The power of distance: Re-theorizing social movements in Latin America

Abstract

Most scholars who work on Latin American social movements borrow frameworks developed by those who study Europe and North America. Little effort has been made to formulate alternative models deliberately sensitive to the unique political, social, cultural, and economic developments in Latin America. Furthermore, the two models most frequently utilized, mainly the political opportunity structure (POS) and new social movement (NSM) approaches, are limited in their explanatory potential and scope because they are built on "western" assumptions about state formation and state-society relations that do not hold in the Latin American context. In what follows, I offer a new and more historically specific framework for the study of social movements, built around a phenomenological understanding of space conceived as both a material and a social construct. By encouraging a sensitivity to space and how it articulates with historically given patterns of state formation, class formation, and citizenship, as well as racial, ethnic, and gender-specific identity politics, my larger aim is to provide a new way of understanding and theorizing the origins, nature, and consequences of social movements in different comparative and historical contexts. I argue that once we more conscientiously develop what Anthony Giddens, Doreen Massey, and Alan Pred, among others, call the "space/time" dimension of our theorizing,1 we can better understand social movements in Latin America and elsewhere, not just who joins them and the role that meaning and stragegy play in these decisions, but also their larger implications for political and social change.