CfP – Partecipazione e Confitto
N. 1/2010
CfP : The Lefts and the Global Movement: historical, political and
cultural paths toward collective action transnationalization
When the Global Justice Movement (GJM) entered the public arena in
November 1999 with the protests against the third World Trade
Organization conference in Seattle, it presented itself as an unusual
coalition of traditional organizations, new social movements, and
emerging groups contesting neoliberal globalization (Levi and Murphy
2006: 652). Similar alliances developed on the old continent, although
with an important difference: while organizations of the socialist or
communist tradition, including political parties, are largely absent
from the GJM in the US, they are quite central in the European GJM,
where the large European trade unions are historically closely
intertwined with these parties and organizations (Bartolini 2000).
Alongside this block of parties, trade unions, and collateral
organizations that we consider as the ‘traditional Left’, we find a
‘radical Left’ sector of parties, grassroots trade unions and groups of
autonomous, anarchist or Trotskyite tradition, with their roots in the
New Left of the 1970s (della Porta and Rucht 1995; Tarrow 1989).
Another context, in which the traditional and the radical left
interacted at the moment of the Global Movement formation, was the
Latin American one. Both in Europe and in Latin America, the
relationships between these two sectors of the Left, and between them
and the others groups, have not always been linear, but characterized
by both cooperation and competition, openness and closure, cross-
fertilization and indifference.
The emergence of the Global Movement has been an opportunity for the
traditional Left to re-activate in social mobilization and to find a
way out the domestic politics boundaries, within which it remained long
time confined. At the same time, both sectors of the Left are able to
guarantee resources and visibility, besides micromobilization potential
to the young Global Movement. However, as the sketched comparison
between the United States and Europe just suggests, the relationships
between the Left and the Movement seem to vary from context to context,
and this highlights the importance of national/local resources,
traditions and political opportunities, somehow confirming the (only
apparently rhetorical) image of "rooted cosmopolitans" (Tarrow 2005).
If political science and sociology literature on the Global Justice
Movement is already reach, it hardly systematically investigated its
relationships with the different sectors of the Left. This issue of
"Partecipazione e Conflitto" is meant to overcome such lacuna, and
wants to host contributions with an empirical, and possibly
comparative, approach. We will also consider contributions with an
historical approach on the past transnational activism (old
internationalism, the '68, etc.).
We call for contributions that deal with the following aspects:
a) Comparative analysis of leftist groups which mobilize within the
Global Movement.
b) Diachronic (Historical) Analysis of the leftist transnational
activism.
c) (Possibly comparative) analysis of the relationships between
traditional and radical left within the movement.
d) Analysis of the conceptions and practices of democracy within the
leftist groups involved in the movement.
e) Analysis of the evolution and the cross-fertilization of leftist
political cultures.
Those contributions which provide a deep theoretical framework and
combine both quantitative and qualitative methods, will be highly
appreciated.
Editors:
Massimiliano Andretta (University of Pisa) andretta@???
Gianni Piazza (University of Catania) giannipiazza@???
The articles must be sent to the editors (via e-mail) and to the
Review via its e-mail: partecipazioneeconflitto@???, before
1/12/2008.
The articles will be published in Italian, but they can be submitted
also in English. They must not overcome the maximum length of 60,000
types (spaces, notes and references included). They must be sent with a
short abstract (200 words). The articles will be assessed by three
anonymous referees (one internal and two external to the Review
Board),.
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