Alter-Globalization

Geoffrey Pleyers Alter-Globalization: Becoming Actors in the Global Age, with a foreword by Alain Touraine. Polity Press: London, 2010, 272 pp: 9780745646763 16.99 [pounds sterling] (pbk) The alternative globalisation movement has long lost its once impressive media exposure, and has seen many of its prominent Western actors fragment or even entirely vanish from the agenda of social movement politics in the past few years. Yet the movement has survived and become increasingly active in numerous other geographies and venues of struggle, where its silent development has led to and maintained a healthy scholarly interest. Following important recent contributions to the literature by Graham Chesters and Ian Welsh (2006), and Paul Routledge and Andrew Cumbers (2009), in Alter-Globalization, Geoffrey Pleyers offers a new analysis of the movement that aims to grasp its unique composition on a conceptual level. In Alter-Globalization, Pleyers undertakes a difficult challenge, attempting to capture the specificities of the movement by constructing a dyadic framework. The theoretical contribution is built on an impressive research design, which, in Pleyers's own words, was produced by collecting material in '250 activist meetings, over 800 lectures and numerous actions', and through '152 semi-directed interviews' (p. 31). Pleyers's 11-year journey to witness the maturation of a multifaceted global movement becomes the backbone of the book, in which a plethora of activist voices, on-site analyses of the social forum processes and individual narratives from ali over the world come together to form an engaging oral history of the movement. As challenging as it may be in terms of its scope and its subject matter, Pleyers's theorisation of the movement rests on a simple categorisation between two poles. Pleyers argues that the movement should be conceived of as the amalgamation of two distinct modes of organisation and conceptualisation of social change. He defines these two approaches as the 'way of subjectivity' and the 'way of reason'. The former is understood as the approach adopted by mostly non-affiliated activists or autonomous groups that prioritise transformation in everyday life through radical reconsideration of social relations. The latter, on the other hand, captures a form of 'institutional activism' which brings intellectuals, 'ordinary citizens' and issue-oriented NGOS to challenge established channels of policy-making by means of lobbying, campaigning and debunking the orthodoxies of global governance. According to Pleyers, these two poles are based on different visions of 'another world', and they produce distinct methodologies and forms of action. While the way of subjectivity is taken up by those who are disillusioned with traditional social movement politics, and by activists who attempt to create 'spaces of experience' by building non-hierarchical, horizontal networks, the way of reason provides 'spaces of expertise' which 'aim to produce rational arguments in order to reinforce active citizenship' (p. 178). Put simply, Pleyers's framework is an elaborate reconstruction of the horizontalism/verticalism debate (see De Angelis, 2004; Nunes, 2005), but it also enhances the boundaries of contention by bringing other questions into the equation. The book is divided into four parts in which Pleyers unpacks his formula by dissecting various manifestations of the movement around the world. The main contribution of the book is offered in parts 2, 3 and 4 where detailed analyses of the aforementioned approaches and their convergence within the movement are presented. Starting with the way of subjectivity, Pleyers carefully builds his narrative by entering into a dialogue with Zapatistas, piqueteros and various other autonomous struggles, which aim to organise 'places sufficiently autonomous and distanced from capitalist society' (p. 39, emphasis in original). While, unsurprisingly, Zapatismo is portrayed as a major influence for the activists of the way of subjectivity, Pleyers refrains from romanticisation, and remains sensitive to the shortcomings and limitations of 'spaces of experience'

Development economics · Economic geography · Economic system · Economics · Globalization · Market economy · Political economy · Political science · Sociology · Globalization and Cultural Identity

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