Power and Transnational Activism

Thomas Olesen

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2010
• ISBN:
  9781136864995
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

This book focuses on global activism and uses a power perspective to provide an in-depth and coherent analysis of both the possibilities and limitations of global activism.

Bringing together scholars from IR, sociology, and political science, this book offers new and critical insights on global activism and power. It features case studies on the following social and political issues: China and Tibet, HIV/AIDS, climate change, child labour, the WTO, women and the UN, the global public sphere, regional integration, national power, world social forums, policing, media power and global civil society.

It will be of interest to students and scholars of globalization, global sociology and international politics.

Part I
Critiques and appraisals

NGO networks in action at the COP15

This is true of the two main networks in which NGOs played key coordinating roles in the lead up to the 2009 UNFCCC negotiations, Climate Action Network (CAN) and CJN. However, although these NGOs tend to conceive of their internal role – as well as their network’s relationship with governance and corporate actors – differently and, thus, often compete and conflict, the two networks have nonetheless remained linked through shared history, meeting spaces, members in common, informal information exchange, support of Southern governments and coordinated action.

CAN is the oldest and largest civil society network participating in the UN climate talks, emerging out of the 1992 Rio Earth Summit. Thus, any influence that NGOs have had on this treaty process can largely be credited to CAN members. The network’s leaders have been mainstream environmental groups such as World Wildlife Fund and Greenpeace, although they have recently been joined by influential social justice NGOs such as Oxfam and Christian Aid. Its secretariat in Washington, DC coordinates activities, information exchanges and strategies among 12 regional offices worldwide, publicizes its campaigns, raises funds and collects membership dues. Its stance, although increasingly critical, has largely focused on ‘sustainable development, – that is, human and economic development that neither compromise the continued growth of either nor unduly harm the planet. In this regard, it is very much steeped within the liberal socio-economic and political discourse of universal, yet differentially assigned, rights and obligations based on each country’s level of development. CAN’s lobbying and campaigning efforts promote democratic government regulation at both the national and international levels through ‘fair, ambitious and binding’ targets and treaties, sustainable economic growth supported by technology and aid transfers to the South and individual behavioural change.

Thus, CAN’s network structure and aims tend towards the first-generation advocacy model, with all its attendant tensions. These came to a head at the UN climate talks in Bali in 2007 (COP13). CAN members, including Friends of the Earth International and some national affiliates, voiced concerns about lead Northern NGOs promoting their own governments’ interests over those of the developing and poor countries. They also accused them of blocking the network from adopting more critical and activist stances against powerful governmental and economic actors and in defence of the planet and its majority of people. These critiques resonated with some Southern-based networks and embedded partisan NGOs who were coming to the climate talks for the first time. They began meeting and holding actions separately from CAN and, by the COP13’s end, 20 groups issued a press release regarding a launch of a new network, CJN (2007).⁵ This new network’s reference to ‘justice’ highlights its commitment to fight for social, ecological and gender justice simultaneously, as well as demanding reparations for ‘climate debt’ to be paid to the South. Furthermore, it is telling that CJN’s critical and activist stance against the UNFCCC process – charging it as undemocratic, marginalizing voices from the South and the most affected by climate change, and as proposing false, weak and profit-oriented solutions that fail to address the scale of the crisis – are the very same criticisms its participants levelled against CAN on their exodus.

Going into the COP15, CAN members had to compete with the upstart CJN for UN accreditation badges and were rather put off to find that 40 per cent went to the new alliance. The two networks were made to share the NGO room in the official Bella Center as well as to coordinate times for press conferences – both of which were conflictual. When NGO access to the Center was severely cut back in the final days of negotiations, CAN members migrated to the Klimaforum space, where CJN had been hosting well-attended and open informational and mobilization meetings all week. However, CAN proceeded to string tape and check badges in their cordoned off section of the hall, excluding non-network activists and the public from their ‘sensitive’ discussions.

These conflicts notwithstanding, the two networks did cooperate by sharing information informally via their overlapping members such as Christian Aid, and more formally, by CAN continuing to publish and distribute their free daily conference newspaper, ECO. Furthermore, both networks supported the joint demand of the African group, Least Developed Countries (LDCs), Alliance of Small Island States (AOSIS), the Group of 77 Developing Countries (G77) and China to hold the developed world to legally binding reduction targets and to a second commitment period under the Kyoto Protocol.⁶ Finally, CJN, joined by CJA (discussed later), marched under the banner ‘System Change not Climate Change’ in the 12 December permitted march organized by CAN members’ Global Campaign for Climate Action (GCCA; see Björk 2010; Hadden 2010), where up to 100,000 people turned out. And some CJN members have credited CAN for their ability to orchestrate media-savvy and popular sign-on campaigns such as TckTckTck, which the younger, less well-resourced and more confrontational CJN has not yet been able to do.

Post-, pre- and anti-modern visions of power and global order: within and against empire

Although social-democratic currents continue to denounce finance capital and corporate encroachment of the state’s responsibilities and authority and, thus, to call for re-embedding economies within reinvigorated welfare states while democratizing and strengthening global governance structures, a markedly different vision of governance and power emerges from the revolutionary and radical wings of contemporary scholarship and activism. In the current context of multiple and inter-related crises wracking the global economy, finance, energy and environment, which have in turn exacerbated global inequalities, deprivation, violence and war, leftist discourse and practice have shifted. No longer isolated voices crying in the wilderness against the once hegemonic, but now largely discredited (though still functioning) neo-liberalism, the crux of the debate has rapidly moved beyond Keynesian and Polanyian style reforms towards rethinking and practicing anew radical and utopian projects. These strive to learn from both the failures of past communist experiments and the successes of non-capitalist and non-Western socio-economic arrangements that have persisted over centuries.

