Resisting Globalization: The Alternative Globalization Movement

Abstract

In Chapter 2, we noted that social scientists regard the study of social change as one of their central vocations. This not only involves delineating and analyzing extant and emerging institutions and processes of social transformation, but also thinking about the role of social movements. In what follows, we will examine a central contemporary social movement – the alternative globalization movement (AGM). This movement has been touted by some as a ‘second superpower’ announcing the return of people onto the stage of history (Yuen, 2004), and interpreted by others as a threat to the gains of contemporary globalization, and as violent, irrational, and reactive. Much of the preceding chapters have dealt with claims about, and critiques of globalization offered by the alternative globalization movement, but it is important to more closely analyze the movement as a movement. Our discussion of the AGM will range across a variety of issues, debates, dilemmas, organizations, and key figures of what is in truth a complex ‘movement of movements’. However, we will emphasize the return of a form of socialist contestation with the AGM, although there are some important points of differentiation between the AGM and socialism. Finally, we address the movement as an important utopian moment within contemporary globalization and, therefore, as the reappearance of utopian ‘thinking beyond’.KeywordsSocial MovementCritical TheoryNorth American Free Trade AgreementFood SovereigntySocial DemocracyThese keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.