ABSTRACT
This Special Forum is based on a collective dialogue between place-based struggles to defend rights and territories and the dynamics of global trends. Behind apparently fragmented battles we see an emerging common vision, like a mosaic composed of separate tiles, building towards emancipation and justice. Based on discussions in a workshop in Siena in November 2018, the Forum assembles some pieces of the mosaic through five thematic articles crafted in exchanges between social movement, academic and civil society activists. In this Introduction we review other current convergence efforts looking at two related dimensions: sharing ideas and analysis in order to develop a common understanding of global evolutions, and bringing people together to take transformative action by building shared spaces, alliances, campaigns and solidarity. We then situate the Siena workshop and the People's Sovereignty process that has grown from it in this broader context. Finally, we introduce the five articles.
A mosaic of struggles
For the observer who views contemporary reality from the perspective of social justice the world resembles a mosaic of struggles: many people fighting in their locations – often collectively – against diverse sets of oppressions, building or defending solutions in many different ways. These are the pieces of the mosaic. At the same time, a mosaic is a composition that unifies the parts into a single image – a simple or a complex one. In this sense the viewer will find that, behind what can look like fragmented battles and constructions, there is an increasingly consolidated common struggle. It may be common in its nature and not yet in its coordination and actions, but these fragments are the seeds of something that is needed for emancipation and justice in the world.
This Special Forum of Globalizations aims at making this mosaic visible. It is part of an effort based on the intuition that deep changes in the world are underway and that we need to assess them collectively in a dialogue between the perspectives of the pieces and the overall image, between the struggles on the ground and the dynamics of the global trends that unify them. Our point of departure was a small group of academic and social movement activists from all regions of the world working on transversal issues – including food and agriculture, human rights, democracy, trade, work, womeńs rights, environment … – who came together in a symposium in Siena in October 2018. As a working hypothesis we assumed that there are impacts on people’s lives as a result of economic, social and cultural globalization that need to be explored, and we tried to approach them from the most local level possible.
For a period of almost two decades following the fall of the Berlin Wall, the world economy, politics and society engaged in a project of building a neoliberal globalization and society. Western powers, together with the growing economic forces, operated within an order made up of free markets (for both trade and investments), representative democracy and civil rights, and multilateral global governance. The hegemony of this political force penetrated deep into people’s vision and values and, largely uncontested, became progressively consolidated in the form of the solid common sense we can still see today.
The world moved, then, into a regime of free trade and investment negotiations, privatizations, de-regulation of domestic markets including labour and social rights, extension of intellectual property rights to all kinds of things and deepened exploitation of natural resources to feed the world machine and consumption. Finances also escalated along an accelerated pathway, not only by extending the realm of their logic and operations to almost all areas of the economic lives of societies, but also globally, through the consolidation of new electronic means and a structure of world tax havens that make life quite easy for them. Finances signified quick profits at any cost and huge investments to conquer existing or new markets in order to avoid competition and develop the big monopolies that rule many key areas of the global economy.
Formally, a more democratic world emerged, with less countries under dictatorships and more free elections spreading around the globe. In many cases this evolution was driven by wars and external military threats from the USA and EU countries. Even if the ‘equality’ that the United Nations practiced was still perverted by the veto power and the Security Council, the UN system lived a new moment of energy with a whole series of conferences taking place to acknowledge global problems. Multilateral entities emerged, outside of the UN system and its human rights framework, to rule the new global economy and world. The World Trade Organization (WTO – 1995) was perhaps the main icon of this new moment of euphoria and hegemony of ‘unilateral’ internationalism.
Governments all over the world jumped – or were pushed – into this wave and promoted all kinds of policies aligned with the Washington Consensus, with heavy social, economic and – later on – environmental impacts. The progressive dismantling of national productive structures produced poverty and unemployment in most countries. On top of this, the loss of social and labour rights and the progressive privatization of vital services such as education and health produced what we can call the first round of anti-globalization struggles.
National unions, social movements and many civil society organizations created and developed a new internationalism. It assumed a lively expression in the World Social Forum process whose first edition in Porto Alegre 2001 coalesced the diversity of expressions of anti-global resistance of the 1990s, such as the zapatist uprising in 1994, the Seattle mobilizations against the WTO (1999), the Prague anti-IMF (International Monetary Fund) demonstrations in 1998, those in Quebec against the Free Trade Area of the Americas (FTAA – 2000). Social struggle organized clearly and worldwide in contestation to neoliberal globalization. Politicians also attuned themselves to this phenomenon and in many regions and countries progressive governments emerged – Latin America being, perhaps, the clearest expression of this trend. It can be said that in some regions there was a slowdown in some dimensions of the neoliberal path. In the case of Europe, even though it was subjected to huge pressure, the postwar social contract was not completely broken and is still in place with some consistency in many countries.
But the bubble of the promised ‘miracle’ of this globalization burst in 2008 with the financial, economic, food, energy, environment and, finally, social crises. It was not necessarily a single simultaneous crisis, but it was a strong turbulence that, departing from the core of its promoters, hit the global economy faster and deeper than previous ones. More than 10 years later the world is still suffering from its impact.
An increasingly radical concentration of wealth the hands of a few billionaires has taken place, along with a rise in poverty, unemployment, as well as forced and massive migrations. There has been a clear destabilization of global weather, and a non-stop process of extractivism of raw materials that has put acute pressure on forests, seas and other natural commons and, most important, people’s livelihoods. At the same time, democracy and democratic procedures have been captured and ‘privatized’ by corporations and other expressions of economic powers at national, but also at international levels. States ruled by privatized democracies that favour economic powers have entered into a vicious circle that operates against people’s rights and nature.
At both national and international levels people have increasingly begun to perceive democracy negatively. Living in difficult socioeconomic situations, a growing share of the public has lost interest in the main pillars of a democratic society. Solidarity, peace, respect, trust in the judicial system and/or in the state’s capacity to take care of people’s needs have been side-lined by the discomfort they are experiencing. The unprecedented mutation of communications into a new game in which social media play an increasingly key role accelerates the debate in the public arena and exacerbates a polarized environment dominated by hate politics and fake news.
A final blow to the pillars of neoliberal globalization has been the fact that global economy and geopolitics have changed with the consistent irruption of China onto the scene as a player that operates with its own principles, values and, in many cases, rules. This has put an end to an age governed by a so-called multilateral system backed by unilateral US-EU support, now sharply challenged by China. As a direct result, global governance has become less easy for the US to navigate – imposing its will as before – and the ‘new’ US of Donald Trump rejects the structures in which its hegemony is contested.Footnote1
All these factors and the changing scenario have produced diverse reactions on the part of sectors that, in one way or another, have suffered the loss of their rights or feel their class privileges are diminishing. Working class people losing jobs or entering into new, highly precarious work conditions feel threatened by migrants escaping from hunger, wars or social or political oppression. Even middle classes in countries where progressive forces have tried to introduce a better balance to wealth distribution feel they are losing access to assets or services they used to possess as part of their class membership. These sectors have been easily swayed by hate policies promoted by a new radical right-wing variety of politicians who, without any concern for modern moral values, move the masses into obscurantist beliefs, splitting societies, promoting social and political polarizations. In some cases this has led to renewed fascist-based parties or movements. Examples of these can be seen and are suffered in both East and West Europe, South and South East Asia and North and South America.
The circular relation between the erosion of the economic and social conditions of masses and the privatization and capture of democracy is clear, along with the undermining of democratic values that, in many cases, produces the rise of right-wing neo-fascist governments. And then, a new series of threats is generated, to the civil and social rights of women, ethnic or religious minorities, indigenous people, young people among others.
We close this introduction in the midst of the latest challenge posed to the neo-liberalized globalized world: the COVID-19 pandemic. This crisis is revealing the fragility of the paradigm of market-oriented societies and the unquestionable need for collective and public answers to protect people’s lives. The central role that states need to play in ensuring public coordination, services and concrete help for people left aside by markets is emerging more strongly than ever, along with the creativity and solidarity that communities are demonstrating as they address the crisis on the front line. But at the same time we are witnessing how corporate interests clash with public policies, or even take advantage of them to push profits.
This new complex world looks like a palimpsest where the effects of contemporary global capitalism detonate conflicts that, even though they are linked by this common origin, look split and not necessarily connected. They may be in a different stages or moments, but seen as a whole this mosaic clearly shows the big picture.
