The Movements of Movements

Overview

Our world today is not only a world in crisis but also a world in profound movement, with increasingly large numbers of people joining or forming movements: local, national, transnational, and global. The dazzling diversity of ideas and experiences recorded in this collection capture something of the fluidity within campaigns for a more equitable planet. This book, taking internationalism seriously without tired dogmas, provides a bracing window into some of the central ideas to have emerged from within grassroots struggles from 2006 to 2010. The essays here cross borders to look at the politics of caste, class, gender, religion, and indigeneity, and move from the local to the global. Contributors include Taiaiake Alfred, Tariq Ali, Daniel Bensaïd, Hee-Yeon Cho, Ashok Choudhary, Lee Cormie, Jeff Corntassel, Laurence Cox, Guillermo Delgado-P, Andre Drainville, David Featherstone, Christopher Gunderson, Emilie Hayes, François Houtart, Fouad Kalouche, Alex Khasnabish, Xochitl Leyva Solano, Roma Malik, David McNally, Roel Meijer, Eric Mielants, Peter North, Shailja Patel, Emir Sader, Andrea Smith, Anand Teltumbde, James Toth, Virginia Vargas, and Peter Waterman.

Reviews

"Possible futures right now in the making become legible in how The Movements of Movements doesn't shy away from the complex and unsettling issues that shape our time while thinking through struggles for social and ecological justice in the wider contexts of their past and present." —Emma Dowling, senior lecturer, Sociology, Middlesex University, London 

"This collection offers a thought-provoking opportunity to parse multiplicities and recent directions in global justice organizing. Jai Sen's framing in this book sets us up to take stock of two decades of social and political movement in terms of dynamic motion—not only as strategy and organization, but as kinaesthetic experience, embodied transformation through space and time. This agile cluster of contributors leads us through the cumulative dialectic of Zapatismo, altermondialisme, and their various permutations and relations in resistance to global capitalism, guiding the steps of the social dance repeatedly back to earth from the ethereal spaces of hypermobile globality to place feet on the ground in the most deeply rooted sites of embedded struggle." —Maia Ramnath, author, Decolonizing Anarchism and The Haj to Utopia 

"Edited by Jai Sen, who has long occupied a central position in an international network of intellectuals and activists in movement, this is an important contribution to a developing internationalism that doesn't assume that the North Atlantic left has all the answers for the rest of the world and which recognizes that emancipatory ideas and practices are often forged from below. The essays here range across the globe, look at the politics of caste, class, gender, religion and indigeneity, and move from the local to the global. This book will be useful for activists and intellectuals in movement—be they in universities, parties, trade unions, social movements, or religious organisations—around the world." —Richard Pithouse, Rhodes University, Grahamstown, South Africa

"This collection of the references at the end of the essays taken together is really a treasure of this book." —Rabin Chakraborty, Frontier

"The essays in the recently published The Movements of Movements: Part 1: What Makes Us Move?, edited by Jai Sen, a long-time organizer of the World Social Forum, demonstrate that indigenous peoples in India, Latin America, and Africa are confronting the neoliberal order of austerity, privatization, social-welfare program evisceration, and elite privilege for multinational corporations that sustain global capitalism." —Eve Ottenberg, American Prospect

"Reviewing a volume of collected readings presents many challenges, however, the craft that Jai Sen puts into this publication speaks to his insight and keen ability to 'compose' a truly remarkable piece. The Movement of Movements reads like a musical score that motivates social movement academics to begin to rethink and challenge their approaches to studying this phenomenon. Part I: What Makes Us Move? is the first part in a two-volume series, it also is the fourth volume in the OpenWord's Challenging Empire series." —Sara Smits Keeney, Humanity and Society

Author Biography

Jai Sen, based at the India Institute for Critical Action: Centre In Movement, is an activist/researcher/author on and in movement. He has intensively engaged with the World Social Forum and contemporary emerging movement at a world scale, as moderator of the listserv WSFDiscuss and as coeditor of several books including World Social Forum: Challenging Empires and World Social Forum: Critical Explorations.