Keeping Your Enemies Close? The Variety of Social Movements’ Reactions to International Organizations’ Opening Up

Starting in the 1990s, international organizations (IOs) have created various opportunities of access for civil society to voice criticism. While international relations (IR) scholarship has increasingly addressed the resulting interaction between IOs and civil society with a focus on NGOs, we know little about the particular reactions to IOs’ opening up by social movements. This paper analyzes reactions to opening up by a transnational social movement centrally addressing IOs: the Global Justice Movement (GJM). Examining reactions by different groups of the GJM in Europe and Southeast Asia to IOs’ opening up, we demonstrate that reactions differ considerably depending on activists’ assessments of the nature of opening up. In particular, we identify four pathways of reactions on a continuum from (1) strong cooperation with IOs as a reaction to opening up, (2) temporally limited cooperation with different IOs, (3) a hybrid reaction that combines cooperation with specific IOs with a strong opposition to other IOs in reaction to their opening up, to (4) a continuous rejection of all cooperation with IOs. We show how these different reactions are shaped by activists’ perceptions of the quality of the international opening up in conjunction with national and local context factors. Furthermore, our analysis demonstrates that such perceptions can significantly change over time depending on experiences of interactions. Reactions to opening up are therefore not predictable on the basis of a movement's shape and resources only, but rather depend on a variety of factors such as the movement's perception of the IO's sincerity in a strategic and consequential interaction, as well as the movement's ideological framework and its history of interaction with institutions at other levels, especially in the domestic realm.

Rethinking Samir Amin’s Legacy and the Case for a Political Organization of the Global Justice Movement

Juego argues that the new Internationale’s “primary organizational function should be the global coordination of actions of progressive grassroots movements from country to country.” He calls for a ‘learning organization,’ where the new Internationale supports “a continuous dialogue between bottom-up and top-down approaches to decision-making.” He sees it as “[a]kin to a global coordinating council” meaning that it works to integrate and synthesize the “varying initiatives, campaigns, and mass actions at all geographical levels of membership” while remaining mindful of the “dialectics between reform and revolution.” The new Internationale must, moreover, be “grounded on a pragmatic understanding of realpolitik especially in struggles at national and local scales,” and institutionalize a commitment to dialogue, research, and discussion.