Global Justice Networks: Geographies of Transnational Solidarity

This book provides a critical investigation of what has been termed the ‘global justice movement’. Through a detailed study of a grassroots peasants’ network (People’s Global Action [Asia]); an international trade union network (the International Federation of Chemical, Energy, Mining and General Workers); and the Social Forum process, it analyses some of this movement’s component parts and operational networks. The authors argue that the emergence of new globally-connected forms of collective action against neoliberal globalisation are indicative of a range of variously place-specific forms of political agency that coalesce across geographic space at particular times, in specific places, and in a variety of ways.Rather than being indicative of a coherent ‘movement’, the authors argue that such forms of political agency are best conceived of as ‘global justice networks’: overlapping, interacting and competing networks that articulate demands for social, economic and environmental justice. Such networks, and the social movements that comprise them, characterise emergent forms of transnational political agency. The role of key geographical concepts of space, place and scale is crucial to an understanding of the operational dynamics of these networks.