558 - Thematic Session. Silos or Synergies? Can Transnational Social Movements Connect across Issues?

Session Submission Type: Invited Session

Description

Transnational mobilization is now part of global politics, but whether transnational movements can have a consequential impact on global policies and institutions remains an open question. This session explores one key challenge for transnational social movements: how do they relate to each other? Are they likely to operate in “silos,” each movement pursuing its own issue by itself? Or, can they develop synergies – cross-issue connections and alliances that will expand their leverage?
Naomi Klein argues in This Changes Everything (2014:7) that “the climate crisis could form the basis of a powerful mass movement, one that would weave all of these seeming disparate issues into a coherent narrative.” Her argument implies that the transnational environmental movement can provide a master narrative around which other movements can coalesce. In contrast, Michael Burawoy is skeptical that movements can coalesce sufficiently to shift global power structures, suggesting instead (2010:312) that what he calls ‘third wave marketization’ “destroys the very ground upon which a ‘counter-movement’ could be built.”
The presentations in this panel will look at the “eco-system” of transnational social movements from four different vantage points building a composite contribution to the debate on the potential of transnational social movements as agents for changing power dynamics.

Sub Unit

• Thematic Sessions

Session Organizer

• Peter B. Evans, University of California-Berkeley and Brown University

Presider

• Nitsan Chorev, Brown University

Individual Presentations

• Third-wave Marketization and the Dilemmas of the Contemporary Countermovement - Michael Burawoy, Univ. of California, Berkeley

• Power Shift? Transnational Commodity Chain Activism and the Fate of Fossil Fuels - David M. Ciplet, University of Colorado Boulder

• Strategies for Exploiting Comparative Political Advantage and Complementarities among Transnational Social Movements - Peter B. Evans, University of California-Berkeley and Brown University

Discussant

• Nitsan Chorev, Brown University