11. Social Movements and Alternative Politics

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Siri Gloppen
Keyword(s):  
Social Movements ◽  
Social Justice ◽  
Identity Politics ◽  
Developing World ◽  
New Technology ◽  
Bottom Up ◽  
Theoretical Perspectives

This chapter examines how social movements in the developing world and ‘bottom-up’ alternative politics, supported by new technology and globalized networks, can strengthen democracy. It first traces the origins of social movements, showing how different forms of social movements have emerged and been influential during different periods, before discussing the main theoretical perspectives about why this is so and how we should understand this phenomenon. It then considers past and present social movements and alternative politics in the developing world, focusing on three categories: movements concerned with democracy and governance, movements concerned with identity politics, and movements concerned with social justice. It also describes the increasing globalization of social movements and explains what makes such movements successful.

The Networked Global Order

2020 ◽  
pp. 151-186
Author(s):  
David Martin Jones
Keyword(s):  
Artificial Intelligence ◽  
Social Justice ◽  
Identity Politics ◽  
Financial Crises ◽  
New Technology ◽  
Nation State ◽  
End Of History ◽  
Liberal Democratic ◽  
The Us ◽  
The Media

Economic redistribution, and social equality required an interconnected, regional and global trading order. After 1989, it was easy to believe that a liberal democratic model, supported by US-sponsored international rules, would spread across the globe. However, over two decades, unmoveable progressive values proved internally and externally unsustainable. After 2008, the US subprime and Eurozone financial crises eroded the economic preconditions supporting these values and undermined the already fragile relationship between the nation state, the market, the media, and a cosmopolitan faith in a liberal democratic end of history. Ironically, liberal progressive values, committed to the idea that all social ills were amenable to technocratic remedy and that the state was a suitable instrument for making such change, rationally engineered inegalitarian outcomes. This chapter examines how the financial crisis destroyed the meliorist assumption linking capitalism, globalization, and democracy rendering the pursuit of universal emancipation and social justice increasingly redundant. One consequence of this evolution was an artificial intelligence and new technology driven intangible economic order. The new economy incubated a paranoid populist style of identity politics that emerged after 2016. Instead of convergence, the new intangible capitalist structure erected a burgeoning divide between a cosmopolitan elite and a disenfranchised, nation based, precariat class.

Advocating for Social and Economic Rights—Critical Perspectives

2019 ◽  
pp. 185-202
Author(s):  
Jeremy Perelman
Keyword(s):  
Human Rights ◽  
Social Movements ◽  
Social Justice ◽  
Political Strategies ◽  
Economic Rights ◽  
Fundamental Structure ◽  
Theoretical Perspectives ◽  
Critical Perspectives ◽  
Social And Economic Rights

This comment situates Aryeh Neier’s critique of social and economic rights within a broader set of arguments about the nature of such rights as rights, about their justiciability and enforceability, and about their value to social justice advocates and social movements’ political strategies. It highlights the main responses to Neier’s critique articulated by human rights scholars and activists, including those pointing to the indivisibility and interdependence of the human rights framework. The comment draws however on historical and theoretical perspectives on the fundamental structure of this framework to both revisit and transcend Neier’s critique. It points to approaches that aim at taking critique seriously when engaging in social justice-oriented human rights work.

Afterword

Ideal Minds ◽  
2020 ◽  
pp. 172-190
Author(s):  
Michael Trask
Keyword(s):  
Social Movements ◽  
Social Justice ◽  
Social Change ◽  
Identity Politics ◽  
Collective Consciousness ◽  
New Social Movements ◽  
The Sixties

This afterword reflects on the afterlife of neo-idealism and clarifies the author's stance on questions of social justice, utilitarian ethics, and the nearly universal repudiation of statism. The author's argument has been focused on the degree to which the collective consciousness that formed a staple of the New Social Movements — perhaps its key catalyst — gives way in seventies culture to a profound displacement onto subjectivity. But it would be a mistake to see this as a perversion of sixties thinking. The appeal to subjectivity was always the latent grounding of social change among important movements of that earlier decade; hence the coming to dominance of identity politics in the generation after the sixties. It is no surprise that the effort to reclaim consciousness's underappreciated power in sixties discourses should give rise to celebrations of unfettered power in seventies thinking. The afterword examines how the market became the megastructure for a wide array of antistatist impulses.

