Alterglobalisation Movement in Asia: New Politics of Scale

Abstract

This article aims to understand the nature of the different forms of manifestation of struggles against the expanding circuit of capital in the context of neoliberal globalisation. In the first part of this article, I try to identify the dual impact of neoliberal globalisation, which expands the basis of solidarity among different social movements by integrating the majority of the population into capitalist value-relations and at the same time creates multiple divisions between social movements by building up hierarchical relations through different social mediations such as gender, region, and nationality. In the second part I will trace the making of intra-Asia solidarity during the anti-WTO protest in Hong Kong in 2005 with a particular focus on the scaling-up strategies taken by the participants. In the third part, I will argue despite the success of Asian social movements in creating ‘Asia’ as a new space for solidarity, Asia as a tool to overcome the boundaries between different social subjects of anti-value struggle is a highly contested space, for more effective utilisation of which is subjected to efforts to overcome nationalist approaches as well as vulgar globalist approaches to alternative globalisation movement.