The New Global Politics

Global Social Movements in the Twenty-First Century

Harry Vanden, Peter Funke, Gary Prevost, Harry E. Vanden, Peter N. Funke, Gary Prevost, Harry Vanden, Peter Funke, Harry E. Vanden, Peter N. Funke, Gary Prevost

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN:
  9781138353671
• eBook ISBN:
  9781315522272
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Over the past decade, there has been an unprecedented mobilization of street protests worldwide, from the demonstrations that helped bring progressive governments to power in Latin America, to the Arab Spring, to Occupy movements in the United States and Europe, to democracy protests in China. This edited volume investigates the current status, nature and dynamics of the new politics that characterizes social movements from around the world that are part of this revolutionary wave.

Spanning case studies from Latin America, North and South Africa, the Middle East, Asia, Europe, and North America, this volume examines the varied manifestations of the current cycle of protest, which emerged from the Global South and spread to the North and highlights their interconnections – the globalized nature of these social movements. Analytically converging around Sidney Tarrow's emphasis on protest cycles, political opportunity structures and identity, the individual chapters investigate processes such as global framing, internationalization, diffusion, scale shifts, externalizations and transnational coalition building to provide an analytic cartography of the current state of social movements as they are simultaneously globalizing while still being embedded in their respective localities.

Looking at new ways of thinking and new forms of challenging power, this comprehensive volume will be of great interest to graduates and scholars in the fields of globalization, social movements and international politics.

1 Introduction

Setting the stage

Times are changing. People will no longer be quiet, calm down, stand down and stop being uppity. Rather, they can complain, protest and think in different ways as they engage in new forms of being, of protesting, of acting politically in the plazas, the streets and the parks; in the media; on their cell phones and internet connections; and perhaps, most radically, in their hearts and minds. They ever more frequently have the audacity to think that they can change things, topple governments and insist on something better – on means and mechanisms that give them a say, require that they be heeded and listened to and get actions and policies that benefit them and a broad swath of society, not just the 1 percent.

Politics and the political ideas that inspire and undergird them are changing. Parties, governments and political leaders are being discredited, being challenged and replaced – often thrown out like the rascals they are believed to be. It is a new day, a new time. Long-held views considered (by the elites?) to be the consensus are frequently being broken, discarded and discredited. The insurgent, participatory dimension of politics is flowering, as it has from time to time before: in the Commune of Paris in 1871, among the young and committed in the 1960s and particularly in 1968 France, and at other times in the history of emancipation from political domination by the few. But now there are not just a few communes like that of Paris or a few times and places where the youth and the disenfranchised take to the streets or storm the lunch counters or march in the segregated south of the United States; social movements have deposed governments in Ecuador, Iceland, Egypt and Argentina and helped to place new governments in power. There are actions, movements, democratic and participatory sentiments that are bubbling up, bursting out all over: in Chiapas and the Lacadón jungle in the 1990s; in the streets and plazas of Cochabamba, Bolivia; in the streets, plazas, factories and the Plaza de Mayo in Argentina in the early 2000s; in Tunisia’s squares and streets in early 2011; in Tahir Square in Cairo; in Madrid’s Puerta del Sol and Athens’s Syntagma Square; in Oakland, California, and in Zuccoti Park in New York; and in the streets all over the United States since 2013 through the Black Lives Matter movement.

These unruly outbursts ebb and flow, gain victories and suffer defeats, but they persist, bubble up from below and live on in the new political actors and especially in their hearts and minds even when the plazas and public spaces have been reclaimed by the forces of the old politics and their public order. These mobilizations aren’t limited to left-inspired movements, as suggested by right-wing populism in Europe. Following the “pink tide” in Latin America, what was a once strong movement of the indignados (the indignant ones) across Spain in 2011 and 2012 was winding down by the end of 2013, only to be revived and reinvigorated by a new kind of political party in 2014, Podemos (We Can), that immediately gained the enthusiasm of a vast swath of the Spanish people. By 2016 they had, through their massive rallies and in regional and national election victories, enough power and support to challenge status quo politics and challenge the long two-party hold on the Spanish political system.

A new epoch of contention

As we advance into the second decade of the twenty-first century, a substantial transformation in political culture becomes ever more apparent. There are new ways of thinking and new forms of challenging – nay, contesting – power, and new theories and analytic frameworks are needed in order to understand them. The uprising in Tunisia in early 2011 seized the world´s attention and inspired similar popular mobilizations in Egypt, the Gulf Emirates and then Syria. Authoritarian regimes and ossified democracy were being challenged by masses of people who, like the Zapatistas in the 1990s and the indigenous people in Bolivia in 2003 and 2005, found new and creative ways to contest power and advocate for the transformation of established political structures and procedures.

