World-Level Determinants of Antisystemic Movements: Lessons from Early-20th Century Syndicalism

• In Event: 277 - Section on Collective Behavior and Social Movements Roundtable Session (one-hour).
  In Refereed Roundtable: Table 15. Global Forces and Movements

Abstract

Political economists, and in particular world-systems scholars, have recently advanced a framework for the analysis of “antisystemic” movements, with one important component of this approach being the integration of world-economic and geopolitical forces into empirical accounts of mobilizations. I utilize Event Structure Analysis (ESA) to demonstrate the integral importance of such global factors in two episodes of syndicalist mobilization: Argentina in 1917 and Chile in 1923. Global factors such as the role of British political hegemony and the institutional forms of the nascent US economic order are seen to enter into each account not merely as “external” context but rather as active conditioning factors that crucially affect the shape and outcome of each mobilization.

Author

• Robert John MacPherson, University of California-Irvine