Globalizations From Below

Brecher, Costello, and Smith chart out a dynamic and innovative strategy for building the movement to challenge unchecked coporate globalization.

When violence broke out at the demonstrations surrounding the 2001 G8 summit in Genoa, Italy, the authors of this book were there. The protests proved to be a critical moment in the global justice movement. Presenting the first systematic empirical research on the global justice movement, Globalization from Below analyzes a movement from the viewpoints of the activists, organizers, and demonstrators themselves. The authors traveled to Genoa with anti-G8 protesters and collected data from more than 800 participants. A year later, they surveyed 2,400 activists at the European Social Forum in Florence. To understand how this cycle of global protest emerged, they examine the interactions between challengers and elites, and discuss how these new models of activism fit into current social movement work. Globalization from Below places the protests within larger debates, revealing and investigating the forces that led to a clash between demonstrators and the Italian government, which responded with violence. Donatella della Porta is professor of political science; Massimiliano Andretta is a researcher in political science and sociology; Lorenzo Mosca is a researcher in information and communication technologies; Herbert Reiter is a researcher in history, all at the European University Institute.

This book deals ethnographically with economic globalization from below in its broadest sense, from producers to traders to vendors to consumers across the globe.

This book is an unprecedented attempt to analyze the role of the law in the global movement for social justice. Case studies in the book are written by leading scholars from both the global South and the global North, and combine empirical research on the ground with innovative sociolegal theory to shed new light on a wide array of topics. Among the issues examined are the role of law and politics in the World Social Forum; the struggle of the anti-sweatshop movement for the protection of international labour rights; and the challenge to neoliberal globalization and liberal human rights raised by grassroots movements in India and indigenous peoples around the world. These and other cases, the editors argue, signal the emergence of a subaltern cosmopolitan law and politics that calls for new social and legal theories capable of capturing the potential and tensions of counter-hegemonic globalization.

Richard Williams surveys the history of the cooperative movement from its origins in the 18th century and deals with the theory of cooperation, as contrasted with the 'Standard Economic Model', based on competition. The book contains the results of field studies of a number of successful cooperatives both in the developed and developing world. It includes insights from personal interviews of cooperative members and concludes by considering the successes and challenges of the cooperative movement as an alternative to the global neo-colonialism and imperialism that now characterizes free-market capitalist approaches to globalization. The book considers democratic and local control of essential economic activities such as the production, distribution, and retailing of goods and services. It suggests that cooperative approaches to these economic activities are already reducing poverty and resulting in equitable distributions of wealth and income without plundering the resources of developing countries.

This book analyzes the Chinese-centered globalization ‘from below’ brought about by China’s entrepreneurial migrants and conceived of as a projection of Chinese power in the Belt and Road Initiative partner states. It identifies the features of this globalization ‘from below,’ scrutinizes its mutually reinforcing relationship with China’s globalization ‘from above,’ and shows that these two globalizations are intrinsically related to the construction of a new international order. It outlines how the actors in China’s globalization ‘from below’ include Chinese emigrants who are located in informal transnational economic networks. It reveals that Beijing has enacted many laws that compel these emigrants to contribute to the development of their country of origin but also influences them through the successful promotion of a specific type of deterritorialized nationalism; and that China is ready to impose harsh punitive actions on political elites in partner states which fail to protect its migrants or limit their economic activities. Finally, it argues that China’s globalization ‘from below’ is fundamentally different from the non-hegemonic globalization ‘from below’ represented by, among others, Lebanese and East Indian traders, and that China’s globalization ‘from below’ is rather a self-interested national strategy intended to support the construction of a Chinese-centered international order.

This book explores how Indigenous Peoples are impacted by globalization and the cult of the individual that often accompanies the phenomenon.

This clear and concise book examines the crucial relationship between globalization and social movements. Deftly combining nuanced theory with rich empirical examples, leading scholar Valentine M. Moghadam focuses especially on three transnational social movements-Islamism, feminism, and global justice. Defining globalization as a complex process in which the mobility of capital, peoples, organizations, movements, and ideas takes on an increasingly transnational form, the author shows how both physical and electronic mobility has helped to create dynamic global social movements. Globalization has engendered the spread of neoliberal capitalism across the world, but it also has engendered opposition and collective action.