Global Justice Movement Research Articles

Mnemonic adoption and rejection: How activists remember and forget previous mobilisations

Contributing to the growing literature on the memory-activism nexus, this article analyses how activists remember past activism. For social movements and activists, memories of past mobilisations represent both an asset and a burden. This article seeks to contribute to existing research on memory in activism by identifying recurrent patterns of how activists remember and forget previous mobilisations across different movements. Based on interviews with activists of the Global Justice Movement (1998–2007) and the Blockupy movement (2012–2015), four mnemonic modes are identified. These entail two types of mnemonic adoption, which highlight continuity with a positive or negative valence attached, and two types of mnemonic rejection, which highlight discontinuity with a positive or negative valence attached. I show how similar patterns of these mnemonic modes can be found across the two movements and their diverse subgroups. At the same time, however, these mnemonic patterns differ depending on the degree of activists’ identification with the overall movement; while activists who strongly identify with the movement in question remember failures of past mobilisations and their differences to current ones more clearly than similarities and successes, the opposite is the case for activists with low identification attachments.

Rising to the challenge: a systematic review of development of environmental justice in India

ABSTRACT Environmental justice has experienced rapid expansion in its scope and conceptualization in the last three decades. Literature on environmental justice narrates how individuals and communities mobilize to confront economic and environmental issues at the local, national, and global levels and how globalization, gender, racism, and class affect the environment. This article presents a systematic review of environmental justice in India, aimed at showing how the concept originated and came into common parlance and how it differs or actually resembles now a lot with the environmental justice discourse in the United States. The focus of this study is on various salient events that are crucial in the development of a well-established movement. The review contends that environmental justice may have only recently become a recognized concept in Indian environmental history, as a philosophy, it has been a mainstay of Indian environmental consciousness. India has an indigenous environmental justice movement, albeit not on the lines of the US. This review also suggests that the discourse on environmental justice in India is currently shaped by both global environmental justice movements as well as indigenous efforts and concerns about environmental challenges.

Academic Supervivencia and Sesi Irekani: Refusing, Reimagining, and Rearticulating Decolonization in the Social Foundations of Education

The American Educational Studies Association (AESA) was established in 1968 in a context of both local and global social justice movements. The AESA’s mission and ongoing commitment to the analysis of education and society with underlying liberal activist aims has been ongoing since. Although AESA and its membership have been critiqued and questioned for their larger impact in the field, especially in its disconnect between university academics and pk-12 teachers, the original charge and purpose has largely remained. This address seeks to put a spotlight on the foundations of the social foundations of education and by extension AESA by using settler colonial and structural racism frames to examine the enduring problematics of how academia and academic enterprises are, as Quechua scholar Sandy Grande would say, “an arm of the settler state” (p. 47). Namely, I ask, how does AESA and the field of social foundations of education advance settler futurity? However, most importantly, I will also engage, how can AESA, the field and its membership engage in anti-colonial and anti-racist self-reflection and work toward decolonizing the organization and the work that we do as faculty members in this field? To engage in this process of reflexive praxis, I will use Grande’s concept of academic survivance, which includes operating beyond the boundaries set up for us by the institution and toward “an active presence in society and the academy” (p. 12). I slightly modify survivance with Chicana feminist scholar, Ruth Trinidad-Galvan’s concept of supervivencia, which also emphasizes beyond mere survival but from the perspective of Mexican campesinas “left behind” in a context of neoliberal extractivist dislocation. Finally, I draw from my P’urhépecha community ancestry a concept also common throughout many Indigenous communities, Sesi Irekani, el buen vivir, or “the good life.” I will argue that by centering a reflexive praxis based on these saberes-haceres we can refuse, reimagine, and rearticulate a relational comunalidad that unsettles the settler within and recon/figures an alter/Native charge and decolonial practice.

Transnational Activism through the Prism of Anarchism, and Vice Versa

AbstractChapter Four of Daniel Laqua's Activism across Borders, on “Class, Revolution and Social Justice”, opens stimulating avenues for reflection with its cross-partisan approach, over an ambitious chronological span – from the post-1848 wave of revolutionary exile to the contemporary global justice movement. From the perspective of a historian of pre-1914 transnational anarchism, this brief review essay considers three prominent aspects of this chapter: historiographic perspectives on socialist activisms; the modalities of transnational activism; and borders and boundaries.

