Alter-globalization

Alter-globalization refers to a large spectrum of global social movements that support new forms of globalization and that urge that values of democracy, justice, environmental protection, and human rights be put ahead of purely economic concerns. This paper attempts to develop a framework for the study of the influence of alter-globalization on sport in three ways: by outlining a periodization of social movements and sport; by proposing a typology of responses to the politics of globalization; and by proposing a typology of recent social movements associated with sport. The paper does not report on an empirical research project, but provides a stock take of what has happened since the 1990s regarding the politics of globalization and the politics of sport, with specific reference to global social movements. The questions raised in this paper include: What form do the movements challenging the world sports order today take? How are they  connected to alterglobalism? What alternative models of sport do they propose? Where some may argue for “one world, one sport,” this paper explores whether “another sport is possible”. In doing so, it aims to ask how these questions about the possibility of political transformation through sport could be answered through a series of empirical research projects.

Since 2008, the impact of the global financial markets meltdown, often attributed to the downturn in sub-prime mortgage industry in advanced Western economies, have resulted in worldwide deterioration of living standards, mass unemployment and the
collapse of various social programmes. In many developing countries, the crisis has disrupted modest economic gains and continues to undermine various attempts at securing sustainable wealth and jobs. Drawing from a critical reflection of the themes
of governance and capacity development, and the concepts of “sustainable social protection systems” and “social dialogue” advanced by the International Labour Organisation, this paper explores various means by which the public sector could be
strengthened to create wealth and employment amid the current economic crises. The paper challenges policy makers to meet mounting citizens’ expectations and various international and governmental commitments to commit to full employment and
poverty reduction through state-driven interventions. It argues, among others, that without an effective and dynamic public sector that has the capacity to undertake constructive engagements with other private actors, a strong state may be unable to meet the expectations and promises of jobs and income growth. The analysis points to the need to blend traditional administrative tools with innovative techniques revolving around information communication technologies, public-private partnerships and best-fit inclusive governance processes for effective policy making to drive economic
growth and full employment

The purpose of this paper is two-fold. First, is to provide an empirical analysis of the implementation of economic reforms in the areas of privatization, trade liberalization, and public expenditure priorities, using the Washington Consensus guidelines. Second, is to assess to continued viability of the Washington Consensus as a model for developing economies. The two methodologies used in this paper are case study and analysis of aggregated data. A case study of Mexico’s economic reforms since the 1980’s is used to assess whether those reforms have been implemented consistently. An analysis of aggregated data is then used to determine levels of implementation. The study finds that Mexico has failed to implement reforms in privatization, trade liberalization, and public expenditure priorities consistent with the ideals established by the Washington Consensus. It also recommends that developing countries continue to use the Washington Consensus as a blueprint for their own economic reforms.

After providing a brief overview of the global justice movement
history, this article analyzes the main argument raised by its activists to oppose the neoliberal ideology, as notably asserted by the shifts in the discourses of some G20 leaders. Activists however call attention to the gap between the speeches of the G20 leaders and the measures actually implemented.
Accordingly, global justice activists have decided to focus on seeking concrete outcomes through the following: specialized advocacy networks, empowerment at the local level and alliances with progressive regimes.

The latest economic crisis has forced many organizations to look very closely at their financing, operations, marketing and strategy. Recessions are certainly a sobering period for many people, requiring changes in habitual spending and consumption patterns. Main problem in a period of recession will depend on anticipation of this new environment and understand consumer attitudes and needs will change. The purpose of this study is to make a literature review about ‘marketing strategies during recession’ and provide ‘proposed guidelines’ for firms and practitioners working on this field.

Uneven distribution of resources and unequal access to power in the current phase of postcolonial late capitalism has spurred a range of critical discourses globally that has led to the formation of “transnational counterpublic spheres”. These counterpublics facilitate interests of disenfranchised groups to
become visible and audible. However, counterpublics are also spheres of power that replicate mechanisms of exclusion. My paper aims to explore, on the one hand, to what extent transnational counterpublic spheres succeed in facilitating resistance and agency, enabling marginalized collectives to find a “voice” in international politics. On the other hand the mechanisms of exclusion will be investigated that obstruct the inclusion of subaltern groups.

"Alter-Globalization / The Global Justice Movement
From Bangalore to Seattle, Porto Alegre, Copenhagen and Dakar, citizens, indigenous, farmers, intellectuals and dalits have contested globalization in its neoliberal form, proposed alternative policies, implemented participatory organization models and promoted a nascent global public space. Based on extensive field research conducted since 1999, Alter-Globalization provides a comprehensive account of these movements and their attempts to answer one of the major challenges of our time: How can citizens and civil society contribute to the building of a fairer, sustainable and more democratic world?


