Abstract
The dilemma of most American scholarship on global social movements is how best to engage the transnational. Is “global” just a synonym for something that happens on foreign shores? Or is the “transnational” something distinct and worthy of analysis itself? And, in the absence of a truly global field of collective action, should that analysis be focused on examining the penetration of global forces into domestic contention, the connections between disparate mobilizations, or the resulting impacts on global structures? Christopher Chase-Dunn and Paul Almeida argue that a truly transnational analysis should, in fact, do all three. But in doing so, they find themselves trapped in reified paradigms rather than pushing our horizon of understanding forward.
At its core, Global Struggles and Social Change: From Prehistory to World Revolution in the Twenty-First Century is a truly global analysis. The authors are self-conscious and explicit about this approach as they argue that cleavages around inequality and capacities to act against material forces are transnationally structured. Thus, global changes create a political opportunity for movements that may reduce harm or, in extraordinary circumstances, alter global power arrangements through revolutions (see page 3). As such, the theory is very much rooted in world-systems analysis, which emphasized the material bases of social life, the importance of material power inequalities, and the potential of self-conscious movements to create a different world. This approach should sound familiar to anyone who followed the paradigm’s growth from twentieth-century inspiration to twenty-first-century stultification, the latter of which is certainly not the authors’ fault but the former of which they both contributed to.
The primary advantage of the book is its broad temporal and geographical scope and the resulting diversity of the examples and cases brought to bear. The first part of the book sets the stage for three later case studies. In Chapter One, we learn of anthropological speculation about what state formation, inequality, and contention may have looked like in prehistorical societies, as well as anti-settler movements among Native Americans. And the second chapter brings in a more explicitly social movement theory frame by examining resistance to neoliberalism in Central America. From these examples, we see the world-systems paradigm at work. Movements are a form of resistance to globalizing economic forces, in which clashes with capital and coercion are inevitable.
It is the latter half of the book where the pay-off comes. The authors move through three case studies of the present moment—the climate justice movement, the “New Global Left,” and the reactionary “global right.” This is a nice array of examples. First, one is clearly a transnational movement—climate justice—that is made up of all the disparate organizations, alliances, and strategies that we might expect. It is unexpected, and apt, to show its origins in the global justice (née anti-globalization) movement of the 1990s and that movement’s spill-out into the antiwar movements of the early 2000s. While the chapter is brief, it does serve as an important demonstration of what transnational movements look like.
The chapters on the global left and the global right are thought-provoking from their pairing alone. The authors argue that the twenty-first century is in a moment of crisis and contention—a possible world revolution—that is similar to other important geohistorical moments such as 1968 or 1789. But, today, this has yet to take the form of a single year of collective action; rather it is an assemblage of mobilizations across the globe, for disparate reasons and with disparate goals. Here, the authors focus on the World Social Forum, which is an annual meeting of activists from around the world framed as a counterpoint to Davos’s World Economic Forum, as an exemplar. The analysis of survey data from participants reveals the overlap between different causes and mobilizations, showing that interconnections between economic systems, environmental concerns, and human rights values lie at the center of contemporary activism.
The chapter on the global right is more descriptive, but also thought-provoking. While interwar fascism has always been understood as a global mobilization, scholars are only just beginning to confront the transnationality of contemporary right-wing movements. More certainly could be done here, so perhaps the chapter should be read as a research agenda rather than a conclusive analysis. As such, having an explicit and direct comparison between the global right and the global left is timely and engaging.
Given the wide lens that the book has, and its lucid and brief chapters, this volume is perfect for the undergraduate classroom. I would adopt it in my own, particularly the latter three case studies, without hesitation. The authors have brought together strands of research from various traditions and shown how they can all be subsumed under one theoretical lens. This was always one advantage of world-systems research—it was a polyglot theory of everything that could excite our imagination, no matter our field of specialty.
But here, too, is where the primary drawback of the volume lies. World-systems analysis is dead. This is why throughout this review world-systems has only appeared in past tense. It was a paradigm of a time, and a glorious one. But we need a theoretical account of the globe that is dynamic and alive; one that accounts for the considerable transnational challenges that we face. Such a paradigm would be intellectually inspiring and creative, rather than a tired defense of the old. Thankfully the authors have avoided this all-too-common tone. But they have not been able to point the way toward something new. And this leaves the reader with a special sadness. In today’s moment, perhaps the first era in which we can conceive of movements as truly global and with the potential for transnational transformation, there is an opportunity for us to remake our understanding of the forces that govern the world. A pioneering work on global movements and global social change is sorely needed. Until that account emerges, this book will have to suffice.