This Special Forum, born from the exchanges that took place in Siena, aims at putting together some of the pieces of the mosaic through a collection of articles built in dialogue between social movement militants, engaged scholars and civil society activists, and rooted in the concrete struggles that people are making to defend their rights in every corner of our world.
Collective analyses of and reactions to the contemporary crises
The group of people who came together in Siena represented only one of a number of efforts of convergence – assembling the pieces of the mosaic – that have multiplied over the past few years in reaction to the capture of democracy and territories described above. This section of the introduction will describe some of them in order to situate this Special Forum in a broader context of collective concern. We will not visit front-line actions here; some of these will be described in the thematic articles which compose the Forum. Instead, we will look globally at what we understand to be two related dimensions of convergence: sharing ideas and analysis in order to develop a common understanding of what is going on in the world, and bringing people together to take transformative action by building shared spaces, alliances and campaigns. We will first review analysis that has been conducted over the past few years aimed at better understanding the current geo-political-economic-environmental situation in order to strategically oppose it, and some of the key ideas that have emerged. We will then map some existing spaces in which convergences among different social movements are taking place – and in some cases have been for years. These include both autonomous spaces created by the movements and institutional ones into which they foray to obtain measures that can support local struggles. This review and mapping exercise will help to contextualize the ‘Reclaiming Democracy from Below – People’s Sovereignty’ process, the origin of this Special Forum, which will be presented in the final section.
Collective analyses and key issues
This Forum is focused on collective action, so we will not assess the growing literature in which individual analysts have addressed the worsening context, while fully recognizing the important contributions that such thinkers can make to collective understanding. Instead, we will briefly review a few recent initiatives that have set a variety of people from different places and identities around a physical or virtual table for a shared analytic effort. The analyses conducted in the different cases involved various mixtures of academic and social movement activists and adopted a range of methodologies. Since building such synergies is one aspect of convergence that interests us we will consider the process of these initiatives as well as their content.
Alternatives in a World of Crisis, published in 2018, is the substantial output of three meetings of the Global Working Group Beyond Development convened with the support of the Brussels Office of the Rosa Luxemburg Foundation in 2016, with the participation of the Universidad Andina Simon Bolivar of Ecuador (Global Working Group Beyond Development, Citation2019). The Working Group was composed of some 30 people in their individual capacities, described by the organizers as engaged researchers, movement-based organizers, activists and popular educators from all five continents. Their report opens with a statement of common concern that could be taken as a rallying cry of this Special Forum as well: ‘alternatives do exist even if in many cases they remain invisible to us’. The Global Working Group seeks to fill this gap by describing transformative processes around the world that are ‘addressing different axes of domination simultaneously and anticipating forms of social organization that configure alternatives to the commodifying, patriarchal, colonial and destructive logics of modern capitalism’ (Global Working Group Beyond Development, Citation2019, p. 5). In their analysis the crisis of the foundations of capitalist modernity rests on five dimensions: ecological destruction; technologization, automatization and digitalization; rise of right wing populism and nationalism and counteroffensive against human rights; corporate power and degeneration of the quality of democracy; and inequalities, illegal economies substituting the framework of social security and labour protection.
The bulk of the volume consists of six detailed case studies of experiences in Nigeria, Bolivia, Ecuador, India, Greece and Spain, selected according to two main criteria: ‘they have all generated practices regarding the material and symbolic reproduction of life that are radically alternative to capitalist/modern/Western civilizational patterns, and they have attained a more than local dimension’ or have inspired actors in other contexts (Global Working Group Beyond Development, Citation2019, pp. 10–11). The discussions that were stimulated by the cases and by a field visit to an indigenous municipality in Ecuador enabled the participants to agree on five key processes through which progressive social change can take place: decolonization, anti-capitalism, anti-racism/casteism, dismantling patriarchy, and transforming predatory relations with nature. Some participants felt that spirituality and cosmovision should be added to the list. The outcome of the rich exchange is structured around four central questions: How to democratize or deepen democracy? How to deal with the State? How to make use of the legacy of the left? What kind of internationalist relations and solidarities are necessary for multidimensional transformation?
The report closes with final thoughts on strategy, concluding that ‘the current historical moment implies different temporalities of transformation which are best met by different, eventually complementary political strategies’ (Global Working Group Beyond Development, Citation2019, p. 302) . These local processes of ‘prefigurative politics’ need to be made visible to each other, like pieces of a tapestry. The report identifies some threads along which dialogue among different processes could be developed. These include preserving and creating commons as a way of building popular power, and interrogating political perspectives (like those of plurinationality, polyycentricity, Buen Vivir, and biodemocracy) which can overcome the limitations of Eurocentric political thought. Three issues in particular were felt to require more discussion: putting social control and ownership of technology into practice; combining the urgency of radical resistance with the slow pace of deep cultural transformation; and transforming our methods of production, distribution and exchange (Global Working Group Beyond Development, Citation2019, p. 303).
The Global Working Group Beyond Development is linked, through people who are engaged in more than one group, to several other collective initiatives that are seeking to think ‘outside the box’. Radical Ecological Democracy (RED)Footnote2 is a network animated by the paradigm of ‘an evolving framework of governance in which each person and community has access to decision-making forums of relevance to them, and in which the decisions taken are infused with ecological and cultural sensitivity, and socio-economic equity’. The RED website includes a page operated jointly with the Global Working Group Beyond Development. It also dedicates a page to Pluriverse: a Post-Development Dictionary (Kothari et al., Citation2019). This is a revisitation of the Development Dictionary published just 25 years ago, whose editors describe it as ‘a broad transcultural compilation of concrete concepts, worldviews and practices from around the world challenging the modernist ontology of universalism in favour of a multiplicity of possible worlds’. The more than 100 short essays are divided into three sections which describe the current ‘development crisis’ and proposing reformist solutions and transformative initiatives. Each is written ‘by someone who is deeply engaged with the world-view or practice described – from indigenous resisters to middle-class rebels’. The book is envisaged as a contribution to another initiative, the Global Tapestry of Alternatives,Footnote3 dedicated to ‘weaving radical alternatives to foster the systemic changes we need’. Systemic Alternatives,Footnote4 coordinated by ATTAC, Fundaciòn Solòn, and Focus on the Global South, also seeks to promote dialogue and complementarities between different visions – such as Vivir Bien, degrowth, commons, ecofeminism, Mother Earth rights, and deglobalization – that contest the capitalism, productivism, extractivism, patriarchy and anthropocentrism which are the bases of today’s systemic crisis.
More specifically focused than the group of initiatives described above was the International Conference on Authoritarian Populism and the Rural World organized at the International Institute of Social Studies in The Hague on 17–18 March 2018. The organizing force was the Emancipatory Rural Politics Initiative (ERPI),Footnote5 which describes itself as ‘a collective of scholars, researchers and activitists from a variety of universities, research institutions and social movements, linked together by a commitment to understanding the emergence of authoritarian populism and identifying and promoting its grassroots alternatives’ (ERPI Press Release, Citation2018). Key figures are a group of scholar-activists from different universities who are all engaged with social movements in their separate work and have come together before as an extended collective to strategically provide academic legitimation to social movement struggles against land grabbing.
The 2018 International Conference was introduced by a framing paper authored by some members of the collective (Scoones et al., Citation2018). The authors define authoritarian populism in terms not of parties or individual leaders but of the modalities of political and ideological relationships between the ruling bloc, the state and the dominated classes. A crucial element in analysing it, they note, is determining who is incorporated and who is excluded, which can take the form of a confrontation between ‘the people’ and ‘Others’. They recall that rural transformations have historically been driven by the political economy of resource extraction, exacerbated today by financialization under neoliberal capitalism, which is sparking various patterns of migration and undermining rural communities and livelihoods. In the contemporary context an emancipatory rural politics has to address different challenges together: redistribution (and so class and inequality), recognition (identity), and representation (democracy, community, solidarity). The invitation is to understand more deeply the dynamics at play and to identify alternatives, which are increasingly being framed as relational, multi-class and multi-sectoral, overcoming the rural-urban divide.