'Pleyers has traveled the world to offer readers the most sweeping look yet at this crucial global movement, including how it has changed in the face of the recent crisis of the very capitalism it criticizes. By showing us a movement grappling continuously with the Pyramid Dilemma over top-down versus bottom-up approaches, this book helps us think about the most basic issues of democracy and social change.'
James M. Jasper, City University of New York's Graduate School

'This important book is the first scholarly account of the alter-globalization movement. This highly original analysis of the way the movement is constructed around the tension between its two logics – subjective experience and expertise based on reason - helps us to understand not only the movement itself but also the role that the movement plays in inventing global citizenship.'
Mary Kaldor, London School of Economics

“Well-documented and relying on the most in-depth analyses. This book presents a movement both truly global and adapted to the economic context of each country and region. The main contribution of Geoffrey Pleyers, and what makes this book an indispensable tool, is that he clearly exposes the mixed strengths and weaknesses of a movement which was, and remains, a grassroots movement in which activists from poor countries occupy a place observed in no other movement.”
Alain Touraine, EHESS

“An outstanding example of contemporary sociological research that rises to the immense demands of a truly global ethnography. Pleyers’ book is bound to become the definitive account by a contemporary of the alter-globalization movement.”
Martin Albrow, L.S..E.

“This book will be the main reference for those who want to understand how the alter-globalization movement shapes today's world, how it modifies our perception of action, but also of democracy, and how this new actor articulates local and personal meanings with general concerns for the future of humanity. This study enables us to discover with precision the short, but real history, the aims, the functioning, the internal tensions, the hopes and the difficulties of the first real global movement.”
Michel Wieviorka, President of the International Sociological Association 2006-2010.

"Un livre indispensable pour comprendre l'histoire de l'altermondialisme et où le mouvement en est aujourd'hui"


Reviews:
http://giuseppecaruso.wordpress.com/2011/02/02/alter-globalization-becoming-actors-in-the-global-age/


http://www.contretemps.eu/lectures/altermondialisme-temps-bilan-n%C3%A9cessit%C3%A9-perspectives

Book website:
http://www.polity.co.uk/book.asp?ref=9780745646756"

F*ck May 68, Fight Now: Exploring the Uses of the Radical Past from 1968 to Today

Session 1: History is a Weapon

June 8, 2018

Department of History, University of Liverpool

https://archive.discoversociety.org/2018/09/04/circumnavigating-the-past-foreclosing-the-future-commemoration-of-the-radical-past-in-the-amnesiac-present/

"""How does a revolt come about and what does it leave behind? What impact does it have on those who participate in it and those who simply watch it? Is the Greek revolt of December 2008 confined to the shores of the Mediterranean, or are there lessons we can bring to bear on social action around the globe?

Revolt and Crisis in Greece: Between a Present Yet to Pass and a Future Still to Come is a collective attempt to grapple with these questions. A collaboration between anarchist publishing collectives Occupied London and AK Press, this timely new volume traces Greece’s long moment of transition from the revolt of 2008 to the economic crisis that followed. In its twenty chapters, authors from around the world—including those on the ground in Greece—analyse how December became possible, exploring its legacies and the position of the social antagonist movement in face of the economic crisis and the arrival of the International Monetary Fund.

In the essays collected here, over two dozen writers offer historical analysis of the factors that gave birth to December and the potentialities it has opened up in face of the capitalist crisis. Yet the book also highlights the dilemmas the antagonist movement has been faced with since: the book is an open question and a call to the global antagonist movement, and its allies around the world, to radically rethink and redefine our tactics in a rapidly changing landscape where crises and potentialities are engaged in a fierce battle with an uncertain outcome.

Contributors include Vaso Makrygianni, Haris Tsavdaroglou, Christos Filippidis, Christos Giovanopoulos, TPTG, Metropolitan Sirens, Yannis Kallianos, Hara Kouki, Kirilov, Some of Us, Soula M., Christos Lynteris, Yiannis Kaplanis, David Graeber, Christos Boukalas, Alex Trocchi, Antonis Vradis, Dimitris Dalakoglou and the Occupied London Collective. Art and design by Leandros, Klara Jaya Brekke and Tim Simons. Edited by Antonis Vradis and Dimitris Dalakoglou of Occupied London.