Embodied contradictions, structural power: Patient organizers in the movement for global health justice.

Embodied contradictions, structural power: Patient organizers in the movement for global health justice.

기후정의운동의 운동사적 맥락에 관한 연구: 환경정의운동과 지구정의운동을 중심으로

기후정의운동의 운동사적 맥락에 관한 연구: 환경정의운동과 지구정의운동을 중심으로

The Socio-ecological Question, the Global Environmental Justice Movement and Anti-systemic Environmentalism

Abstract This article makes two central arguments: i) we can understand the current phase of anti-systemic movements predominantly through the globally expanding forms of resistance centered on environment, food, climate, soil, water, and so on as a collective socio-ecological critique and confrontation of the global capitalist relations of production; and ii) we can conceptually specify the global environmental justice movement through the notion of anti-systemic environmentalism expressing “the second contradiction of capitalism,” i.e., the socio-ecological crisis of the capitalist world system. In making these arguments, it introduces the concept of the socio-ecological question, theoretically grounded in the value theory of nature, in establishing the world-historical relationality among diverse place-based socio-environmental movements.

A Game of Whac-A-Mole

Abstract This article focuses on the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) movement's utilization of ‘fluidity,’ conceptualized as the ability to adapt campaign tactics to multiple arenas and political opportunity structures simultaneously. Framing BDS as both a social movement and a transnational advocacy network, it demonstrates the movement's fluidity in the context of three campaigns: the campaign at the 65th FIFA (Federation Internationale de Football Association) congress in 2015, which illustrates an ‘outsider’ strategy aimed at intergovernmental institutions; the 2014 Olive Declaration of municipalities endorsing BDS, which illustrates how local ‘insider’ campaigns can combine to create a translocal campaign; and the ‘Ferguson-Gaza moment’ in 2014, which illustrates how movements can engage at the level of civil society and embed themselves in the broader global justice movement.

Framing health and care: legacies and innovation during the pandemic

ABSTRACT Since the outbreak of the Covid-19 pandemic, progressive social movements have been engaged in an incredibly intense period of contestation. Confronted with the unprecedented extent of the crisis, the current wave of mobilization brought together both older and newer actors, bridging generations and movement sectors, building on past experiences of previous mobilizations while also innovating in important ways. The Covid-19 pandemic provides an opportunity to contextualize the role of past mobilizations in contemporary struggles, singling out continuities and innovation in the forms of resistance, collective frames, and organizational models. This paper focuses on the framing of health rights and analyzes the emergence of care as a bridging frame in the movement campaigns developed during the Covid-19 crisis. In examining the processes of cross-temporal diffusion, it considers the legacy of the Global Justice Movement and its offspring in the current mobilization in Italy. Through the analysis of key documents produced by social movements triangulated with in-depth interviews with activists, we observe the ways in which some collective frames migrate from past mobilizations to new ones, and are adapted through the reactivation of old organizational networks and the emergence of new organizations.

Emotional cycles and collective action: Global crises and the World Social Forum

As the world suffers the effects of the Covid-19 pandemic, global justice activists pursue political solutions to its devastating consequences especially on the weakest sections of the world’s population. I analyse activists’ responses to the 2008 financial crisis to reflect on how collective action is impacted by social crises. The global justice movement and the financial sector face recurring, intertwined, and inversely related cycles of exuberance and crash. I find that, on the one hand, the prevalence and intensity of recurring crises in large transnational collective actors depend on factors including their prevalent emotional dynamics, their dispositions towards their objectives, and their ability to gauge external reality. On the other hand, differential outcomes of crises in groups are accounted for by the capacity to mourn the losses suffered, as opposed to the denial of responsibility and the externalisation of blame. I analyse these emotional dynamics through psychoanalytic lenses to provide a contribution to the literature on the cycles of collective action and, more broadly, to the study of political action and social change.