A new politics is in play: refined, vibrant conceptions of equality, participation, and popular democracy; an active, direct democracy; a broader concept of citizenship; and the increased importance of the common people. There was a consensus forming in territories as diverse as the highlands and the jungles of Chiapas, Mexico; the streets of Hong Kong; the plateaus of the Andes Mountains; the sweltering streets of North Africa and the Middle East; and the squares and plazas of Greece, Spain and Turkey. The people – or segments of them – had something to say, and they were looking for and experimenting with new ways to say it. As was suggested by the new work by Paul Mason (Why It’s Kicking Off Everywhere: The New Global Revolution, 2012), a revolution or something like it was breaking out all over the world. This work hoped to chart important aspects of it.

In the process, new repertoires of actions to contest power were being refined and developed. The people came to believe that they could unarm their oppressors with their creative and often outrageous actions. As Gandhi said, “I will go naked before the crowd to unarm my enemy.” Thus, unarmed masses of people confronted authoritarian governments across North Africa and the Middle East just as their counterparts had done in Southern Mexico, Southern Brazil and several Andean countries. There was a growing and rapidly spreading belief that it was time to be heard; time to stop the intimidation, subordination and repression; and time to stop being quieted, ignored, squashed, killed or co-opted. A new consciousness had congealed and spread and found manifestation in Western Europe and North America, where popular movements took to the streets in Iceland, Greece, Spain and the United States to protest the impact of the Great Recession.

This new consciousness and the logic and praxis of the new social movements swept through Latin America, Europe, the Middle East and then North America. Within Europe and the United States, “occupy” has been one of the iconic markers of this current cycle of contention. Itself inspired by Tahir Square and Iceland, the Spanish Indignados and 15M movements in Portugal and Spain, New York’s Occupy Wall Street (OWS) motivated protests and occupations in over 900 cities across roughly 80 countries. People across Europe, North America and beyond took to the streets to protest the socioeconomic and political developments in the wake of the global 2008 recession and the banking debacle (a.k.a. the Euro crisis in Europe), engaging in new repertoires of contention or reinterpreting older forms of protests such as occupation of space and encampments. In the winding down (or rather morphing) of the original occupy-type mobilizations and encampments by early 2012, novel but closely related protest forms and processes were developing such as Occupy Congress in the U.S. or Occupy Central in Hong Kong or the more recent “blockupy” protests in Europe. Similarly, Black Lives Matter emerged as a reaction to the ongoing police brutality against blacks in the U.S., itself a symptom of much deeper injustices in everyday life the poor and those of color face in the United States.

The volume at hand studies these and related movement politics through an array of country and regional studies spanning four continents and draws on the emerging theoretical literature to do so. The book’s chapters detail the diversity of protests and mobilizations across the world and the hopes and aspirations of activists from all corners of the globe. Beyond a cacophony of mobilizations and activism, however, The New Global Politics: Global Social Movements in the Twenty-First Century also unearths a shared yet variegated meta-logic that informs all protest formations, which suggests a new “epoch of social movement organizing” (Funke, 2014 and 2015). Stretching back to at least the Zapatista Army of National Liberation (EZLN) of the 1990s and the broader Global Social Justice Movements of the 2000s, this new “epoch of contention” is related but distinct from past movements and protest cycles of the so-called old and new left.¹

Keyed to the ascendance of neoliberal capitalism and to shifts in communication technologies, as well as in conversation with the histories of social movement organizing, the current epoch of contention is powered by a distinct yet dynamic and context-colored movement logic. This logic, referred to as “rhizomatic logic or rhizomatic left” (Funke, 2015), “nomadic movement logic” (Funke and Wolfson, 2015) or the “cyber left” (Wolfson, 2014), among other names, thrives on multiplicity and thus lacks a dominant core or main axis and emphasizes radical participatory democracy, horizontal organizational forms, media and communication tools, multiconnectivity and heterogeneity of political struggles, often with no central actor, issue, strategy or ideology beyond opposition to a neoliberal society and sometimes a certain reluctance to engage in resilient longer-term organizing and (at least in parts of the global north until recently) to making policy demands on the state.

To locate and better understand the emergence and nature of what we see as a new movement logic, it is thus necessary to examine it in conjunction with the shifting configurations of the global economic system and the correspondent dynamics in technology and communication practices, as well as with the implications of the end of the Cold War and the concomitant seismic shifts in the character of left politics.

The shifting dynamics of the global political economic order have often been discussed as changes from Fordism to post-Fordism and to neoliberalism. While the distinction should not be overstated, the current economic system can be differentiated by the speed and mobility of capital, goods, people and ideas. The transformations of the global political economy are in turn generating modified capital and class relations, and thus they restructure the composition of counter-struggles and movements as well as their practices and strategies. These dynamics have been fragmenting and at the same time broadening the collectivity of progressive groups and movements resisting neoliberalizing capitalism (for a meta-critique of the effects of neoliberal economics, see David Harvey, 2003).² The center of resistance is no longer predominately comprised of exploitations on factory floors and at conveyer belts but includes increasing numbers of service sector workers or students as well as ongoing oppressions structured by gender, race or sexual orientation.