The Conference gathered over 300 academics, activists and scholar-activists from around the world. In an effort to adapt the typical academic conference format to the diverse nature of the participants the discussions were organized around plenary panels followed by small working groups. These focused on the three questions that framed the conference: what are the rural roots and consequences of authoritarian populism and how does this differ across the world? How are people resisting and with what different strategies? What are emancipatory strategies and how can they be supported? An overall conference report has not been published, but the papers are all available on the conference websiteFootnote6, and groups of papers have been published as special forums in academic journals. Additionally, in collaboration with Open Democracy, the collective has stimulated a series of videos and articles aimed at a broader audience.Footnote7
Intersecting Movements Resisting Authoritarianisms: feminist and progressive analysis and tactics, adopts a feminist lens to analyse the local and transnational manifestation of authoritarianism and to map resistance across contexts (Regions Refocus, Citation2018). The report is based on 31 in-depth interviews across 19 countries with people from a range of movements and identities. Respondents were asked to contribute on three topics: political reflection on the various contexts and their commonalities; challenges and priorities that progressive activists face in these various contexts; and tactics to strengthen cross-movement and cross-regional solidarities. Among the factors they saw as stimuli to the global surge in authoritarianism was imperialism, as manifested in Donald Trump’s support for reactionary forces elsewhere. Religious dogmatism was felt to permeate many conservative movements, while patriarchy fundamentally structures them around the world. Neoliberalism is at the heart of renewed conservatisms, leading to an emptying out of the state as it is captured by corporate forces.
At the top of the interviewees’ list of challenges to be met is that of fighting against fragmentation and strengthening solidarities, adopting intersectionality as a methodology. New ways of working across movements need to go beyond traditional alliances and organizing structures. Interviewees lamented the insufficiency of intergenerational collaboration and the increase in activist burnout leading to a failure of capacity to imagine politics as fundamentally different from what is happening. Sustainable activism needs to be built on convergence, cooperation, analysis and engagement. Without a structural understanding of the connections between fascism and global capitalism it is not possible to organize strategically. It is imperative to generate analysis rooted in alternative paradigms, recovering suppressed heterodox thought, and grounding a research agenda that is informed by and informs activist priorities. The report closes with a list of strategic proposals including, more explicitly than in other initiatives mentioned in this review, a statement of the need for adequate innovative and flexible funding.
Another initiative merits mention, although it was more limited in time and outreach, since it brought together a number of the scholar-activists who have since been a part of the Peoples’ Sovereignty process. This was a one-day dialogic symposium held at the CUNY Graduate Center in New York in March 2016. The meeting grouped academics from a broad range of disciplines with practitioners and some social movement activists to discuss ‘Global governance in the post-2015 era: can it become inclusive, accountable and transformative towards a more equitable and sustainable world?’ (McKeon, Citation2017b). The discussions addressed a number of the issues that would appear again on the agenda in Siena, such as corporate capture of governance and resources and the need to start with the people on the ground by supporting their struggles and initiatives to defend and rebuild democracy. Participants highlighted the potential of multi-level, territorial approaches for breaking out of hierarchical and nation state-based frames and for organizing social and economic life. They invoked the imperative of protecting the human rights framework from the multiple challenges it faces. Finally, they explored alternative ways of generating and sharing knowledge and of challenging narrowly defined ‘evidence-based’ policy. Of particular interest was the inclusive, iterative process of preparation adopted, whereby all participants took part in a collective exercise of defining the agenda and the programme.
Finally, the Right to Food and Nutrition Watch,Footnote8 backed by the Global Network for the Right to Food and Nutrition, has functioned for over a decade as a dynamic site of experimentation in blending people’s experience on the ground with social activist and academic analysis, through the written word but also using means such as webcasts and infographics.
Key issues that have emerged from the analyses touched on in the preceding paragraphs, as well as in other related reflections, can be grouped into the six clusters that form the architecture of the post-Siena People’s Sovereignty considerations. Three of these clusters fit nicely together into a politically-oriented concern for: Reclaiming democracy and people’s sovereignty from below; Ensuring people’s food, water, energy and health sovereignty, and Defending the commons and respecting nature. This composite cluster houses a range of concerns, from reflection on what to do with the heritage of the left to the more radical effort to re-think governance as a process in which nature plays a protagonist role. The need to heal ecological disaster fits here, although it could merit a heading of its own since nothing that is done to change political systems will matter if ecosystem destruction continues at its current rapid pace. In addition to the contributions to the political dialogue contained in the texts referred to in the preceding sections, a few other relevant sources – from among the many – include the extensive literature on governing the commons and landscapes (Friedmann, Citation2015; Frischmann, Citation2013), food sovereignty understood as a loose pattern of overlapping sovereignties deeply rooted in local dynamics (Conversi, Citation2016), discussions of democratization as a process (Gills, Citation2002; Shivji, Citation2011), the potential of local democracy to contest corporate power (Manski & Smith, Citation2019), denunciations of corporate-led ‘multistakeholderism’ (Gleckman, Citation2018; McKeon, Citation2017a), defending public policy space for social movement projects (Kay et al., Citation2018), the challenge of the democratization of global economic power (Prato, Citation2016), terrestrial politics in the New Climatic Regime (Latour, Citation2018) or planetary governance in the age of the ‘Capitalocene’ (Gill, Citation2019), and the grand debate around Samir Amin’s call for a ‘fifth international’ (Gills & Chase-Dunn, Citation2019).
Reflections on a fourth people’s sovereignty cluster, Building economies based on decent work, has generally received somewhat less attention than the more explicitly political dimensions of building a better world. The report on Alternatives in a World of Crisis referred to above accords attention to the damage wrought by the logic of modern capitalism and offers some examples of the ‘decommodification’ of some aspects of life in the case studies that compose it. Yet one of the three issues it identifies as requiring more discussion is precisely that of how to transform methods and networks of production, distribution and exchange in a non-capitalistic frame. The vision of ‘deglobalization’ proposed by Walden Bello and featured in Systemic Alternatives explores what is required to promote ‘effective economics’, which strengthens social solidarity by subordinating the operations of the market to the values of equity, justice and community and enlarging the range of democratic decision-making in the economic sphere (Bello, Citation2019). Some ‘new left economists’ seek to change how capitalism works with transformation driven by employees and consumers (Beckett, Citation2019). Others feel there is scope for government regulation (Frischmann, Citation2013) and still other advocate tools such as fiscal instruments to redress the relative pricing of the factors of production and oppose the constant search to lower labour costs (Prato, Citation2016). An opposing view, asserted in Alternatives in a World of Crisis, is that government regulation and the welfare state operate more as an instrument for the salvation of capitalism in crisis than one for transformation. The ERPI initiative seeks to find community-grounded alternatives based on distributive networks, the collaborative commons and community organization to deliver food, energy and other services. Work-in progress on ‘rogue capitalism’ conducted by the International Planning Committee for Food Sovereignty’s Land and Territory Working GroupFootnote9 is an exemplary effort to help grassroots organizations understand the key components of finance capitalism building on how its effects are experiences on the ground. ‘Just transition’ has emerged as a vision and a set of principles to shift from an extractive to a regenerative economy taking the community as the basis of agency. Energy is often the entry point, and particular attention is given to protecting workers and communities as they transit to clean energy systems.Footnote10
The range of issues housed in the fifth cluster Respecting culture, spirituality and diversity of learning is highly varied. Some fully accept the need for a deep revision of inherited Western values and concepts of knowledge, incorporating the quite different approaches of indigenous cosmologies. Others find it more difficult to factor spiritual concerns into the search for transformation. This cluster includes, among much else, the rich experience of building agroecological knowledge among traditional practitioners and respectful scientists, horizontal ‘peasant-to-peasant’ learning, ‘resilient knowledge’ as a source of enabling power to make needed changes (Anderson, Citation2015), the copious collection of pieces of a transformative paradigm put together by the editors of Pluriverse: a post-development dictionary (Kothari et al., Citation2019), and the practice of cooperation between academic and social movement activists which is central to the Siena/People’s Sovereignty process (among others Borras, Citation2016; Duncan et al., Citation2019; The People’s Knowledge Editorial Collective, Citation2017).
The sixth cluster, Asserting women’s rights and self-determination, is most directly addressed in the Regions Refocus publication among those reviewed above, but it is a recurring theme in reflections about life-affirming worlds, as is the concern for Recognizing the transversal nature of youth and their agency.
Convergence spaces
Convergence, as we have noted, is not only about sharing ideas and analysis, but also about creating and governing spaces, building alliances, conducting campaigns. The need to promote such convergences at all levels – among place-based struggles, social movements focusing on different dimensions of the fight against authoritarian capitalism, their potential allies, and the spaces in which they gather – was a key motivation behind the launching of the Siena initiative. It is also a red thread throughout the reflections we have reviewed. How best to accomplish this difficult task is open for discussion and experimentation. The reports of collective reflection cited above contribute some stimulating suggestions. We need to go beyond traditional alliances and organizing structures and strengthen intersectional solidarities. Convergence takes place through plural dialogue across different systems of knowledge in which Western concepts and analytical tools are not necessarily taken as points of departure. Local alternative experiences need not necessarily be scaled ‘up’; they can scale out in oceanic circles in Gandhi’s words. The outcome of convergence need not be a single shared vision, but a situation in which different visions can complement each other. The metaphors most often applied in these analyses – as in the first section of this introduction – are those of pieces of a puzzle, or a tapestry or mosaic, in which the total picture can emerge only if the contours of the individual contributions are maintained.