Lessons for Left-Wing Populism from the 2010s Austerity Wave in Europe

Lessons for Left-Wing Populism from the 2010s Austerity Wave in Europe

Reimagining global health: From decolonisation to indigenization

ABSTRACT In the wake of global racial justice and Indigenous sovereignty movements, there have been calls to decolonise global health as an academic discipline and set of policies, programmes, and practices. Identifying these calls for decolonisation of global health as both promising but limited, we argue that global health needs to engage in deeper critical reassessment of its ontological foundations in Western thought and that Indigenous ontologies have an important role to play in deconstructing and reimagining global health. We identify four Western ontological assumptions that are particularly relevant to global health and demonstrate how Indigenous ontologies assist in thinking outside of and beyond these assumptions, offering a path toward a reconstructed Indigenized imagining of global health.

When global problems come home: Engagement with climate change within the intersecting affective spaces of parenting and activism

Emotional engagement with climate change has been identified as an important research agenda. Recent studies have suggested parental worry for children and future generations are motives for climate activism, highlighting both personal and social justice concerns. A global parent-led climate justice movement specifically articulating this has emerged, yet currently remains under-researched. At the same time, social movement research has tended to overlook the social embeddedness of activism. To address these gaps in knowledge, this study used a qualitative mix of diary entries and interviews of UK-based mothers and fathers to investigate the overlapping emotional spaces of climate activism and parenting. It found that a parental lens on climate, informed by dystopian imaginings and processes of responsibilisation amplified fear and risk-related feelings, but were managed by channelling energy into a diverse array of collective action spaces. This led to positive emotions of hope and solidarity which were fostered and circulated within close personal relationships. In addition, the study found times and spaces which put a strain on affective engagement, and on partner relationships. The paper discusses the lack of moral anger in this sample of climate activists compared to previous research, and calls for further enquiry into the movement's development of intergenerational justice grievances.

The Only Commonality is Uncommonality: Progressive Protest from the Mid-1980s, Globalization from Below, Environmental Devastation, Climate Change, and Questioning of Industrial Civilization

Noting the extensive number of progressive protests, mobilizations, and social disruption from below since the mid-1980s, not just in the US but around the world, this article suggests that what is going on is the expansion of the global economic and social justice movement, a bottom-up form of globalization. It suggests that this is, ultimately, a rejection of industrial civilization itself. And it points out, through an examination of the effects of climate change, that the continued existence of industrial civilization is imposing a burden on the peoples of the world that far outweighs its benefits, and suggests that protests will expand as more and more people understand the costs of industrial civilization.

Toward decolonial globalisation studies

ABSTRACT This article draws on the epistemologies of the South, namely decolonial theory, to point to the analytical and interpretive limitations of northern theories of globalisation. It gestures toward decolonial globalisation studies to provide an alternative reading of global justice movements, including university student movements in Latin America. Moreover, it maintains that situating university student movements geopolitically provides a valuable way out of the theoretical limitations of critical globalisation studies informed by northern perspectives. By adopting a geopolitical perspective, decolonial globalisation studies unsettles and provincialises the central myth of modernity, which portrays the emergence of modern institutions and globalisation as endogenous European and Anglo-American phenomena subsequently diffused to the Global South. Finally, this article addresses the need for decolonial globalisation studies to ground its theorisation in alternative sites of knowledge production.

Steering ethics toward social justice

Abstract The interpreting field has not been impervious to the call for dismantling patterns of injustice that extend down to the communication encounter. However, its engagement with socio-political commitment and change remains largely constrained by a deontological and liberal tradition. To decenter interpreting from this tradition and to steer its ethics toward social justice, this paper proposes a meta-ethical approach to and a model of interpreting. It explores activist interpreting in the global justice movement from three complementary standpoints: interpreting in the encounter (micro), politics of organization (macro) and enquiry (meso). The case study shows that social justice does not only concern the leverage of citizens’ benefits in the welfare state, but also consists of a communicational and social performance. The model can equip researchers to harness the liberatory potential of praxes, discourses and epistemologies found in the social movement milieu to refashion ethical language and thought in the field.

