisions, women's organizations got savvy--framing the issues strategically, seizing political opportunities in the international environment, and taking advantage of mobilizing structures--and overcame the cultural opposition of many UN-member states to broadly define the two issues and ultimately cement women's rights as an international cause. Joachim's deft examination of the documents, proceedings, and actions of the UN and women's advocacy NGOs--supplemented by interviews with key players from concerned parties, and her own participant-observation--reveals flaws in state-centered international relations theories as applied to UN policy, details the tactics and methods that NGOs can employ in order to push rights issues onto the UN agenda, and offers insights into the factors that affect NGO influence. In so doing, Agenda Setting, the UN, and NGOs departs from conventional international relations theory by drawing on social movement literature to illustrate how rights groups can motivate change at the international level.

Politics is intuitively about relationships, but until recently the network perspective has not been a dominant part of the methodological paradigm that political scientists use to study politics. This volume is a foundational statement about networks in the study of politics.

In the mid-1990s, when the United Nations adopted positions affirming a woman's right to be free from bodily harm and to control her own reproductive health, it was both a coup for the international women's rights movement and an instructive moment for nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) seeking to influence UN decision making. Prior to the UN General Assembly's 1993 Declaration on the Elimination of All Forms of Violence against Women and the 1994 decision by the UN's Conference on Population and Development to vault women's reproductive rights and health to the forefront of its global population growth management program, there was little consensus among governments as to what constituted violence against women and how much control a woman should have over reproduction. Jutta Joachim tells the story of how, in the years leading up to these decisions, women's organizations got savvy—framing the issues strategically, seizing political opportunities in the international environment, and taking advantage of mobilizing structures—and overcame the cultural opposition of many UN-member states to broadly define the two issues and ultimately cement women's rights as an international cause. Joachim's deft examination of the documents, proceedings, and actions of the UN and women's advocacy NGOs—supplemented by interviews with key players from concerned parties, and her own participant-observation—reveals flaws in state-centered international relations theories as applied to UN policy, details the tactics and methods that NGOs can employ in order to push rights issues onto the UN agenda, and offers insights into the factors that affect NGO influence. In so doing, Agenda Setting, the UN, and NGOs departs from conventional international relations theory by drawing on social movement literature to illustrate how rights groups can motivate change at the international level.

In Activists beyond Borders, Margaret E. Keck and Kathryn Sikkink examine a type of pressure group that has been largely ignored by political analysts: networks of activists that coalesce and operate across national frontiers. Their targets may be international organizations or the policies of particular states. Historical examples of such transborder alliances include anti-slavery and woman suffrage campaigns. In the past two decades, transnational activism has had a significant impact in human rights, especially in Latin America, and advocacy networks have strongly influenced environmental politics as well. The authors also examine the emergence of an international campaign around violence against women.

The types of actors involved in transnational advocacy have diversified. Northern NGOs have lost power and influence and been restricted in their access to southern states. Southern NGOs have developed a capacity to undertake advocacy on their own and often built closer relationships with their own governments. International institutions have become more open to southern NGOs and more skeptical of southern NGOs' claims to speak for southern populations. The result is that the boomerang theory, although still useful, no longer provides the broad explanation for advocacy. A wealth of recent articles (many by contributors to this volume) showed a growing scholarly recognition of the need for new theory. "Beyond the Boomerang" offers cutting-edge scholarship and synthesizes a new theoretical framework to develop a coherent, integrated picture of the current dynamics in global advocacy. .

A comprehensive look at the global movements that are transforming international relations.

Advocacy organizations are viewed as actors motivated primarily by principled beliefs. This volume outlines a new agenda for the study of advocacy organizations, proposing a model of NGOs as collective actors that seek to fulfil normative concerns and instrumental incentives, face collective action problems, and compete as well as collaborate with other advocacy actors. The analogy of the firm is a useful way of studying advocacy actors because individuals, via advocacy NGOs, make choices which are analytically similar to those that shareholders make in the context of firms. The authors view advocacy NGOs as special types of firms that make strategic choices in policy markets which, along with creating public goods, support organizational survival, visibility, and growth. Advocacy NGOs' strategy can therefore be understood as a response to opportunities to supply distinct advocacy products to well-defined constituencies, as well as a response to normative or principled concerns.

Why are some international nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) more politically salient than others, and why are some NGOs better able to influence the norms of human rights? Internal Affairs shows how the organizational structures of human rights NGOs and their campaigns determine their influence on policy. Drawing on data from seven major international organizations—the International Committee of the Red Cross, Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, Médecins sans Frontières, Oxfam International, Anti-Slavery International, and the International League of Human Rights—Wendy H. Wong demonstrates that NGOs that choose to centralize agenda-setting and decentralize the implementation of that agenda are more successful in gaining traction in international politics.Challenging the conventional wisdom that the most successful NGOs are those that find the "right" cause or have the most resources, Wong shows that how NGOs make and implement decisions is critical to their effectiveness in influencing international norms about human rights. Building on the insights of network theory and organizational sociology, Wong traces how power works within NGOs and affects their external authority. The internal coherence of an organization, as reflected in its public statements and actions, goes a long way to assure its influence over the often tumultuous elements of the international human rights landscape.

International relations theories have conceptualized nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) as, inter alia, agenda setters for global governance. To date, existing research on NGO agenda setting has overwhelmingly focused on how advocacy is supplied by well-established, leading NGOs, but overlooked how and why advocacy is demanded in the first place. Contrary to the assumption that small NGOs are "bandwagoners," I argue that small NGOs substantially influence the variation of issue salience in a given issue area due to the interdependence of demand and supply in the advocacy market. Drawing on the insight of public opinion research, I argue that the demand for advocacy is concentrated in a small segment of the public, referred to as the issue public. Leading NGOs cannot target their advocacy to the issue public alone because they cannot maintain their social and economic resources with a small segment of the public. By contrast, small NGOs can frame their advocacy to resonate with the identities and shared values of the issue public. The stability of attention from the issue public legitimates small NGOs' agenda and allows them to exercise influence over policymakers with expert knowledge. The implications are important: the existing literature overestimates the agenda-setting power of leading NGOs while trivializing small NGOs' issue entrepreneurship. I evaluate my theory in the issue area of biodiversity and wildlife conservation to overcome a persistent problem in the study of NGO agenda setting: selection bias. As NGOs cannot advocate for non-existent species, all conservation issues are observable regardless of the outcome of advocacy work. Three empirical tests were conducted. First, I quantitatively explored the relationship between small NGOs and issue salience among Northern publics, leveraging the computational text analysis of 20,000 newspaper articles and 350,000 mission statements. Second, I analyzed the causal linkage between types of NGOs, locational issue characteristics, and their interaction with survey experiments in Canada, the United Kingdom, and Germany. Finally, I qualitatively investigated the recent case of issue emergence, pangolin (scaly anteater) conservation, through in-depth interviews. I conclude with the reviews of my overall findings and contributions and potential applications for future research.