Global Social Movements in Global Governance

2002

From the earliest campaign against Augusto Pinochet’s repressive practices to the recent massive demonstrations against the World Trade Organization, transnational collective action involving nongovernmental organizations has been restructuring politics and changing the world. Ranging from Santiago to Seattle and covering more than twenty-five years of transnational advocacy, the essays in Restructuring World Politics offer a clear, richly nuanced picture of this process and its far-reaching implications in an increasingly globalized political economy. The book brings together scholars, activists, and policy makers to show how such advocacy addresses—and reshapes—key issues in the areas of labor, human rights, gender justice, democratization, and sustainable development throughout the world. A primary goal of transnational advocacy is to create, strengthen, implement, and monitor international norms. How transnational networks go about doing this, why and when they succeed, and what problems and complications they face are the main themes of this book. Looking at a wide range of cases where nongovernmental actors attempt to change norms and the practices of states, international organizations, and firms in the private sector—from debt restructuring to protecting human rights, from anti-dam projects in India to the prodemocracy movement in Indonesia—the authors compellingly depict international nongovernmental organizations and transnational social movements as considerable, emerging powers in international politics, initiating, facilitating, and directing the transformation of global norms and practices.

VOLUNTAS: International Journal of Voluntary and Nonprofit Organizations, 2006

This paper considers three different conceptualizations-three civil society perspectives-on global-scale economics and geopolitics, from standpoints that can be termed 'global justice movements', 'Third World nationalism' and the 'Post-Washington Consensus'. These three perspectives on the fusion of neoliberal economics and imperialist politics sometimes converge, but often are in conflict. From different analyses flow different political strategies, concrete campaigning tactics, and varying choices of allies. Much transnational social movement literature is bound up in the subjects' norms, institutions, values, logistics and organizational development (as well as issues and advocacy-as in the case of Millennium Development Goal and anti-poverty campaigning), and very little takes ideology and analysis seriously. The advent of the World Social Forum (WSF)-and sharp debates about its merits and capacities-gave rise to new literatures that put transnational networking at the centre of the analysis. However, since so many transnational networks have grown and prospered not through programmatic integration such as the WSF would suggest, but rather through sectoral processes, ideological analysis is that much more complicated. (There is no grand WSF political programme to consider, nor is there likely ever to be one generated through consensus within the WSF.) However, because neoliberalism and imperialism are the two economic and political sides of the same coin, it is logical to analyse the nature of analysis (and then strategies, tactics and alliances) that emanate from various oppositional forces.

JWSR Editorial Policy, 2004

and Patrick Jobes provided helpful comments on an earlier version of this paper. Th e authors also wish to acknowledge the incisive comments off ered by Andrew D. Van Alstyne and anonymous reviewers on an earlier draft of this paper, which helped us produced a stronger argument and deeper analysis.

Voluntas, 2011

This article explores the alleged emancipatory potential of global civil society as regards transnational activism to promote fair trade. It examines the case of transnational activism on European Free Trade Agreements, with illustrations from the Stop EPAs campaign and activism relating to the negotiation of an Association Agreement between the EU and Central America. It looks at how ideas of fair trade are expressed and at the process of managing diversity and searching for common messages. Activists working in North-South open and ideological diverse coalitions managed the tensions between reform and resistance for the perceived benefits of increased voice. Though transnational activism created more space for debate and action thereby promoting inclusion of different voices, some views remain marginal in the search for compromises. The analysis suggests that global civil society cannot be understood as a single entity. Rather, the emancipatory contents and meanings of global civil society are being forged through these conflicts and interactions among different groups.

Globalizations, 2019

Various social movement debates on organizational design have hinged on the possibility and political usefulness of devising post-representational, a-representational or anti-representational spaces. We analyse organizational options and obstacles that the WSF faces. A denial of representational dynamics may leave internal power and structural imbalances unattended. We raise the question whether the WSF process can intersect the current instances of activism across the planet including the climate justice movement. We explore its changing attitudes toward representational decision-making. Finally, we suggest that the relationship between traditional organization-building and internet-mediated decision-making practices developing at the intersection between the local, the global and the virtual could be debated on the road to the next global WSF, likely to take place in Mexico.

2014

The contestation over existing and projected forms of globalization across the turn of the millennium was crucial to bringing together a loosely aligned set of globalizing social movements both as a global movement-of-movements, and a movement-for-itself. Although it was once reductively named as ‘the anti-globalization movement’, the movement included individuals with many different standpoints ranging from those who were singularly anti-globalization to others who argued for ‘another kind’ of globalization. This book explores those movements.

2012

Oxford Handbooks Online, 2015

Most social movement research privileges the state as the main, if not the sole arena where social movement contestation takes place. By drawing from work in political sociology, international relations, and political economy of the world-system, scholars can improve understandings of the ways political conflicts are embedded in extra-local contexts. This essay clarifies some assumptions embedded in state-centric approaches and explores ideas at the borders of social movement scholarship and related fields about how the world beyond states impacts conflicts at local, national, and global scales. Having engaged the interstate arena in unprecedented ways during the 1990s, many activist groups saw more clearly this system's limited capacities for responding to deepening global crises. The early twenty-first century thus saw a growth in transnational social movement activity outside the interstate arena. This encourages us to rethink relationships between social movements and not just the state, but also the interstate system itself.

The past two decades have witnessed the emergence of a new range of transnational social movements, networks, and organizations seeking to promote a more just and equitable global order. With this broadening and deepening of crossborder citizen action, however, troubling questions have arisen about their rights of representation and accountability -the internal hierarchies of voice and access within transnational civil society are being highlighted. The rise of transnational grassroots movements, with strong constituency base and sophisticated advocacy capability at both local and global levels, is an important phenomenon in this context. These movements are formed and led by poor and marginalized groups, and defy the stereotype of grassroots movements being narrowly focused on local issues. They embody both a challenge and an opportunity for democratizing, legitimizing, and strengthening the role of transnational civil society in global policy.