Some recent academic studies have revisited the literature on convergence spaces involving social movements in order to adapt analysis to the current situation. In this introduction we are interested above all in presenting some concrete cases that illustrate how social movements and their allies are addressing the challenges involved. For this reason we will briefly refer to three studies only, all well-rooted in direct experience with social movement activism. The first is the introduction to a special issue of Third World Quarterly on ‘Converging Social Justice Issues and Movements’ written by a group associated with the International Conference on Authoritarian Populism and the Rural World referred to above (Borras et al., Citation2018). The authors of the articles are all engaged in activist work and their analyses are complemented by reflection pieces by social movement activists also contained in the special issue. The introduction suggests four broad themes that merit discussion regarding the political implications of convergence processes: revisiting class politics in the context of intersectionality, since working people experience oppression in plural ways on the basis of class and other social identities; validating the sectoral concerns that are the entry point for much activism, but moving towards multisectoral issues; taking very seriously the need to address the immediate, concrete issues of working people, which can require tactically forging broad cross-class alliances that content themselves with being ‘more or less anti-capitalist’; seeking to understand better how national, transnational and global spaces and processes shape one another in response to the converging crises.
A more specific look at ‘Food sovereignty and convergence spaces’ focuses on the way in which these spaces are marked by contested social and power relations related to differential control of access to resources, which may give rise to problems of representation, mobility and cultural differences. These can take on particular dimensions, in the authors’ analysis, when the convergence space in question is engaged in interface with institutional processes (Claeys & Duncan, Citation2019). Finally, the Special Forum of Globalizations on ‘Transformative Responses to Authoritarian Capitalism: Learning with the World Social Forum’ revisits the history of the ‘grandmother’ of social movement convergence spaces and presents a variety of interpretations of the lessons learned and their implications for transformative change (Wallgren et al., Citation2020).
Moving now to examine some existing convergence spaces, our review can only be highly selective and indicative of the kind of mapping exercise that should be extended further at different levels. We limit ourselves to a small selection of autonomous, self-managed global spaces that have been created by movements and/or front-line struggles, academics, civil society organizations coming together for common purposes. We privilege spaces which in one way or another have been connected with the process that has led to the ‘People’s Sovereignty’ dynamic.
The food sovereignty movement has given birth to a variety of convergence spaces at different moments of its history and for different purposes. Key ‘pieces’ of the movement – such as La Via Campesina (LVC), the West African Network of Peasant Organizations (ROPPA), or the Food Justice movement in the US – are themselves spaces and products of convergences among different kinds of actors. At global level, the first convergence space in time emerged through the process of bringing together small-scale producer organizations that accompanied the organization of the civil society forum in parallel to the World Food Summit convened by the FAO in 1996. This was the occasion in which La Via Campesina first enunciated the concept of food sovereignty on the international scene. By the time of the civil society forum held in parallel to the second World Food Summit in 2002 the International Planning Committee for Food Sovereignty (IPC)Footnote11 emerged as a network of small-scale producer organizations and other social actors. The IPC did not have a ‘legal personality’ but its mandate and work programme were legitimated by their adoption by the forum. It aimed at interfacing with FAO and other international agencies on issues of importance to the concerned movements, who constituted a recognized membership and set in place a governance mechanism. It is worth noting that the overwhelming presence of LVC in the forum and the quota system adopted to ensure that the majority of the delegates were from rural movements operated to sideline Western NGOs who were accustomed to dominating civil society spaces of interaction with intergovernmental processes (McKeon, Citation2009, pp. 62–63). The dynamics of inclusion, exclusion and alliance building have continued to be central in the history of the food sovereignty movement.
Over the first years of its existence the IPC successfully performed its interface role, introducing hundreds of rural social movement representatives into the decision-making forums of FAO and negotiating guidelines on the application of the right to food at national level. At the same time it served as a space within which important progress was made internally in building convergence among different sectors of the rural world which often had conflictual relations – such as peasants and indigenous peoples, pastoralists and farmers – and helping to strengthen the weaker sectors, such as the fisherfolk. A self-evaluation conducted in 2008, soon after the eruption of the food price crisis, provides interesting insights into the characteristics that were felt to have facilitated the functioning of the IPC as an effective convergence space for rural social movements in this first period of its operations (McKeon, Citation2009, pp. 113–118; McKeon, Citation2015b, pp. 145–146; see also Colombo & Onorati, Citation2009).
A second, complementary convergence space was the autonomous International Nyéleni Forum on Food Sovereignty, held in Mali in 2007, which brought together more than 500 participants from local movements and struggles in all parts of the world to deepen the common understanding of what food sovereignty means. The organization of the forum represented a deliberate effort by La Via Campesina (not without some understandable internal turmoil) to share ‘ownership’ of the concept of food sovereignty and to ensure that it was rooted in and built up from peoples’ initiatives throughout the world. The forum egregiously fulfilled its purpose and the final declaration it adopted continues to constitute a reference point for the movement. The organizing committee deliberately refrained from perpetuating its existence. Instead, it dissolved after the forum into a broader informal group responsible for bringing out the Nyéleni Newsletter, which continues to appear regularly and seeks to strengthen the grassroots of the movement by providing accessible material on key issues and creating a space for exchange of experiences.Footnote12
A further decisive moment in the construction of convergence spaces emerged with the eruption of the food price crisis in 2007–2008, which obliged the international community to address the evident void in global governance of food issues. The outcome – strongly advocated by the food sovereignty movement – was the reform of UN Committee on World Food Security (CFS), with the active participation of the IPC. The result was an unprecedentedly inclusive global policy space, the only one in the UN system in which organizations representing those most affected by the issues under debate intervene on the same footing as governments and with priority voice as compared with other non-state participants, following the Human Rights framework. In the CFS governments maintain final decision-making authority, and hence accountability, an important distinction as compared with the ‘multistakeholderism’ that corporations are propagating as a strategy for capture of governance (Gleckman, Citation2018; McKeon, Citation2017a).
The CFS reform document recognizes the right of civil society to autonomously design and manage its interface with the intergovernmental process and the resulting Civil Society Mechanism (CSM)Footnote13 constitutes a third major convergence space to which the food sovereignty movement has given birth. The CSM’s membership overlaps largely with that of the IPC, but it is open to participation by all civil society organizations at all levels engaged with food issues. Its governance is structured around 11 constituencies of which only one is NGOs, whose role is understood as largely one of support. In this sense the CSM maintains the IPC’s prioritizing of social movements while broadening its outreach to other civil society actors. The CSM’s mandate is restricted to interface with the CFS. The present threat of corporate capture of global food governance – and the UN in general – is stimulating a strong effort to build synergies between the two spaces, based on the activism of the social movements who are members of both, and outreach to other important spaces and actors such as the climate justice movement and the youth who are energizing it.
The food sovereignty movement’s adherence to the human rights framework has taken it to the UN Council on Human Rights as well. Here the process of negotiating the UN Declaration on the rights of peasants and other people working in rural areas (UNDROP) was successfully concluded with its adoption by the UN General Assembly in December 2018 (Claeys & Edelman, Citation2019). The six-year process in the UNCHR was led by LVC supported by a few specialized CSOs, but progressively reached out to include organizations from other rural constituencies and a broader range of allies. For the duration of the negotiations it constituted an interesting convergence space concentrated on the creation and defence of new human rights. The implementation of UNDROP is now reaching back into consolidated spaces such as the IPC and the CSM/CFS, as well as other more problematic arena such as the UN Decade on Family Farming where the civil society space is occupied also by organizations which represent big commercial farmers who do not adhere to a food sovereignty vision.
The UNCHR is also the global institutional interface of another complex of social movement activism which has been a source of energy for the People’s Sovereignty initiative: the Global Campaign to Reclaim Peoples Sovereignty, Dismantle Corporate Power and Stop Impunity.Footnote14 The Global Campaign was launched in June 2012 at the Rio+20 People’s Summit. The launch was preceded by a broad consultation process with movements, networks and organizations from around the world which are fighting against the corporate regime that has captured development models and the architecture of extraordinary privileges and impunity that allow this regime to perpetuate itself. A Call for Action was issued with the goal of giving the central role to communities who are resisting the systematic violations and crimes of transnational corporations.
