Global Civil Society and Transversal Hegemony

The Globalization-Contestation Nexus

Karen Buckley

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9781138909403
• eBook ISBN: 9781135047825
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

There has been clear recognition of tendencies towards uncritically celebrating resistance and the need for critical appraisal within the literature on globalization and contestation.

This book provides a conceptual history of global civil society and a critical examination of the politics of resistance in the global political economy. It uses a dialectical method of analysis to illustrate the conceptual stasis of mainstream approaches to questions of globalization and contestation, while demonstrating the potential of a Gramscian approach to reconstitute hegemony as a key analytical and explanatory tool. Buckley offers insight to the movements of transversal hegemony and existent and anticipated modes of social relation through the case studies of the World Social Forum and the World People's Conference on Climate Change.

Offering a more comprehensive understanding of change in the global political economy, this book will be of interest to students and scholars of international political economy, globalization, global civil society, sociology, and the politics resistance.

1

Introduction: globalization and contestation

For just over a decade, the World Social Forum (WSF) has functioned as a focal meeting point for movements, groups and individuals to discuss and develop alternatives to neoliberal globalization. Partly emergent from the optimism and strength of anti-globalization demonstrations and social movement formations of the late 1990s, early assessments centred on the ‘globalization of solidarity’ and the World Social Forum as a concrete expression of ‘counter-hegemonic globalization’ headed by an ‘emancipatory global civil society’ (Santos 2006a: 42–43). This was carried forward by the momentum of its annual event and support by organizers and participants. During the early years, there was a consistent increase in attendance at annual gatherings such as Mumbai, India in 2004 and Porto Alegre, Brazil in 2005. The annual forum was extended to Nairobi, Kenya in 2007, Dakar, Senegal in 2011, and Tunis, Tunisia in 2013.¹ The momentum of the World Social Forum has been reinforced by descriptions of it as a novel ‘open space’ (Whitaker 2004) or ‘new Bandung’ (Hardt 2002) in which the disparate groups that make up an ‘emancipatory’ global civil society are able to converge and synthesize their common points of opposition to neoliberal globalization and work towards the creation of another possible world (Worth and Buckley 2009).

However, expressions of global civil society in relation to global contestation and global governance more broadly tend uncritically to celebrate resistance rather than engage in critical conceptualization to understand more fully the position of global civil society on the terrain of the global political economy. This takes places alongside recognition of the conceptual shortcomings of global civil society. It is described as ‘to a large extent an analytical mirage’ that lacks sufficient accuracy in providing clear accounts of changing forms of globalization and contestation (Cerny 2006: 97). It is also argued that global civil society retains illusory and phantasmal qualities that ‘may actually stunt rather than stimulate political thinking about what might be born in the world economy’ (Drainville 2004: 6). Indeed, global civil society has been considered ‘an analytical and political milestone around postmarxist necks’— for its analysis of globalization, reification of boundaries and spheres, and failure to deal with the political implications of the differences between global movements (Eschle 2001: 62).

There is much evident interest in global civil society and a corresponding proliferation of literature, theories and empirical accounts on contesting globalization and global governance. Within critical and Gramscian frameworks, there has been a recent shift in attention towards resistance and counter-hegemony in the global political economy (Marchand 2005: 216; Marchand 2003: 147). Additionally, a number of key discussions and frameworks to conceptualize the ‘politics of resistance’ assess interrelations between neoliberal economic globalization and social forces (Gills 2000). However, when drawing on global civil society in particular, accounts on contesting globalization and global governance converge towards similar delimited understandings of processes of change and contestation. Considerable scope remains for the further development and articulation of modes of social relation engaged in by global civil society in and towards the global political economy (cf. Drainville 2004, 2012). In this book, I draw explicit attention to the potential insights and new ways of seeing and understanding that Gramscian civil society and hegemony offer. Global civil society and transversal hegemony are used throughout as key analytical and explanatory tools towards understanding change in the global political economy.

