The Global, the Local and the Personal: The Dynamics of a Social Movement in Postmodernity

Abstract

For over a century key social movements have operated on a world stage, with internationalist ethics and a global political imaginary. Labour movements, women’s movements, peace movements, and, more recently, environmental movements have actively engaged in the construction of global identities and global political projects. As processes of cultural, economic and political globalization have intensified in the postmodern era, the global scope of social movement activity has also increased, both responding to globalization and producing it. Many of the leading theorists who have drawn attention to the salience of globalization in the understanding of the contemporary social condition have also pointed to the significance of social movements as forces for social transformation (Beck, 1998; Castells, 1997; Giddens, 1991; Melucci, 1989, 1996). In this context, then, it is surprising that empirical research on social movements has been so slow to attend to the ‘planetary dimension’ (Melucci, 1989) of contemporary collective action. Research has tended to conceptualize movements as bounded by the nation-states in which they appear to operate, and individual movements have largely been studied either within the context of national societies, or through cross-national comparisons. The extent and salience of transnational connections, border-crossings and global flows of people, ideas, information and resources within and between movements have been all but ignored.KeywordsSocial MovementNuclear WeaponSouth African WomanGlobal IdentityCruise MissileThese 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.