The network now includes some 250 social movements, CSOs, trade unions and communities affected by the activities of Transnational Corporations (TNCs). These groups resist land grabs, extractive mining, exploitative wages and environmental destruction caused by TNCs globally but particularly in Africa, Asia, Europe and Latin America. The Campaign proposes an International Peoples Treaty Footnote15which provides a political framework to support the local, national and international movements and communities in their resistances and practices of alternatives to corporate power and the TNC model of the economy. At the same time it participates in the campaign for the UN Binding TreatyFootnote16 to regulate TNCs, stop human rights violations, and end impunity and ensure access to justice for affected communities. The meetings conducted in the context of the negotiation process, which got underway in 2014 in the UNCHR, constitute a face-to-face convergence space for a broad range of social movements who have in common the struggle against corporate power. A few of the key members, but by no means all, are also associated with the food sovereignty movement and the CSM and IPC spaces.
Another convergence space merits mention in this brief review because of its interconnections with anti-TNC movements and the importance of defining alternative bases for an economy which denounces capitalism: the World Social Forum of Transformative Economies (WFSTE). The WFSTE identifies itself as a convergence process aimed at
bringing together social movements and projects which share the will to put people and the environment at the centre of the economy, to put an end to an economy based on extraction, growth, competition and the market, and to struggle towards collaborative, resilient societies which develop and reinforce strategic alliances and actions through working together.Footnote17
The rapid review of just a few existing convergence initiatives and spaces conducted in this introduction is intended to convey a sense of their variety and complexity and the different ways in which they address the two interrelated modalities of convergence we have referred to above: developing a common understanding and strategic analysis of what is going on in the world and bringing people together in campaigns and actions to bring about transformative change. Some of the convergence spaces we have mentioned are self-contained. For others the motivation to create the space has included some form of institutional interface, and the two kinds of mandate are often synergetic. In some cases the motivation for sharing a space has been time and objective-bound; in others it is more-or-less ongoing. Often the spaces have over-lapping membership, although this does not necessarily ensure optimal communications and synergies. All of them are highly dynamic, rapidly evolving and conflictual. Efforts to pin them down like laboratory specimens and subject them to externally devised schema can be undertaken only at the peril of the observer. Devising a meaningful framework with which to consider such convergence initiatives is a consummate example of a task that should be undertaken with the participation of the social movement inhabitants of the spaces involved.
The Siena/people’s sovereignty process
As in the case of other initiatives we have surveyed in the preceding section, the impetus to organize a workshop on ‘Reclaiming democracy and fighting corporate power’ emerged from multiple discussions in different venues in which social movements and their allies convene. It reflected the growing realization that a convergence among these spaces and movements is essential to overcome a silo approach to battling corporate capture and defending democracy and people’s rights. Chief among these venues were two of those mentioned above, the Committee on World Food Security, the only global intergovernmental policy forum in which concerned social movements are full participants, and the UN Human Rights Council, the negotiation space for the Binding Treaty on Transnational Corporations (TNCs) and the Declaration of Peasants’ Rights.
A first concept note describing what the process might look like was developed in 2017 by an informal core group composed of civil society, social movement and academic activists and was shared with their respective networks. This group had no formal, institutional status and operated on a voluntary basis. As more people and organizations expressed interest in participating, the planning group grew to involve some 40 persons, with a strong presence of social movements engaged in various kinds of struggles in different regions. The workshop preparation was conducted with an eye to building engagement by all the participants in order to ensure their ownership of the process. The interaction was carried out principally through a series of international collective calls that privileged verbal over written contributions and group discussion over individual inputs. The social movements led in framing the agenda and deciding how to organize the programme.
It was agreed that the process did not aim at establishing a new entity but rather at supporting and enhancing the struggles of existing social movements. Participants would come from a variety of networks that don’t usually find themselves in the same room. Most would be social movement activists with experience on the ground, complemented by CSO and academic activists. Regional and gender balance would be respected, and special attention would be given to young women and men. In the end, available resources made it possible to gather 25 participants in the Italian hilltop town of Siena from 22 to 24 October 2018.
The methodology aimed at ‘ensuring that social movements speak their own language’Footnote18; ‘providing space for exchanging and sharing local social movement experience’; and being attentive to softer voices that could risk being drowned out. At the same time, it was hoped that the Siena process could ‘build a common analysis of how capitalism is advancing and a shared reading of our struggles’, and contribute to ‘making connections to construct from below an alternative project to capitalism in the world’. It was agreed to start off by exchanging communities’ experiences in order to respect and enrich their perceptions and build solidly grounded networks of understanding and action.
The discussions were organized under three headings, each addressed in a panel session followed by group work. In the initial reflection on Changes in the world order and their impact on democracy participants were asked to describe how they experience these changes in their own local situations and the impacts they see on democracy, people’s rights and struggles. The second theme, Peoples’ sovereignty and the future of democracy, moved on to take a look at how people are reacting at the local level, their concrete experiences of initiatives to build another society, what has worked and what hasn’t, and their aspirations and worries. The final session and group work, on Strategies moving forward, was intended to build on the first two days’ discussions and agree on strategic elements and next steps that could be taken.
A ‘mistica’ organized by the group of Indigenous Peoples participants on their own initiative, at the very opening session, set the tone for the workshop and enacted the methodology the group was seeking. A multi-coloured cloth was spread on the floor with fruits, flowers and indigenous symbols placed on it. It was the day of fabric, participants were told, woven by women, the start of everything, in which all is interconnected. The colours of the fabric represent all of us intertwined, not separate individuals as our enemies would want us to be. We are recovering traditional knowledge and understanding. We are part of nature. Life is circular like the flowers arranged on the floor, those who have gone and those still to come. Each participant held a flower to her or his heart and then placed it on the cloth with a wish for the collective work. The flowers and fruits remained in the centre of our circle throughout the workshop and reminded the group of the commitment to listen, to dialogue and to connect.
A broad range of experiences were presented in the panels that set the stage for the first two sessions of the workshop. These included interaction with communities on energy in South Africa, the Kuna people’s history of defence of their territory and culture, the World March of Women’s work in Africa to help women understand their rights and find their voice, building food sovereignty in the Basque country, defence of territories and resources in Ecuador, food sovereignty and education in Mexico, agroecology among the Mayan people, the Greater Kurdish freedom movement, organizing labour in the Philippines, supporting women and young people in Zambia, fighting extractive industry and defending natural resources in Honduras, trade and justice issues in Indonesia, and women’s rights/sexual and reproductive rights in Asia. In the group work there was free exchange among these experiences and with others contributed by participants, ranging from threats to democracy and human rights in contemporary Brazil to migrants’ movements in Italy and the alliances they are building with exploited Italian farmworkers.
Despite the variety of experiences and the diversity of local contexts, many participants are experiencing similar forms of oppression, the discussions showed. There is land grabbing everywhere, extraction of minerals, recolonization of the people, violence against women and LGBTQs. Inequalities are increasing among and within countries. Media and social media are used to manipulate information and legitimize the alliance among global capitalism, sexism, racism, and ethno-nationalism. Activists are branded as terrorists. Criminalization and murder of environmental and human rights defenders is a rising threat in the global North and South. We are witnessing a dispossession of society. Institutions can no longer do even the minimal things they used to do because they are manipulated by the alliance between corporations and states. The failure and dismantling of the State have allowed corporate capture of decision-making spaces and multiple abuses of human rights. Corruption and bureaucracy are huge. There is a crisis of representation, the result of poor policies in the past for which we too need to take our responsibilities. Radical right-wing parties are gaining momentum. The result is an absence of the rule of law and a proliferation of human rights violations of all kinds. Communities feel less and less protected. Neoliberal capitalism is breeding hopelessness and people are vulnerable to terrorism and migration. At the same time, some participants felt that this is actually the most hopeful situation in recent human history since the status quo is in structural crisis and there is a possibility of getting rid of the nation-state and delivering decision-making back to people.