The global political economy of resistance

The relatively recent disciplinary call for a ‘new International Political Economy’ (NIPE) and subsequent periodic reminders seeking to retain its continued relevance (Murphy and Tooze 1991; Gills 2001; Shields et al. 2011), in addition to emerging areas such as critical globalization studies (Mittelman 2005), are considered in this book to provide an initial point of theoretical clarity in their potential applications to the global political economy of resistance. Intending to offer more adequate explanations of the changing global political economy, the call for a NIPE, for example, proposes to:

• Move beyond a narrow view of the most important questions in the field;
• Update and broaden our view of scholarly ‘rigor’; and
• Integrate developments in the philosophy of social science (Murphy and Tooze 1991).

A broad range of ‘world order’ approaches drawing on Cox (1981, 1983, 1987), in particular, reinforce many of these proposals. Among them, a volume on theoretical innovation and historical transformations in international studies, edited by Gill and Mittelman (1997), seeks to extend the world order approach to focus on the changing contours of world order, the remaking of global theory, globalization and structural change, and social movements. This is followed by a forum in New Political Economy on re-orienting the new (International) Political Economy (Gills 2001). This piece takes stock of the potential of a new political economy that is simultaneously rooted in the traditions of political economy and in its capacity to engage in holistic multidisciplinary knowledge construction on the important issues affecting the world political economy. More recently, in a volume on ‘Critical International Political Economy’ (CIPE), Shields et al. (2011) issue similar reminders to critical scholars to engage in intellectual candour and scholarly innovation, rather than assume critical attributes to be self-evident in their own work. Adopting a tripartite structure, this volume emphasizes critical dialogue to encourage conceptual reflexivity and an enriched understanding of the world, critical debate to unsettle unwarranted silences, and critical dissensus to assert a transformed means of understanding the world in which we live.

While the path towards a critical global political economy of resistance can be traced back through periodic reminders, the works mentioned here are not exclusive to this trajectory but are in themselves indicative of the objective of critical thinking to encourage reflexivity and the translation of reflexivity into concrete analysis. The reminder, then, that critical attributes can be portrayed as increasingly self-evident in critical work, is taken seriously in this book and extended to my concern with global civil society and the global political economy of resistance. The political economy concerns with which I engage are located close to those of the politics of resistance. An edited collection on Globalization and the Politics of Resistance (Gills 2000), initially published as a special issue of New Political Economy at the same time as Gill and Mittelman’s intervention, sought to intervene in the debate on globalization and alter its intellectual and political direction. In particular, the politics of resistance picked up on an essential critique of Cox’s ‘patient’ support for a new polity to emerge from the gradual, almost passive, elongation of a war of position (cf. Drainville 1994). The politics of resistance, in contrast, would ‘reclaim the terrain of the political’ and ‘make concrete strategies and concepts of “resistance” central’ to analyses of globalization (Gills 2000). The rationale for this approach retains contemporary relevance; sustained market and financial volatility, for example, continues to push people to find more innovative ways to safeguard their futures, to which emerging social movements, alter-globalization movements, movements for social justice—Occupy Wall Street, the Spanish Indignados and Arab uprisings, amongst many others—attest (cf. Boyer and Drache 1996, cited in Gills 2000). From a disciplinary perspective the continued technical and definitional emphasis of argumentation also reaffirms the meaning of the politics of resistance in the current context. Furthermore, the integration of resistance into the study on Power and Resistance in the New World Order (Gill 2008) underlines the need for a more critical approach to resistance. Paying more attention to these reminders in the contemporary context builds on the aims of earlier research to generate:

a perspective which needs to be understood as a part of the historical process, that is, its form of engagement involves human knowledge, consciousness and action in the making of history and shaping our collective futures.

(Gill 1993: 17)

The politics of resistance, nonetheless, continues to jostle for a place in International Political Economy and the contemporary context of globalization and contestation places particular demands on critical political economy perspectives to pay more attention to accumulated periodic reminders.