Other People's Struggles

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Nicholas Owen
Keyword(s):  
Social Psychology ◽  
Social Movements ◽  
Political Theory ◽  
Identity Politics ◽  
Global Justice ◽  
British History ◽  
Original Theory ◽  
The Past ◽  
Contemporary Politics ◽  
Do So

Other People’s Struggles is the first attempt in over forty years to explain the place of “conscience constituents” in social movements. Conscience constituents are people who participate in a movement but do not stand to benefit if it succeeds. Why do such people participate when they do not stand to benefit? Why are they sometimes present and sometimes absent in social movements? Why and when is their participation welcome to those who do stand to benefit, and why and when is it not? The work proposes an original theory to answer these questions, crossing discipline boundaries to draw on the findings of social psychology, philosophy, and normative political theory, in search of explanations of why people act altruistically and what it means to others when they do so. The theory is illustrated by examples from British history, including the antislavery movement, the women’s suffrage and liberation movements, labor and socialist movements, anticolonial movements, antipoverty movements, and movements for global justice. Other People’s Struggles also contributes to new debates concerning the rights and wrongs of “speaking for others.” Debates concerning the limits of solidarity—who can be an “ally” and on what terms—have become very topical in contemporary politics, especially in identity politics and in the new “populist” movements. The book provides a theoretical and empirical account of how these questions have been addressed in the past and how they might be framed today.

Kissing the Old Class Politics Goodbye

2005 ◽  
Vol 67 ◽  
pp. 54-63 ◽  
Author(s):  
Dorothy Sue Cobble
Keyword(s):  
Social Movements ◽  
Identity Politics ◽  
Economic Justice ◽  
Class Politics ◽  
Working Classes ◽  
Working People ◽  
History Of ◽  
Multiple Class ◽  
Alternative Reading

Verity Burgmann's call for a reinvigorated class politics and language is timely. This essay shares her goal of strengthening social movements in which class is taken seriously. It argues, however, that her efforts to resuscitate an antiquated class politics dressed up in identity clothes will not further that goal. This response offers an alternative reading of the nature and history of the “new” and the “old” social movements, of what can be learned about class and class-conscious movements from “identity politics” and from cultural theorists, and of what is needed to encourage future movements for social and economic justice. It calls for a class politics that recognizes the diversity of the working classes, embraces multiple class identities, reflects the fluid and multitiered class structures in which we live, and honors the aspirations of working people for inclusion, equity, and justice.

scholarly journals Feminist Scholarship and Its Relevance for Political Engagement: The Test Case of Abortion in the US

2011 ◽  
Vol 1 (1) ◽  
pp. 18-43
Author(s):  
Margaret D. Kamitsuka
Keyword(s):  
Identity Politics ◽  
Political Engagement ◽  
Religious Studies ◽  
Test Case ◽  
Theoretical Perspectives ◽  
Starting Point ◽  
The Us ◽  
The Subject ◽  
Ethical Thinking ◽  
Societal Dynamics

This essay explores how gender studies in academe, including in religious studies, might remain relevant to ongoing feminist political engagement. I explore some specific dynamics of this challenge, using as my test case the issue of abortion in the US. After discussing how three formative feminist principles (women’s experience as feminism’s starting point, the personal is political, and identity politics) have shaped approaches to the abortion issue for feminist scholars in religion, I argue that ongoing critique, new theoretical perspectives, and attentiveness to subaltern voices are necessary for these foundational feminist principles to keep pace with fast-changing and complex societal dynamics relevant to women’s struggles for reproductive health and justice. The essay concludes by proposing natality as a helpful concept for future feminist theological and ethical thinking on the subject.