Participants also had many stories to tell about local initiatives to resist and construct, despite the difficult situations in which communities find themselves. This was the focus of the second session. Experiences of women fighting for their rights in Nairobi slums and the struggle against the Mondragon Corporation and for food sovereignty in the Basque country were presented in the plenary. The working groups contributed a host of other experiences with their successes, problems and lessons learned. In Rojava the Greater Kurdish freedom movement is putting into practice a paradigm for societies seeking to reclaim the functions that have been robbed by the State by creating a situation in which everyone works and takes decisions together in a constant process of doing, learning and moving forward, with women in the forefront. In Ecuador the matriarchal nature of indigenous societies has been re-evoked in a cleverly syncretic fight against mining companies’ usurpation of water by mobilizing communities around a Virgin of the Water, defended by the women. In Guatemala the fight to save biodiversity is working on different lines at the same time: agroecological education at the grassroots level, political work to define national objectives, and collaboration with Mayan lawyers who understand the peoples’ cultures and can advise the movement on how to defend itself in international treaty negotiations. In the Philippines there is an effort to rebuild trade unionism from below and seek to force the state to advance peoples’ interests and hold corporations accountable. In Indonesia judicial review has been used successfully to change policies and laws and regain rights taken by TNCs. In Brazil communities threatened by land grabs are seeking to sensitize pensioners in the US, who have no idea that their pension fund money is being used to commit violence against people’s rights. In Honduras artisanal fishery communities – with the women in the forefront – have built alliances with local government to defend their fishing rights. In towns in England the movement to make public procurement work for people is helping to create jobs and support local employment. One conclusion of the exchange was that participants needed to leave the workshop with a good sense of the challenges we face in our regions and, at the same time, to build this into a sense of the global challenge.
The discussions also threw up a series of propositions that need to be considered in moving forward. Do we view our struggle against capitalism as a polarized movement from one thing to another, diametrically opposed, or is it more of a transition? Can the state be encouraged to contribute to the transition, or do we need to cut off the tentacles that it extends into society like those of an octopus? Who defines social movements? Are we sufficiently open to diversity? Can we accept the self-mobilization of actors like migrants or the poorest sectors of the population who are not included in our organizations? Indeed, can the structures of ‘the left’ – political parties, trade unions – be critiqued and reconstructed? Or do we need to leave left/right distinctions behind us along with the organizational structures and cultural dimensions they engender? The community level is clearly the one where it’s easiest to ‘weave the fabric’, as the opening mística suggested, but don’t we risk limiting ourselves to this level and ignoring the broader challenges? Are we reaching the limits of the dominant paradigm and those of capitalism to invent profitable solutions to the problems it causes? If so, how can people be convinced to make the fundamental changes in their lifestyles that will be necessary?
The final day was devoted to strategies moving forward. The first part of the morning session revolved around two interlinked concepts that had been central throughout the workshop: the future of the state and democracy. Views were divided. For some participants the two terms are radically opposed. ‘We describe democracy to be non-state. Self-governance without the state is democracy.’ Put in a different way, it’s representative democracy that ‘is a farce’. ‘We are trying to create states that are pluricultural and horizontal, with various dynamics of assemblies in which every part of the population is consulted.’ Some preferred ‘not to think of democracy as a thing but of democratization as a tool for radical change and empowerment, a process that becomes a way of life’. Similarly, others reminded the group that the ‘crisis of democracy’ is also within our own popular institutions and the practices of leaders, not just outside us. A cautionary note was sounded. Granted that formal democratic institutions have failed at all levels, ‘is it opportune to demonize them?’ In situations of human rights violations, people hold on to the hope that formal institutions can be forced to perform. ‘Are we ready to replace them with peoples’ assemblies? Is there a short-cut or is it inevitably a long process?’ What about the international level, where we have advanced on some fronts but find ourselves confronted with phenomena like the Sustainable Development Goals (which sideline human rights) and multistakeholderism (which gives the illusion of democracy while allowing corporations to invade governance spaces)? Moving ahead, we need to assess the results achieved by movements investing energy in ‘semi-democratizing’ some UN institutions in order to obtain guidelines and narrative changes that could protect communities’ rights and initiatives. We should consider defining what we mean by ‘democracy’, building on popular democratic practice as we did with food sovereignty at Nyéléni, and agreeing on specific principles and shared ideas about how it should work.
The subsequent session began to identify some of the big questions and principles. Among the potentially unifying principles figure those of respecting diversity while striving for coherence in all that we do; placing the web of life (including people) at the centre of everything rather than the death-dealing that capitalism privileges; practicing an idea of solidarity that puts demands on all of us, wherever we are; walking together and not leaving behind those who can’t keep up the pace. We asked ourselves where the ‘fresh currents’ of transformation come from and found sources in the force of feminism, the dynamism of youth, giving space to cultural and spiritual dimensions of transformation, and practicing reflective self-criticism.
We spoke about some of the questions we can continue to explore, seeking to think holistically about topics that help to link different groups. These include, in addition to ones already raised in the previous sessions, issues such as:
How does the imminent threat of increasing climate change affect what we’re seeing and doing? Can it be an opening, as more people begin to experience phenomena such as ecosystem degradation and species death?
What can we learn from the most ‘radical’ social visions and practices (such as indigenous cosmovisions and the Greater Kurdish freedom movement) that is relevant to transformation in other settings?
What approaches to conceiving and managing territory – such as bio-regions or commons – can allow us to evade the impositions of the nation-state and the concept of private property?
How can we re-imagine the economic dimensions of our visions of society? What approaches to ensuring livelihoods are different from those that capitalism foresees, and what do they look like on the ground?
How should we understand geopolitical changes taking place today, such as the growing role of China in Africa and Latin America as well as Asia, and attacks against multilateralism?
What are the impacts of growing numbers of forced migrations and displaced people? How might they link politics across borders?
How can we get a better understanding of how the capitalist system is working today, how financialization, Big Data and digitalization are affecting people’s movements?
We noted strategic elements that had emerged across the various contributions. The local, territorial level is where strength is built and reconnecting takes place. Municipalism can be an umbrella under which to practice ‘territorial acupuncture’, sticking needles in strategically where we can obtain results. Free Prior Informed Consent is a mechanism that we need to use to defend and strengthen all that is local. Litigation can be adopted to turn claims into laws and open up spaces. Agroecology is an example of a strategy not just to transform the food system but also the way in which communities are organized and rights defended. Liberating the full transformative power of feminism is essential, as is making real space for young people in decision-making today, not just as a resource for tomorrow. The terrain for regaining peoples’ sovereignty regards also our bodies and our health. Building alliances across different arenas – such as unions or parliamentarians – is important. It is fundamental to construct and consolidate our popular narratives to gain strength for the fight against dominant discourse and oppose it with a vision of hope in the current atmosphere of hopelessness. Key to this is building links between social movements and educational systems that put different kinds of expertise into dialogue and critique the false myths propagated by dominant discourse.
The session closed with a round of reflection on what we had learned from the experience of this workshop. Generally, people were positive about the process and felt they were going away enriched by the exchanges. The inclusive preparation had helped to build a collective attitude in which all were trying to analyse the situation and find solutions without attempts to dominate the conversation. The fact that we spoke not only about politics and policies but also about feelings, spirituality and personal needs was rare. As one participant put it ‘we have given birth to something’ that can be replicated at different levels. At the same time, lessons were learned to improve the process in the future. In the end the emphasis on hearing from social movements, which the movements themselves had urged during the preparation, was carried to a point of imbalance in which academics felt inhibited from engaging in the dialogue. In future encounters, once an experience-centred base has been laid and an atmosphere of mutual trust has been achieved, it would be good for discussion to move forward on collectively determined thematic and strategic issues in order to deepen the analysis. A better relationship between working groups and plenary sessions should be devised. The former are necessary to dig deep and ensure that all contribute, but it is difficult to feed the richness of group discussions into the plenary. Language is also a barrier to inter-regional exchange unless resources are available for full interpretation. The mística was acknowledged as a fundamental contribution to building the ‘Siena community’. The discrete and effective support of our host institutionFootnote19 was celebrated in a final encounter between the Siena participants and people working on an incipient territorial movement.
What has happened since Siena? Participants have kept in touch and exchanged news about their struggles and campaigns through a vibrant whatsapp list. The larger group of some 40 people involved in the ‘Siena process’ has ‘met’ through internet calls and emailed updates. Collectively, they have taken decisions on how to carry out follow-up activities that were suggested at the final session of the workshop. These are conducted by groups of volunteers that are open to others who wish to join.
