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Globalization and Social Movements – Islamism, Feminism, and the Global Justice Movement by Valentine M. Moghadam

GLOBALIZATION AND SOCIAL MOVEMENTS

How have people collectively responded to globalization? Have social movements changed to better confront globalization’s economic, political, and cultural manifestations and challenges? And how are contemporary social movements and networks affecting the progression of globalization?

These are the principal questions posed and addressed in this book, through a focus on three transnational or global social movements: the global women’s movement and transnational feminist networks; transnational Islamist movements and networks; and the global justice movement.

 In addition to exploring the mutual relationship between globalization and social movements, this book examines the ways that the social sciences have sought to address changing social realities.

The social sciences have long focused on processes and institutions within single states, societies, and economies. Until the 1990s, the terms

“global” and “transnational” represented concepts that were either alien or marginal to mainstream social-science theories. “International” and “world” were of course understood, but supra-national developments could hardly be fathomed.

The Cold War world order consisted of the First World, Second World, and Third World—also known as the rich capitalist countries of the West, the countries of the communist bloc, and the developing countries of Africa, Asia, and Latin America—and while scholars studied these political and economic regions, analyses tended to focus on single societies and economies.

Dependency theory and its more sophisticated variant, world-system theory, challenged mainstream social science theorizing as well as Marxism’s emphasis on class conflicts within single societies, drawing attention to the transnational nature of capital and labor flows and the implications thereof for economic and political processes at the societal level, as well as for the reproduction of global inequalities.1

(However, in The Communist Manifesto, Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels were absolutely correct in predicting the ever-growing concentration of capital and its expansion across the globe.) World-system theory in particular was unique in its conceptual and methodological approach.

Though it posited the existence of hierarchical “economic zones” of core, periphery, and semi-periphery, it in-sisted that the analytical point of departure should be the structures of the world system in its entirety. Back in the mainstream, theories of social movements and “new social movements” focused on national-level dynamics—and mainly in the West or in “post-industrial society.”2

But no sooner had these theories gained prominence in the 1980s than new developments began to challenge some of their basic assumptions.

The new developments included forms of governance and activism on a world scale, as well as global shifts in the political economy. New governance structures included the ever-growing power and influence of multinational corporations, the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund (IMF), and (later) the World Trade Organization (WTO), along with the emergence of regional blocs such as the European Union (EU) and the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA).

These institutions of global and regional governance were also behind shifts in the international political economy, which entailed the move from Keynesian or state-directed economic models to neoliberal or free-market economic strategies.

Thus the “structural adjustment and stabilization” policies that were advocated for indebted Third World countries during the 1980s and 1990s, the transition from socialism to capitalism in the Second World, and the free-market imprint of Reaganism and Thatcherism in the First World all