The components of ‘critical globalization studies’ (Mittelman 2005; Appelbaum and Robinson 2005)² potentially contribute to a critical framework from which globalization and contestation can be analysed and strengthened conceptualizations of civil society and hegemony applied. The first component of critical globalization studies centres on reflexivity and emphasizes the relationship between knowledge and material and political conditions. Reflexivity, like critical theory (Cox 1986), investigates the historical background of theories and perspectives and the nature of interests underpinning them. It highlights the post-positivist challenge to distinguish between facts and values and is applied, for example, to textual analysis on studies considering the position of civil society in contesting global governance in this book. Further to this, critical globalization studies introduces a temporal dimension and builds on reflexivity through proposing ‘rigorous historical thinking’ (Mittelman 2005: 24). Globalization, therefore, is not inevitable but is open-ended and encompasses its own social relations (see also Thompson 1963). In this book the inevitable nature of globalization and contestation is critiqued and focus is placed on various modes of social relation in the global political economy. ‘Historicism’, meanwhile, connects with advice to put in place an open-ended and multi-directional form of research which critically considers the meaning and history of ideas (cf. Germain and Kenny 1998). Decentring, in addition, points to the significance of a variety of perspectives on globalization that emerge not just from the centre but also from the margins. There are challenges associated with decentring hegemonic perspectives on globalization, even within more ‘marginal’ forums in the global political economy such as the World Social Forum and World People’s Conference on Climate Change and the Rights of Mother Earth (WPCCC), held in Cochabamba, Bolivia, in 2010. Additionally, what many consider to be marginal civil society in Southern Africa is particularly demonstrative of the patterns of inclusion and exclusion, internal paradoxes and conflicts within civil society (cf. Söderbaum 2007), and also has a bearing on conceptualizations of global civil society.

A further component of critical globalization studies emphasizes the importance of crossovers ‘between the social sciences and complementary branches of knowledge’ (Mittelman 2005: 25). A combination of many research avenues that may bridge, for example, medical, social, cultural, economic and political research, contributes to holistic understandings. Interdisciplinary learning is a vital aspect of research on globalization and contestation as it embraces wide cross-fertilization and processes of knowledge construction. While interdisciplinary learning or multidisciplinarity may complicate the character and content of a given discipline, and presents considerable difficulties in terms of intellectual control, rigour and focus (Gills 2001: 236), it nonetheless offers more potential to address global, more complex, themes (Schuurman 2009: 832). Internal crossovers or intra-perspective analyses are particularly emphasized towards the end of this book. The advantage of intra-perspective analysis is to encourage a comprehensive evolution of Gramscian approaches from critique of other International Relations (IR) and Global Political Economy (GPE) approaches to constructive engagement with them. Lastly, critical globalization studies also offers a productive focus on strategic transformations: ‘Strategic transformations are about establishing counter-hegemony: how to engage hegemonic power, upend it, and offer an emancipatory vision’ (Mittelman 2005: 25). This component, while significant, is most neglected in studies on contestation. Gramscian studies, for example, can do much more to deepen their analyses of hegemony and counter-hegemony, more concretely locate civil society within hegemony, and consider modes of relation in the global political economy.

There is a clear rationale then for articulating the following study on contestation alongside the theoretical precepts of calls for an NIPE, CIPE and critical globalization studies. These calls point acutely to the evolving and contested nature of conceptualizing power and resistance in the global political economy. Taking them seriously intimates that contestation is placed on broad theoretical foundations which are open to crossovers from a range of perspectives. Notably, there has been a recent shift in attention towards resistance in the global political economy, albeit alongside more extensive interdisciplinary interest in global civil society, social movements and activism. Less evident, however, in studies on global contestation is ‘an empathic understanding of societal phenomena’ and recognition of ‘the historical dimension of human behaviour and the subjective aspects of the human experience’ (Frankfort-Nachmias and Nachmias 1996: 280). The approach that is extended in this book remains attentive to the continuing analytical and methodological contributions of Thompson (1963, 1978), in addition to the more recent innovations by Drainville (2004, 2012) towards understanding and explaining the ‘making’ and ‘unmaking’ of transnational subjects with the explicit aim of uncovering more radical possibilities (ibid.). There is some sense, then, that resistance to neoliberal economic globalization is indeed a ‘central theme of praxis’ in the contemporary time (cf. Gills 2000). However, much more remains to be done to achieve a global political economy of resistance that takes conceptual innovation seriously and considers new ways of seeing, doing and understanding. In particular, the global political economy of resistance can be more carefully developed through close attention to the contributions of Gramsci (1971).