In addition to these structural dynamics, the organizational history of the left itself generated the need for novel processes and linkages among this more extensive but also increasingly heterogeneous and splintered grouping. In particular, the failures of the state (socialist) projects made groups and movements of the left “wary of any group playing a vanguard role in defining the society that the overall global movement should pursue” (Fisher and Ponniah, 2003, p. 13) while recognizing the need to “articulate a common vision” (Fisher and Ponniah, 2003). Novel organizational constellations are emerging that enable configurations that seek to safeguard the heterogeneity and the groups’ autonomy while at the same time recognizing the need to bridge and congeal leftist groups and movements into new formations, albeit with mixed outcomes.

Consequently, communication serves an even more central function for generating necessary linkages and possibly commonalities between these fractured groups. As such, communication can be regarded to function as an infrastructural dimension (Funke and Wolfson, 2015), having the ability to shape and organize social relations across the fragmented landscape. The pivotal role of on- and offline communication tools is readily observable when looking at manifestations or emergences of current movements (see also Castells, 1996 and 2012). From the start, the Zapatistas creatively reappropriated web-based communication tools. The launching of Indymedia during the 1999 anti-World Trade Organization protests (Wolfson, 2014), the role of Twitter feeds during the “Green Revolution” in Iran and more recent Facebook and Twitter usages for the various occupy-type protests indicate its pivotal nature. However, it would be naïve, as some have done, to discount the ongoing importance of older forms of communication for mobilizations and movement building. The type of communication medium is variable and context specific, ranging from older forms, such as radio and print, to the newer mediums of predominately Internet-based platforms. When organizing cab drivers in cities such as Philadelphia, for example, the radio is still one of the most efficient ways to reach cabbies because they sit up to 18 hours in their cars. Similarly, “old-fashioned,” face-to-face communication plays a pivotal role in building trust and thus in organizing, and at the same time the impact of instant communication through Internet-powered platforms is apparent when examining contemporary protest formations. Hence, during the current epoch of contention, media and communication provide a pivotal infrastructure for movement politics (see Victoria Carty, 2015, and Manual Castells, 1996 and 2012).

This volume’s unique contributions

With these observations in mind, this volume investigates the current status, nature and dynamics of the new politics that characterizes social movements as it is enacted in various ways around the globe. The recent cycle of protests, which were rich in novel organizational dimensions and politics, found expression in movements such as the Zapatistas in the early 1990s, the alter-globalization movement as manifest in the Battle of Seattle in 1999, the World Social Forums beginning in 2001, the mobilization of the Bolivian masses from 2003 on, the occupy-type encampments and protests in Europe and the U.S., as well as the so-called Arab Spring. This volume takes a country and regional perspective to investigate this new global phenomena as it examines locally or regionally grounded movement formations across the world. Beginning with Reitan’s recent argument that “what began nearly two decades ago as anti-globalization morphed for a time into alter-globalization and global peace and justice or simply the movements of movements, and now seems to be congealing into a counter-hegemonic project of and for global democratization” (Reitan, 2012, p. 323), the book highlights these new dynamic and vibrant forms of movement-powered democratic participation (the new politics) as they unfold in varied and yet homologous ways across the globe.

While insightful research has been done on contemporary social movements, The New Global Politics adds a distinct and missing perspective to this impressive array of publications. Earlier work has emphasized the anti-/alter-globalization movement writ large (e.g. Castells, 2012, Conway, 2013, Eschle and Maiguashca, 2010, Flesher Fominaya, 2014, Gautney, 2010, Juris, 2008, Marks and McAdam, 1996, Pleyers, 2011, Reitan, 2007 and 2012). Others have focused on a particular region, such as prominent research on Latin American movements, which are arguably the trailblazers of the current epoch of contention (e.g. Alvarez, Dagino and Escobar, 1998, Prevost, Oliva and Vanden, 2012, Stahler-Sholk, Vanden and Becker, 2014, Stahler-Sholk, Vanden and Kuecker, 2008), on Europe (e.g. Della Porta and Calani, 2011, Flesher Fominaya and Cox, 2013, Mathers, 2016), North America (e.g. Huges et al., 2010, McAdam and Kloos, 2014), Asia (e.g. Broa...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Editors and contributors
• 1 Introduction: Setting the stage
• Part I Latin America
• Part II Africa and the Middle East
• Part III Europe and the United States
• Part IV Asia
• Index