Contextualising Feminist Global Justice Activism: A Case Study of the Gezi Park Protests

Neoliberal globalisation has not affected everywhere equally. It has deepened the socio-economic inequalities and in some regions has stimulated conservative counter-movements, which affect women more than men. Feminists in the Global Justice Movement draw attention to such issues by highlighting the interrelated nature of patriarchy and the global economic order. In this way, they could incorporate gender justice claims into the wider agenda of the Global Justice Movement and increase their influence as a political actor. This article examines the Gezi Park protests in Turkey as an example of this particular type of feminist activism and contextualises it in local forms of collective action. Utilising Eschle and Maiguashca’s (2010) framework, this article explores how women experience unjust global patterns in local contexts and how oppressive patriarchal neoliberal structures at different levels speak to each other. In Turkey’s context, neoliberal restructuring policies are accompanied by the promotion of religious, familial and heterosexual values along with the state’s penetration into private space, which affects women disproportionally. Turkish feminists in the local Gezi Park protests responded to such regional and national contexts, whilst also defining power relations, injustices and demands in line with international frameworks of feminist anti-globalisation activisms.

“Whose streets? Our streets!”: Negotiations of Space and Violence in Protests

AbstractThis article suggests that focusing on situational, interactional space provides a fruitful addition to understanding protest dynamics and the emergence of violence in protests. It suggests connecting insights from social movement research and violence research to examine what happens spatially during a protest. Examining how space can be conceptualized situationally, the article then employs document and visual data, participant observation, and interviews in a qualitative analysis and cross-case comparison of protest marches. Situational space is studied in peaceful and violent marches during three social movements (Global Justice Movement, New Social Movements, 1960s student movement). Findings suggest that a clearly defined, transparent concept of situational space during protest marches can be useful in understanding the unfolding of protest events and that situational space is of particular relevance for the emergence of protest violence. Space is not only a common comfort zone, but for protests, territory also consists of implicit power relations. Thus, spatial incursions by police officers or protesters during protests into space assigned to the other group drastically change dynamics during protest marches, lead to mistrust and rising tensions, and form a crucial bedrock for violent eruptions.

Keeping Your Enemies Close? The Variety of Social Movements’ Reactions to International Organizations’ Opening Up

Abstract Starting in the 1990s, international organizations (IOs) have created various opportunities of access for civil society to voice criticism. While international relations (IR) scholarship has increasingly addressed the resulting interaction between IOs and civil society with a focus on NGOs, we know little about the particular reactions to IOs’ opening up by social movements. This paper analyzes reactions to opening up by a transnational social movement centrally addressing IOs: the Global Justice Movement (GJM). Examining reactions by different groups of the GJM in Europe and Southeast Asia to IOs’ opening up, we demonstrate that reactions differ considerably depending on activists’ assessments of the nature of opening up. In particular, we identify four pathways of reactions on a continuum from (1) strong cooperation with IOs as a reaction to opening up, (2) temporally limited cooperation with different IOs, (3) a hybrid reaction that combines cooperation with specific IOs with a strong opposition to other IOs in reaction to their opening up, to (4) a continuous rejection of all cooperation with IOs. We show how these different reactions are shaped by activists’ perceptions of the quality of the international opening up in conjunction with national and local context factors. Furthermore, our analysis demonstrates that such perceptions can significantly change over time depending on experiences of interactions. Reactions to opening up are therefore not predictable on the basis of a movement's shape and resources only, but rather depend on a variety of factors such as the movement's perception of the IO's sincerity in a strategic and consequential interaction, as well as the movement's ideological framework and its history of interaction with institutions at other levels, especially in the domestic realm.

El Tren Maya: un escenario de conflictividad socioambiental en el posneoliberalismo mexicano

Andrés Manuel López Obrador’s government in Mexico is self-denominated as a «postneoliberal» and «leftist» regime. However, its core strategic projects clearly belong to the former mainstream of extractivist and neocolonial geopolitics which tend to generate socioenvironmental conflicts and territorial defense by local stakeholders. This paper, as a result of interdisciplinary research carried out by the Intercolegial Research Group on Political Ecology of Mexico City’s Autonomous University, address the Maya Train case, a land-use planning project that promotes predator extractivist capital advance towards relatively isolated territories, even protected by environmental laws. It is also described the Consejo Regional Indígena y Popular de Xpujil’s (CRIPX’s) resistance as a clear demonstration of «ecologism of the poor» and the global environmental justice movement.