Charting the Shape-Shifting Global-Justice Movement

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Charting the Shape-Shifting Global Justice Movement
Heather Gautney, Ph.D., says that the anti-globalization movement will
gain steam in light of the global financial meltdown.
By Gina Vergel

Street protests that disrupted the World Trade Organization Ministerial
Conference of 1999 in Seattle are widely credited with sparking the
anti-globalization movement.

While the movement began taking shape years before the “Battle in
Seattle,” media coverage that accompanied the protests thrust the issue
of global justice into the spotlight, according to Heather Gautney,
Ph.D., assistant professor of sociology.

Gautney’s research focuses on contemporary social movements and
globalization. Much of what she studies is how the broad-based global
justice movement has grown and changed, and whether it has a future. She
said she thinks it does, although it will move away from the anti-war
platform it espoused earlier this decade and return to some of its
anti-globalization roots.

“Now that we’re dealing with the economic crisis, the war is starting to
fade and the economy is becoming the primary issue,” she said.
“Positions the movement had in the late 1990s -- being against
deregulation, for example -- are now popular. Even mainstream
politicians are saying, ‘We didn’t regulate corporations and look what
happened.’”

Gautney first took an interest in the topic while accompanying fellow
graduate students to meetings and protests. When global justice
activists created the World Social Forum (WSF) in 2001 as a platform to
discuss economic, political and social alternatives to globalization,
Gautney found a focus for her dissertation and much of her post-doctoral
research.

“I thought the World Social Forum should be studied and tracked,” she
said. “I was involved in going to meetings for about eight years. I was
able to learn things you wouldn’t find out otherwise.”

The WSF, which was held to coincide with the World Economic Forum that
occurs annually in the posh city of Davos, Switzerland, drew 20,000
participants to Porto Alegre, Brazil, in its inaugural year.

It received global press coverage and was the primary organizing body
for worldwide anti-war demonstrations. At its peak in 2005, the
conference boasted 160,000 participants from more than 120 countries.

Since 2006, however, WSF participation has steadily declined. The
reason, Gautney said, is that it has lost its radical edge.

“In an effort to avoid politics and be as inclusive as possible, the
World Social Forum started to attract groups that were not really
opposed to neoliberalism and institutions like the World Bank,” said
Gautney, who has attended WSFs in Brazil, Venezuela and Kenya. “A
movement can be political and still remain independent and open. The
trick is in redefining politics itself.”

She researched three major groups that participated in the WSF --
anarchists, political parties and non-governmental organizations -- and
found that differences between the groups provided some insights as to
why the WSF was losing ground.

Similarities between the groups operated as a strong basis for action.
They all critiqued large-scale institutions that promoted neo-liberal
globalization. And they all wanted to see a more grassroots form of
democracy become the norm.

“Very easily summed up, these institutions put profits before people and
[the three activist groups] want to reverse that,” Gautney said. “But
when forced to articulate a vision of social change, then things would
get hairy.”

The vision for social change espoused by members of these groups
sometimes conflicted with their actions, which led to criticism, Gautney
said.

“I might desire to be free of party influence or corporate influence,
but in the real world how do I realize that goal? It’s a huge conflict,”
she explained. “The anarchist groups that were the protagonists in
Seattle began to contend that the WSF was trying to dilute them or
depoliticize them.”

Others criticized WSF organizers for inviting big-name intellectuals and
state actors, such as Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez and Brazilian
President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva, to speak.

There was even debate as to how much protest was too much after someone
was killed at an anti-globalization rally in 2001 in Genoa, Italy.

“So there were big fights within the movement about dangers associated
with waging these kind of protests,” Gautney said. “Shortly after that,
you have the attacks of Sept. 11, which added to their concerns.

“Is it offensive to disagree with government at a time when everyone is
so vulnerable? It became very divisive between these groups. Some of
them thought the United States had a right to retaliate against the
terrorists and others didn’t. These are fundamental differences.”

The wars in Iraq and Afghanistan saw the movement adopt an anti-war focus.

“But with Iraq, almost the entire left was on the same page,” Gautney
said. “With the anti-globalization movement, you can say that 250,000
people were on the same page. For the anti-war movement, world records
were broken. At an anti-war protest in Italy, there were more than a
million people. So it was much more of a social movement.”

Gautney defines a social movement as something that arises organically
from some kind of fracture in, or dissatisfaction with, the realm of
social relations.

“The anti-war movement was very organic and had a very simple goal -- we
need to stop the war,” she said. “Now the anti-war movement has become a
popular position, so there’s no need for a movement anymore. The
economy, especially housing and employment, will be the next field of
contestation.”

--
Dan Clore

My collected fiction: _The Unspeakable and Others_
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