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he post-cold war world is marked by the emergence, proliferation, and expansion of a wide array of transnational initiatives to address international economic, political, ecological, and social crises. In many cases these initiatives involve transnational advocacy networks, coalitions, movements, and alliances that contain (to varying degrees) government, civil society, business, and intergovernmental agency actors. These movements have demonstrated a capacity to disrupt, to place issues on the policy agenda, and to force leaders of powerful governments and intergovernmental organizations to alter at least their discourse when talking about globalization, security, human rights, and sustainable development.

These citizen-based movements are often publicly identified with the mobilizations at the WTO Ministerial Meeting in Seattle, 1999. Seattle was not the beginning of a process, however, but a moment in a longer series of activities linked to the solidarity movements and national liberation struggles of the 1970s and 1980s as well as numerous peace, labor, environment, economic and social justice, and human rights campaigns with even longer histories.

A crucial fault-line in many of these networks is that Southern and Northern members often have different perspectives about the character of the problem and about the focus of proposed solutions (recognizing, of course, that within both North and South there are often differences as well).

For example, there is typically controversy over the meaning and significance of sovereignty that arises in debates about the appropriate responses to economic globalization, the application of trade sanctions, and the promotion of conditionalities by the international financial institutions. Also, Southern activists typically fault Northern activists for failing to address the politico-military dimensions of globalization.

These divides are all the more important because the resource inequalities embedded within these movements, coalitions, and networks is often an obstacle to a full, transparent, and constructive dialogue. We believe that it is important to define and analyze these differences in the interests of:

1. Promoting more effective, unified responses by transnational citizen movements, networks, and campaigns.
2. Facilitating discussions and exchanges in which the different concerns of Northern and Southern members of citizen movements are both addressed.
3. Ensuring that less-powerful voices and less-known perspectives get a hearing.
4. Avoiding the entrenchment of the better-funded, more powerful voices of the North.

With these goals in mind, IRC's South-North dialogue tries to accomplish two goals:

• enrich ongoing South-North dialogues by expanding the discussion to a broader array of participants within both North and South, with the specific objective of expanding the reach of often under-represented voices from the South;
• highlight the cross-sectoral linkages in these issues and movements (such as addressing the often-unmentioned military dimensions of globalization).

Through this webpage, our ezine Progressive Response, and in more traditional fora such as debates, seminars, and presentations, we aim to provide arenas in which progressives can debate, dialogue, and discuss the normative, analytical, strategic, and tactical issues central to creating a more effective, representative, and accountable progressive movement for social transformation.