Thus, a major rethink of twenty-first century communism is underway, centred especially on experiments in ‘post-anarchism’ conjoined with pre-, post- and anti-modern autonomism and de-coloniality (see Adamovksy 2007; Balakrishnan 2003; Conway 2007; Day 2005; Graeber 2004; Graeber and Grubacic 2004; Hardt and Negri 2000, 2004; Harvey 2010; Holloway 2005; IIRE 2005; Juris 2008; Mignolo 2009; Notes from Nowhere 2003; Sullivan 2005; Turbulence Collective 2007a, 2007b, 2008, 2009). Critical theorist Zizek (2009: 7–8) captures this rising red ‘phoenix from the ashes’ mood when he writes:

the time for liberal-democratic moralistic blackmail is over. Our side no longer has to go on apologizing; while the other side had better start soon. … Today … it is permitted to know and to fully engage in communism.

Similarly, Marxist geographer Harvey (2009: n.p.; see also Harvey 2010) argues the following:

While traditional institutionalized communism is as good as dead and buried, there are … millions of de facto communists active among us … ready to creatively pursue anti-capitalist imperatives. If, as the alternative globalization movement of the late 1990s declared, ‘another world is possible’ then why not also say ‘another communism is possible’?

This ‘other possible communism’ owes much of its dynamism to the resurgence of anti-state and anti-capitalist anarchism and autonomism. Although reanimating the classical debates and dichotomies between revolutionary Marxists and anarchists,⁷ the resurgence has also precipitated a truce of sorts between the two currents. Harvey (2009: n.p.) notes that this revival has tended to eschew commandist strategies of seizing the state in favour of experimenting with networked social organizational forms aimed at circumventing the market and capital, bringing about ‘a convergence of some sort between the Marxist and anarchist traditions that harks back to the broadly collaborative situation between them in the 1860s in Europe’.

Returning to our earlier left and right bank analogy, it seems that the Marxists have decamped to join the livelier party among the Bakunin clan on the other side of the river, leaving their state-oriented, social-democratic Kantian brethren high and dry in the process. This move has generated a creative ferment around re-imagining power, the state, sovereignty and global governance, as witnessed in the jazz-like fusions of neo- and post-Marxist, autonomist, operaist and anarchist praxis. Among the first, most paradigmatic and widely resonant of these hybridizations are Hardt and Negri’s (2000, 2004) conceptions of the rhizomatic empire and the counter-imperial multitude. Empire in their definition has co-evolved with the global market and production circuits and is the new global order, form of sovereignty and collective ruling subject, heralding a new logic and structure of rule. Empire is said to regulate global exchanges and transverse boundaries without establishing a territorial centre of power. To the contrary, it is

a decentered and deterritorializing apparatus of rule that progressively incorporates the entire global realm within its open, expanding frontiers. Empire manages hybrid identities, flexible hierarchies, and plural exchanges through modulating networks of command.

(Hardt and Negri 2000: xi–xii)

This elaborate conception of global governance and power flows infuses the classical tripartite governance structure of imperial Rome with post-structuralist Deleuze and Guattari’s (1987) rhizomatic network, wherein nodal points proliferate on an open plane and connect with all others. The top three tiers, or plateaus, of the rhizome constitute Polybius’s imperial monarchy, which exercises control through the destructive power of the bomb. The US holds the pinnacle nodal position, wielding a monopoly of force. Its most powerful allied states reside just below, using inter-governmental organizations to regulate international monetary exchanges and exercising power over culture and biopolitics, or the power to regulate social life from the inside. The two centre plateaus comprise Polybius’s aristocracy, which exercises financial control via judgment. Networks of transnational corporations bring the command structure of the higher monarchical tier to life. Below the corporate nodes are the semi-peripheral states, which filter the powers above and discipline their subject populations.

Finally, the nodes and relations at the base of the imperial rhizome constitute the democracy matrix. Here reside peripheral governments of the Global South, operating alone and through forums such as the UN General Assembly. Also, at the base are a range of groups seeking to capture, tame, mediate, and ‘represent’ the popular interests of the multitude, such as NGOs, religious organizations and the media. The multitude is regulated by and made subject to this ethereal web of control primarily through superstition and fear, aver Hardt and Negri. There is no possibility of escaping the imperial rhizome or any ground for constructing collective actors or political programs beyond empire.

In this seemingly totalizing new order of global imperial sovereignty, Hardt and Negri posit that a counter-hegemonic global class – the multitude – nonetheless has the potential to act within and also against empire. Imperial control is conceived as parasitic, feeding off the productive energies of its multitudinous host. This constitutive power of the multitude makes empire possible; however, it can also potentially destroy it and construct a post-imperial, global society with radically different flows and forms of power (Hardt and Negri 2000: xv, 359–61).

This they argue is because imperial ‘biopower’ emanates from command nodes and casts itself as a transcendent sovereign authority that imposes order – a would-be global Leviathan. In contrast, the multitude is involved in bottom-up ‘biopolitical production’, which Hardt and Negri conceive as immanent to society and creates relationships through collaborative forms of labour, which give content to democracy. Although the modern, vertical form of biopower creates a people, the nation and indeed a civil society, the post-(or late-)modern, horizontal, biopolitical production constitutes the multitude as a multiplicity of identities or subjectivities that cannot be reduced or subsumed unde...

Table of contents

• Rethinking Globalizations
• Contents
• Illustrations
• Contributors
• Abbreviations
• Introduction
• Part I Critiques and appraisals
• Part II The state and the national
• Part III Representation and discourse
• Index