The global justice movement: resistance to dominant economic models of globalization

Abstract

Resistance to dominant economic models of globalization has a long history that reaches back to various movements, protests and campaigns, as for example the Tupac Amaru uprising (1780–1781) or the anti-slave trade movement (which peaked between 1787 and 1807). This chapter focusses on one of the most recent incarnations, the ‘global justice movement’ (GJM). The recent mobilizations by the Indignados and the Occupy movements do not form part of this movement. These current movements entered the scene in 2011 and became prominent for their large street protests and occupations of public spaces. They are mainly directed towards their respective national governments, claiming more democracy and protesting against austerity programmes. According to Dieter Rucht in this volume ‘a social movement can be defined as a network of individuals, groups and organizations that, based on a sense of collective identity, seek to bring about social change (or resist social change) primarily by means of collective public protest’. In order to speak about a movement as an entity, there has to exist a certain degree of consensus of what activists perceived as a grievance and how problems and solutions are defined. The actors within movements also need to be related to each other, at least in the sense that they consider their struggles as related. Similarities in action forms and internal practices also have to exist in a meaningful way in order for observers to be able to talk about movements. These criteria are also important when we decide whether to consider a movement as a new movement or as a continuity of an existing movement. Although some claims and practices are very similar to the GJM’s, the organizational structure of the current protests differs and the international ties of the GJM are hardly used by these new movements. As the current mobilizations have a lot in common with the global justice movement and as there already exists some comparative research on these movements that reveals the continuities between the GJM and the current mobilizations, this chapter will occasionally highlight connections and similarities as well as differences and discontinuities between these movements.