scholarly journals Women in Transnational Migrant Activism: Supporting Social Justice Claims of Homeland Political Organizations

2012 ◽  
Vol 7 (1) ◽  
pp. 65-81 ◽  
Author(s):  
Liza Mügge
Keyword(s):  
Social Justice ◽  
Identity Politics ◽  
Transnational Politics ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Political Organizations ◽  
Kurdish Women ◽  
Narrow Definition ◽  
Definition Of ◽  
The Cold War ◽  
Migrant Activism

This article studies the conceptions of social justice of women active in transnational migrant politics over a period of roughly 20 years in the Netherlands. The novel focus on migrant women reveals that transnational politics is almost completely male-dominated and -directed. Two of the exceptions found in this article include a leftist and a Kurdish women organization supporting the communist cause in the 1980s and the Kurdish struggle in the 1990s in Turkey, respectively. In both organizations gender equality was subordinated to broader ideologies of political parties in their homeland. Leftist activists in the cold war era supported a narrow definition of the "politics of redistribution," while and Kurdish activists, combined classical features of the latter with those of traditional identity politics.

scholarly journals Liturgy and non-colonial thinking: Speaking to and about God beyond ideology, religion and identity politics – Towards non-religion and a unbearable freedom in Christ

2021 ◽  
Vol 77 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Johann-Albrecht Meylahn
Keyword(s):  
Social Justice ◽  
Identity Politics ◽  
The Other ◽  
Specific Group ◽  
Post Colonial ◽  
The Past ◽  
The Face ◽  
European Colonialism ◽  
Good And Evil ◽  
The Voice

It has been argued that most countries that had been exposed to European colonialism have inherited a Western Christianity thanks to the mission societies from Europe and North America. In such colonial and post-colonial (countries where the political administration is no longer in European hands, but the effects of colonialism are still in place) contexts, together with Western contexts facing the ever-growing impact of migrants coming from the previous colonies, there is a need to reflect on the possibility of what a non-colonial liturgy, rather than a decolonial or postcolonial liturgy, would look like. For many, postcolonial or decolonial liturgies are those that specifically create spaces for the voice of a particular identified other. The other is identified and categorised as a particular voice from the margins, or a specific voice from the borders, or the voices of particular identified previously silenced voices from, for example, the indigenous backyards. A question that this context raises is as follows: Is consciously creating such social justice spaces – that is determined spaces by identifying particular voices that someone or a specific group decides to need to be heard and even making these particular voiceless (previously voiceless) voices central to any worship experience – really that different to the colonial liturgies of the past? To give voice to another voice, is maybe only a change of voice, which certainly has tremendous historical value, but is it truly a transformation? Such a determined ethical space is certainly a step towards greater multiculturalism and can therefore be interpreted as a celebration of greater diversity and inclusivity in the dominant ontology. Yet, this ontology remains policed, either by the state-maintaining police or by the moral (social justice) police.Contribution: In this article, a non-colonial liturgy will be sought that goes beyond the binary of the dominant voice and the voice of the other, as the voice of the other too often becomes the voice of a particular identified and thus determined victim – in other words, beyond the binary of master and slave, perpetrator and victim, good and evil, and justice and injustice, as these binaries hardly ever bring about transformation, but only a change in the face of master and the face of the slave, yet remaining in the same policed ontology.

A Question of Social Justice: How Policies of Profit Negate Engagement of Developing World Bioethicists and Undermine Global Bioethics

2017 ◽  
Vol 17 (10) ◽  
pp. 3-14 ◽  
Author(s):  
Subrata Chattopadhyay ◽  
Catherine Myser ◽  
Tiffany Moxham ◽  
Raymond De Vries
Keyword(s):  
Social Justice ◽  
Developing World ◽  
Global Bioethics
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