Occupied London is an anarchist collective writing on all things urban. Since 2007, the collective has worked together to publish an irregular journal, offering a platform for discussion within the global social antagonist movement, and featuring contributions by writers and collectives from around the globe, including Nasser Abourahme, Zygmunt Bauman, Franco Berardi, Klara Jaya Brekke, Manuel Castells, Mike Davis, Dimitris Dalakoglou, Christos Filippidis, David Graeber, Richard Pithouse, Marina Sitrin, Antonis Vradis, and many, many more. Since 2008, the collective has maintained a wildly popular blog, “From the Greek Streets,” providing up-to-the-minute coverage of the urban revolt of December 2008 in Greece, and examining the impact and legacies of the revolt and the crisis that followed. http://www.occupiedlondon.org | http://www.occupiedlondon.org/blog)

AK Press is a worker-run, democratically-managed publisher of anarchist and radical literature. Founded in 1990, AK Press is a ten-person collective of committed anarchists, spread between Oakland, Baltimore, and Edinburgh, working hard to publish more than twenty new titles each year, and distributing thousands of other titles from like-minded publishers around the globe. (http://www.akpress.org | http://revolutionbythebook.akpress.org)"""

This article is a manifesto for anarchist geographies, which are understood as kaleidoscopic spatialities that allow for multiple, non-hierarchical, and protean connections between autonomous entities, wherein solidarities, bonds, and affinities are voluntarily assembled in opposition to and free from the presence of sovereign violence, predetermined norms, and assigned categories of belonging. In its rejection of such multivariate apparatuses of domination, this article is a proverbial call to nonviolent arms for those geographers and non-geographers alike who seek to put an end to the seemingly endless series of tragedies, misfortunes, and catastrophes that characterize the miasma and malevolence of the current neoliberal moment. But this is not simply a demand for the end of neoliberalism and its replacement with a more moderate and humane version of capitalism, nor does it merely insist upon a more egalitarian version of the state. It is instead the resurrection of a prosecution within geography that dates back to the discipline’s earliest days: anarchism!

How does the massive use of social media in contemporary protests affect the character of activist communication? Moving away from the conceptualization of social media as tools, this research explores how activist social media communication is entangled with and shaped by heterogeneous techno-cultural and political economic relations. This exploration is pursued through a case study on the social media reporting efforts of the Toronto Community Mobilization Network, which coordinated and facilitated the protests against the 2010 Toronto G-20 summit. The network urged activists to report about the protests on Twitter, YouTube, and Flickr, tagging their contributions #g20report. In addition, it set up a Facebook group and used a blog. The investigation, first, traces the hyperlink network in which the protest communication was embedded. The hyperlink analysis provides a window on the online ecology in which this communication unfolded. In addition, the examination interrogates how the particular technological architectures, related user practices, and business models of the various social platforms steered communication. This investigation shows that the use of social media brings about an acceleration of activist communication, and greatly enhances its visual character. Moreover, as activists massively embrace corporate social media, they increasingly lose control over the data they collective produce, as well as over the very architectures of the spaces through which they communicate.

For around fifteen years now, anthropology has been engaged in the study of neoliberalism. What contribution does the discipline have to make to a debate largely monopolized by economics and political science? To answer this question, the present article returns to the major texts and highlights the three perspectives from which anthropology has approached neoliberal expansion: culturalist, systemic and the approach based on governmentality. Each has its own epistemological presuppositions and a specific conception of anthropology, globalization and neoliberalism. The article highlights the relevance and limitations of these approaches.

This article seeks to provide a critical analysis of the alter-globalisation movement as a potential 'postmodern Prince' as advanced by Stephen Gill. The article proposes that the social forces aligned under the rubric of alter-globalism have always had intractable difficulties articulating a postmodern Prince, and that in contrast to Gill's appropriation of Gramsci, these difficulties can be usefully understood through a reading of Gramsci which is attentive to the problems of collective political action. Recent debate amongst key participants at the World Social Forum (WSF) is used as a case study for analysing the possibility of formulating a common master-frame or strategy for social transformation. It is at the WSF that the problems of articulating a postmodern Prince have been most clearly confronted. It is shown that the weaknesses of alter-globalism can be understood, pace Gill, through Gramsci's own theory of social transformation as evinced in the modern Prince. This underlines the need for further investigation of the agents of progressive politics in an era of global social transformation.

Gregory Bateson said that we are ‘governed by epistemologies that we know to be wrong’ back in 1972. In the same book Bateson wrote: 'the organism that destroys its environment destroys itself.’ Almost forty years later global ecological systems are in steep decline and converging crises make a deep evaluation of the underlying premises of our philosophical traditions an urgent imperative. This paper will suggest that the roots of the economic crisis are epistemological and that to correct this error whole systems thinking and ecological literacy will become increasing important in business management as well as in other disciplines. It will also suggest that the economic crisis opened new political space and has provided an opportunity for intervention. If we are brave enough to examine of the roots of our problems there is possibility for renewal.