A People’s Sovereignty Web Lab has been established as an open space where social movements, activists, practitioners and scholars can share experiences and ideas among themselves and with a wider public, undertake collective analyses, develop concepts, strategies and activities and engage with other existing solidarity networks and initiatives. The web lab intentionally builds from and prioritizes grassroots experiences. Still a work in progress, it is organized around the thematic clusters mentioned above, like pieces of a mosaic: Ensuring peoples’ food, water, energy and health sovereignty, Reclaiming democracy and peoples’ sovereignty from below, Defending the commons and respecting nature, Asserting women's rights and self-determination, Commoning knowledge, culture and spirituality, Building economies based on solidarity and decent work, and Recognizing the transversal nature of youth and their agency. It can be visited at https://peoples-sovereignty-lab.org/.
Video recorded interviews are being conducted with social movement activists to collect their experience on the ground and the strategies their communities are putting into practice to work towards people’s sovereignty. Fifteen have been recorded thus far and more are planned for the future. In many cases the interviewer and interviewee are both social movement activists and in some cases interpretation has been arranged since they do not share a common language. They can be accessed at https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLKIm9yChqE0mSjsveng6S3U4FV26hPzIm
Outreach to others is being conducted through the web lab and through sharing sessions organized on occasions such as the annual plenary of the Committee on World Food Security and the negotiations of the Binding Treaty on TNCs and Human Rights during October 2019. What has now come to be known as the People’s Sovereignty network is a collective, inclusive space available to communities and movements who are resisting corporate violence and constructing people’s sovereignty along with activists in the worlds of civil, academia, the media and elsewhere. The original group of some 40 people from all regions of the world who initiated this effort is rapidly expanding. It is open to others who wish to join and be actively involved in designing and carrying out activities. All are welcome to interact and contribute through the web lab.
Another face-to-face meeting is being planned in collaboration with the University of Helsinki. The agenda and programme is being developed collegially, as for the Siena workshop. It is likely that the Helsinki dialogue will seek to deepen the debate on people’s sovereignty as a strategy to help re-invent participatory and responsive forms of democracy; build new narratives countering the neo-liberal capitalist paradigm starting off from people’s local experiences of resistance and construction; map similar networking and convergence initiatives globally and regionally; and expand the network of scholar-activists while deepening the understanding of basic principles and effective methodologies for collaboration with social movements.
Finally, articles on key issues identified during the discussions at Siena are being prepared to jointly deepen the reflection. The first five of these compose the present Globalizations Special Forum on ‘Reclaiming democracy from below: from the contemporary state capitalist system to peoples’ sovereignty’.
Contributions to ‘Reclaiming democracy from below: from the contemporary state capitalist system to people’s sovereignty’
The articles in this Special Forum pick up themes that aroused particular attention at Siena and take them forward. Each has been authored by a small group of social movement and academic or civil society activists. Their special characteristic, as compared to treatments of the same themes in other publications, is the fact that they are the result of a dialogue between experiences on the ground and a more theoretical lens, so the issues are discussed as they relate to concrete struggles. They are experiments in co-production of understanding, and in each instance a somewhat different approach has been applied. The facilitator of the group (the first name in the list of authors) was requested only to ensure that social movement experiences were taken as the starting point for framing the reflection, that the methodology followed facilitated their contributions, and that there was consensus among the group around the outcome.
Five topics compose this first collection: Contextualizing corporate capture; Land, territory and commons: voices and visions from struggles; Rethinking law from below: experiences from the Kuna People and Rojava; Knowledge and education for people’s sovereignty, and Releasing the full transformative power of feminism. They are presented below, briefly describing both the content and the co-production methodology adopted. Others are expected to follow, on themes such as state sovereignty, people’s sovereignty and indigenous sovereignty; trade unions, workers’ rights and democracy; culture and spirituality as dimensions of resistance and construction, and re-imagining the economic dimensions of our alternatives.
The articles are interlinked in multiple ways. This is not surprising, since the topics are addressed not abstractly but as entry points into the holistic experiences of communities, in which the different dimensions interact dynamically in rapidly evolving processes and are not inclined to sit still while observers train their eyes on them. Taken together they have a lot to say about where we are heading, what we can build on, and what challenges we need to consider as we move forward.
For a while now we have been comforting ourselves that the practices being developed by communities around the world – sometimes with the support of global solidarity and public policy victories – will be there, waiting to emerge when the oppressive neoliberal corporate capitalist system implodes as it collides with an unforgiving nature and intolerable levels of inequalities. COVID 19 has accelerated everything. As compared with 2009–2011, it has hit all countries. It is interrupting supply chains around the world, exposing the fragilities of the corporate system and hence fragmenting the globalization mosaic. Mayors of internationally nameless small towns on the route to the Rosario ports which feed into the shipping lanes of the South Atlantic are refusing to permit transit to trucks carrying Argentina’s major export crop – soya – but maybe also the dreaded virus.
Some fear the risk that, as often happens, the powerful will use the crisis to become even more powerful. With the lockdown, people’s markets are shut down while supermarkets and digitalization are triumphing. Populist dictators are seizing the occasion to render their power ever more absolute. For others it is an opportunity to be exploited (Bello, Citation2020). What is certain is that we are witnessing an unprecedented intensification of reaction and sharing of experiences among social movements and community groups. To borrow a quotation from the Siena dialogue, people are rooted in the challenges they are facing in communities and regions, but are building this up into an ever stronger sense of the global challenge (Gills, Citation2020). The value of people’s solutions built up from base has never been more evident. We dramatically need a new narrative, legitimated by being rooted in people’s practices and claims. The articles in this Special Forum, and the People’s Sovereignty initiative as a whole, are offered as contributions to this new mosaic.
Contextualizing corporate control in the agrifood and extractive sectors
Engaging a deeper reflection on this topic, understood to be a pillar of the system we are seeking to dismantle, was a request emanating from the Siena dialogue. It was entrusted to a team composed of a Canadian academic, expert in corporate concentration and financialization with a focus on food and agriculture, and a Filipino civil society analyst and advocate with special knowledge of trade and investment issues. The methodology they adopted was straightforward: they agreed on the outline of the article, divided responsibility for writing the sections and then commented on each other’s portions. This approach was facilitated by the fact that they share a solid common ground of understanding, with the academic author more abreast of current evolutions in the corporate world and the civil society analyst more informed about sectors other than food and more rooted in social movement responses. The result is a seamless collaborative effort to explain the current phenomenon of corporate control in an accessible manner, illustrate why it matters in terms of its negative impacts on inequalities, small-scale food producers, human rights, the environment, and democracy, and suggest some strategies that civil society and social movements are adopting to contrast corporate control. Ending with a call for a multiscale, multisector attack on corporate power, this article provides a transversal base-line reference for the thematic discussions that follow.
Land, territory and commons: voices and visions from struggles
This theme wended its way throughout the Siena discussions as a key dimension in resisting corporate and state violence and building more equitable and life-enhancing relations among people and with nature. This group of authors included two from Indigenous Peoples – in Guatemala and Canada – two from social movements – in the Basque Country and Kenya – and four academics from the Global North. The facilitator devoted considerable effort to ensuring an iterative process that combined bilingual Skype discussions, contributions on a bilingual Google document, and separate conversations with the social movement authors who were less likely to submit their thoughts in writing. The result is a suggestive example of how the co-production of knowledge can function in an encounter between the perspectives, emotions and reasoning of activists based on their lived experiences and the interpretations proffered by academics. The structure of the article honours the reality of facing violence that is the daily fare of front-line activists. It explores the temporal dimensions of violence rooted in material and cultural legacies of colonialism and reviews the resistance strategies that social movements are deploying. It then moves on to encompass the forward-looking project of recuperating territory as a dynamic political, material and cultural project and evoke the way ahead through shared experiences, vocabularies and strategies.
Rethinking law from below: experiences from the Kuna People and Rojava
What – if anything – can efforts to contrast power structures and reclaim democracy hope to obtain from law and the State was a hotly debated issue in Siena, to which much of the final morning session was dedicated. On the one hand, law has more often served to defend the interests of the elite than those of the people. States have largely abdicated their responsibilities as rights defenders while populist right-wing parties are capturing governments in countries around the world. On the other hand, the human rights agenda, which interacts with the machinery of law but in no way coincides with it, is a reference point for people’s struggles at all levels. The authors of this article included two staunch but self-critical proponents of the human rights framework, a South African front-line practitioner of ‘law from below’, and two exponents of the use of law without reference to the Westphalian nation state, from Rojava in northern Syria and the Kuna People in Panama. In addition, the facilitator of the group dipped deeply into the transcript of the Siena discussions. The result is a refreshingly balanced and clarifying exploration of the issues involved, articulated around three questions: how to re-imagine the State as part of an emancipatory human rights project? How can the project of law from below contribute to this process? How can ‘people’s sovereignty’ drive new social pacts and build supportive relations between state and human rights?