Gramscian civil society and hegemony

Through this book, I aim to contribute to the analysis of globalization and contestation from a Gramscian critical perspective with global civil society and hegemony as key conceptual tools.³ This draws on Gramsci’s legacy as ‘a series of powerful analytical tools through which social orders and social transformations may be understood’ (Wyn Jones 2001: 6). However, this legacy as told through analytical tools such as hegemony, historical blocs and common sense and applied to social orders and social transformations, is essentially contested and requires further development if civil society and hegemony are to contribute meaningfully to further understanding on the nexus between globalization and contestation. The Gramscian conceptualization of global civil society that I put forward redraws attention to the ‘dialectics of concept and reality’, which has been largely overlooked in more mechanical reappraisals of the dual nature of civil society to stabilize and contest hegemonic power (cf. Cox 1999). Re-attending to this notion of the dialectics between concept and reality is an attempt to initiate a dialogue between on the one hand, conceptual formulations or processes of knowledge construction and constitution, and on the other hand, the material location of tangible activities carried out in their name on the terrain of the global political economy. Interrogating the dialectical interaction between conceptualizations of global civil society and its material realities has the potential to uncover strategies through which primarily rational and instrumental analytical instruments are disrupted to emphasize, instead, processes of engagement between human knowledge, consciousness and action (Gill 1993) and the possibilities for human struggles in the global political economy. Global civil society is therefore considered as a philosophy of praxis; reaching the equation between or equality of philosophy and politics, thought and action (Gramsci 1971: 356–57).

Many representations of global civil society, as examined in Chapters 2 and 3, have been developed within the normative sphere of the ideal in the form of a Polanyian counter-movement or Habermasian public sphere. Meanwhile, many critiques derive from apparently separate epistemological orientations which, for example, when starting from an empirical prioritization, establish an uneasy correspondence to normative delineations. Dialectics, in this case, initiate and facilitate a dialogue between contending views. From this, it might be shown that it is not a stretch of the imagination concretely to locate global civil society in thought and action. It is, nonetheless, challenging for a philosophy of praxis to establish its location in the global political economy. From this point of view it is not the World Social Forum or global governance that is the primary point of focus—it is not one or the other that makes an alternative global civil society or global governance possible—but global civil society in thought and action that is the focus of this book. This re-orientates the point of focus to historical subjects of contestation and their modes of social relation in and towards the global political economy.

A Gramscian conceptualization of global civil society, in turn, has much to offer towards achieving greater conceptual clarity on hegemony. A focus on ‘transversal hegemony’, enabled through global civil society and developed more fully in Chapter 7, is suggestive of further possibilities which have not generally been achieved in accounts of ‘counter-hegemonic resistance’. This reflects the view that ‘the really hard work on counter-hegemonic theorization remains to be done’ (Peet 2007: 194). Highlighting the transversal nature of hegemony challenges the spatial and temporal assumptions of orthodox theory (Walker 1993) and coheres with the following extract:

If we are to gain an adequate understanding of contemporary dissent, and of global life in general, we must look beyond the lines that have been arbitrarily drawn into the sand of international politics. We must think past the current framing of the level of analysis problem. It is the steady breeze, the gusty bursts of energy, the transversal forms of agency, that are gradually transforming the lines and shapes of contemporary life. Expressed in more prosaic words, a multitude of actors, actions, spheres and issues must be recognised and discussed as legitimate parts of international relations debates.

(Bleiker 2000: 7)

Bleiker uses Gramsci’s concept of hegemony in fusion with Foucault (in an attempt to counter pessimistic readings of the latter) to examine the transformation of values that led to the collapse of the Berlin Wall (Bleiker 2000: 173–84). In this way, he explains social change through discursive understandings of power and practices of transversal dissent, whereby discourse is defined as ‘frameworks of knowledge and power through which we comprehend (and constitute) the world around us’ (ibid.: 11). ‘Transversal’ is also used to deno...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgements
• List of abbreviations
• 1. Introduction: globalization and contestation
• 2. The dialectics of concept and reality
• 3. The making of global civil society
• 4. Global governance: constituting global civil society
• 5. ‘Dialectics of presence’ at the World Social Forum
• 6. Situating contestation at the World People’s Conference on Climate Change and the Rights of Mother Earth
• 7. Transversal hegemony
• 8. Conclusions: global civil society and the global political imagination
• Bibliography
• Index