Contrairement aux modèles classiques du développement des mouvements sociaux, l’altermondialisme n’a pas globalement évolué vers une institutionnalisation de ses associations et de ses événements. Sa structure organisationnelle reste largement basée sur des réseaux relativement autonomes. Cet article invite à considérer la réflexivité des acteurs et leurs cultures politiques comme l’un des facteurs explicatifs majeurs du maintien de structures réticulaires relativement souples au sein de l’altermondialisme. A partir d’études de cas, d’observations qualitatives, d’entretiens menés entre 1999 et 2008, cet article montre que le plébiscite apparent des organisations spécifiquement altermondialistes pour la forme réticulaire repose sur un malentendu opératoire. Les uns valorisent le réseau pour son efficacité, les autres parce qu’il favorise une organisation horizontale et participative. La forme du réseau renvoie ainsi pour les altermondialistes à deux ensembles de valeurs qui ne sont pas forcément compatibles.

Centred around Antonio Gramsci’s concept of hegemony, this paper employs a critical globalization theory framework to argue that the 1990s notion of ‘changing the world from below’, understood as resistance to capitalist globalization through a ‘transnational civil society’, requires re-theorization in the light of the contemporary developments in Our America. I make a methodological case for a neo-Gramscian approach to argue that ‘counter-hegemony’, together with an adequate theorization of the state and power, should be the preferred concept over the inherently apolitical and under-theorized ‘alter-globalization’. Whilst the alter-globalization movement’s ideational and normative challenges to hegemony (captured in ex-British prime minister Thatcher’s There-Is-No-Alternative-Doctrine, TINA) are undisputed, the transformation of the global geographies of power through local actors alone has remained illusory. Rather, the experience of the Bolivarian Alliance for the Peoples of Our America—Peoples’ Trade Agreement (ALBA-PTA) strongly suggests that counter-hegemonic globalization theory will have to consider the roles of both the ‘state-in-revolution’ and the ‘transnational organized society’. This will be shown through the analysis and theorization of the ALBA-PTA as a multi dimensional inter and transnational counter-hegemonic regionalization and globalization project that operates across a range of sectors and scales.

Love has been theorized as a way to rebuild fractured communities, and a potential way to overcome differences on the political Left. However, might it be dangerous to invest so much potential in the power of love? In this paper, I reflect upon Michael Hardt's work on the necessity of love for politics. Hardt emphasizes the radical and transformative potential of love, seeing it as a collective and generative force. Yet, I argue that Hardt's reading of love, tied to a Spinozist theorization of joy, provides a limited understanding of the affective dimensions of love. Instead, I propose that we need to think about the ambivalence and incoherence of love: how love can be both joyful and painful, enduring and transient, expansive and territorial, revolutionary and conservative. That is, to consider how love, even in its seemingly most benevolent and unconditional form, can still be a source of exclusion, violence, and domination. Ultimately, I seek to challenge this fantasy of coherence and togetherness, asking if there is still space for aspects of politics that are not joyful, that do not feel like love, that anger us, disappoint us, and that make us desire distance rather than togetherness.

Статья посвящена анализу отношений различных групп интеллектуалов арабского мира к процессу глобализации, положительным и отрицательным аспектам данного процесса и возможности альтернативы. 
The article is devoted to the analysis of different groups of the Arab-Muslim world intellectuals’ attitude concerning the globalization process, its positive and negative aspects and the possibility of an alternative.

TABLE DES MATIÈRES

INTRODUCTION Répression policière et mouvements sociaux
par Francis Dupuis-Déri

CHAPITRE PREMIER Les effets du 11 septembre 2001 sur le mouvement altermondialiste
par Jean-Pierre Masse et Nathalie Bayon

CHAPITRE 2 La police des foules en Europe
par Olivier Fillieule

CHAPITRE 3 La délicate violence du policier sans uniforme
par Marc-André Cyr

CHAPITRE 4 Broyer du noir. La répression policière de la « déviance politique » au Québec
par Francis Dupuis-Déri

CHAPITRE 5 Le droit de manifester en péril? Le cas du Sommet du G20 à Toronto
par Francis Dupuis-Déri

CHAPITRE 6 « Printemps érable » ou « Printemps de la matraque »? Profilage politique et répression sélective pendant la grève étudiante de 2012
par Francis Dupuis-Déri

CONCLUSION Contre l’apitoiement. L’auto-organisation face à la répression politique
par Alexandre Popovic

ANNEXES

Tableau I : Mobilisation policière contre le mouvement altermondialiste

Tableau II : Répression policière contre le mouvement altermondialiste (arrestations)

Tableau III : Arrestations politiques au Québec 1996-2011 (données non exhaustives)

Tableau IV : Répression policière contre la manifestation annuelle du 15 mars contre la brutalité policière (Montréal)

Tableau V : Répression policière contre le mouvement étudiant au Québec (1996-2011)

Tableau VI : Arrestations durant la grève étudiante de 2012