Domesticating Social Justice Activism in the Global Era? The Process of Reconfiguring the Czech Social Justice Movement in Times of Crisis

Abstract

The contemporary economic crisis is sometimes labeled as the greatest crisis of capitalism since the Great Depression. Therefore one might expect it to become a perfect mobilizing grievance for the transnational social justice movement, which used to target the ideology of neoliberal governance and social consequences of unrestricted global financial markets. However, the current responses to the crisis and consequent austerity policies have remained mostly embedded at the national or even local level. The symbols of this struggle—Los Indignados and the Occupy movement—have focused on targeting national political issues rather than on organizing transnational coalitions and international protest events, while paying little attention to the role of global institutions and corporations. This article focuses on the case of Czech Republic and traces two broad processes—scale shift and identity shift— that led to a broader change in the meta-logic of social justice mobilization. These processes and their constituent mechanisms have transformed the globally-focused and weakly-integrated movement into dense and nationally embedded coalitions that have started to target the national consequences of neoliberal governance instead of its global political foundations.