Knowledge and education for people’s sovereignty
The call for critiquing the false myths propagated by dominant discourse and building new narratives is transversal to all of the sectors, regions and struggles that interacted in Siena. Education and ‘knowledge’ are instruments that oppressive economic and political powers use to enter into the minds of people and rob them of their capacity to collectively define their identities. People’s sovereignty obligatorily requires revaluing the multiple ways of knowing that communities of various kinds have developed throughout the world and putting them into dialogue with each other and with knowledge generated by academic and scientific study. This article was written by two North American scholar-activists, one from a First Nation in Canada and the other, the facilitator, from the US. A Mexican peasant practitioner of agroecology participated in the discussions that framed the article, and the facilitator drew on experience shared during the Siena workshop. The article sets out principles of transformative learning and knowledge creation but devotes most space to presenting specific examples of education for people’s sovereignty that show how these principles are put into practice. The examples range from First Nation and Metis communities, to peasant schools and horizontal farmer-to-farmer education, to the radically different approach to education instituted by the Greater Kurdish freedom Movement in Rojava. The difficulty of building dialogue and co-production of knowledge between people’s knowledge and academic and scientific concepts is not underestimated: the articles in this Special Forum are mini-experiments in doing so.
Releasing the full transformative power of feminism
Of all of the articles in the series, this one presents the most powerful and ineluctable force. The ways in which feminism has challenged the oppressive binary male–female relations which transgress the false boundary between the intimate household and the political sphere were, of course, alluded to in the Siena dialogue. The vigorous participants who leapt into the centre of the circle and re-energized momentarily weary exchanges, as well as those who wove connections even before we reached Siena and captured them in images when we were together, were all women. But, as one of the participants put it, there is something more out there, we have yet to feel the full transformative power of feminism. This article sets it forth. Four authors are listed, and others are cited for their invaluable contributions. The facilitator, a scholar activist from Bulgaria, has done a respectful and creative job of articulating the article around three concrete experiences of feminism in action: in Rojava, Syria, in the work of the World March of Women in Kenya, and in the Basque Country in Spain, which are presented in sufficient detail to bring alive to the reader the advances and the lessons they embody. The analytic portion that follows demonstrates how feminist approaches transform governance, the economy, democracy, as well as relations among people and with nature. Feminism acts as a force of reconnection and revaluing of diversity, at the centre of the people’s sovereignty project, not least by struggling not to supplant men but to fight for a society in which no one takes the lead and no one is left behind.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
Additional information
Notes on contributors
Nora McKeon
Nora McKeon studied history and political science before joining the UN Food and Agriculture Organization, where she was responsible for opening up the institution to cooperation with organizations of small-scale producers and civil society. She now engages in research, writing, teaching, and advocacy around food systems, peoples’ movements, and governance issues. She closely follows evolutions in global food governance including the reformed UN Committee on World Food Security. She teaches at Rome 3 University and the International University College of Turin, and serves as technical adviser to the West African network of small-scale producers.
Gonzalo Berron
Gonzalo Berron was born in Santa Fe, Argentina, in 1971 and has lived in Brazil since 2001. He studied Political Science in Rosario, Argentina, and then earned a Master and PhD in São Paulo University. His thesis was on political identities and the movement against free trade agreements in the Americas. He has worked with Brazilian trade unions and social movements on trade and regional integration issues. As associated fellow of the Transnational Institute he has played a key role in the foundation of the Global Campaign to Dismantle Corporate Power and Stop Impunity, a world-wide network that mobilizes and advocates – among other objectives – for the adoption of an international binding treaty to protect human rights from corporate violations.
Notes
1 As in other moments of recent history the US are not in ILO, they have withdrawn from climate negotiations, from UN Human Rights institutions and, in the context of the Covid-19 pandemic, they decided to stop contributing financially to the World Health Organization.
13 On the CSM as a convergence space see, among others, McKeon (Citation2015a) and McKeon (Citation2018); Duncan (Citation2015); Brem-Wilson (Citation2017); Gaard (Citation2017); and Claeys and Duncan (Citation2019).
18 All citations are taken from the notes on collective preparatory calls and the verbatim of the workshop.
19 The Monte Paschi di Siena Foundation.
References
- Anderson, M. (2015). The role of knowledge in building food security resilience across food system domains. Journal of Environmental Studies and Sciences. https://doi.org/https://doi.org/10.1007/s13412-015-0311-3
- Beckett, A. (2019). The new left economics: how a network of thinkers is transforming capitalism. The Guardian. https://www.theguardian.com/news/2019/jun/25/the-new-left-economics-how-a-network-of-thinkers-is-transforming-capitalism
- Bello, W. (2019). Revisiting and reclaiming deglobalization. Focus on the Global South.
- Bello, W. (2020). Never let a good crisis go to waste!. Transnational Institute.
- Borras Jr, S. M. (2016). Land politics, agrarian movements and scholar activism (Inaugural lecture). ISS.
- Borras Jr., S. M., Moreda, T., Alonso-Fradejas, A., & Brent, Z. W. (2018). Converging social justice issues and movements: Implications for political actions and research. Third World Quarterly, 39(7), 1227–1246. https://doi.org/https://doi.org/10.1080/01436597.2018.1491301
- Brem-Wilson, J. (2017). La Vía Campesina and the UN Committee on World Food Security: Affected publics and institutional dynamics in the nascent transnational public sphere. Review of International Studies, 43(2), 302–329. https://doi.org/https://doi.org/10.1017/S0260210516000309
- Claeys, P., & Duncan, J. (2019). Food sovereignty and convergence spaces. Political Geography. https://doi.org/https://doi.org/10.1016/j.polgeo.2019.102045
- Claeys, P., & Edelman, M. (2019). The United Nations declaration on the rights of peasants and other people working in rural areas. JPS.
- Colombo, L., & Onorati, A. (2009). Food: Riots and rights. https://www.croceviaterra.it/sovranita-alimentare/food-riots-and-right/; and https://www.foodsovereignty.org/
- Conversi, D. (2016). Sovereignty in a changing world: From Westphalia to food sovereignty. Globalizations, 13(4), 484–498. https://doi.org/https://doi.org/10.1080/14747731.2016.1150570
- Duncan, J. (2015). Global food Security governance: Civil society engagement in the reformed committee on world food security. Routledge.
- Duncan, J., Claeys, P., Rivera-Ferre, M. G., Oteros-Rozas, E., Van Dyck, B., Plank, C., & Desmarais, A. A. (2019). Scholar-activists in an expanding European food sovereignty movement. Journal of Peasant Studies. https://doi.org/https://doi.org/10.1080/03066150.2019.1675646
- ERPI Press Release. (2018). https://www.iss.nl/en/events/authoritarian-populism-and-rural-world-2018-03-17
- Friedmann, H. (2015). Governing land and landscapes: Political ecology of enclosures and commons. Canadian Food Studies, 2(2), 23–31. https://canadianfoodstudies.uwaterloo.ca/index.php/cfs/article/view/95
- Frischmann, B. M. (2013). Two enduring lessons from Elinor Ostrom. Journal of Institutions Economics. https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2252133
- Gaard, I. (2017). Peasants negotiating a global policy space. Routledge.
- Gill, S. (2019). Global governance ‘as it was, is and ought to be’: A critical reflection. Global Governance, 25, 371–392. https://doi.org/https://doi.org/10.1163/19426720-02503003
- Gills, B. (2020). Deep restoration: From the great implosion to the great awakening. Globalizations, 17(4), 577–579. https://doi.org/https://doi.org/10.1080/14747731.2020.1748364
- Gills, B., & Chase-Dunn, C. (2019). In search of unity: A new politics of solidarity and action for confronting the crisis of global capitalism. Globalizations, 16(7), 967–972. https://doi.org/https://doi.org/10.1080/14747731.2019.1655889
- Gills, B. K. (2002). Democratizing globalization and globalizing democracy. Annals of the AAPSS, 581(1), 158–171. https://doi.org/https://doi.org/10.1177/000271620258100114
- Gleckman, H. (2018). Multistakeholder governance and democracy: A global challenge. Routledge.
- Global Working Group Beyond Development. (2019). Alternatives in a world of crisis (2nd ed.). Rosa Luxemburg Stiftung Brussels Office. https://www.rosalux.eu/en/article/1466.alternatives-in-a-world-of-crisis-2nd-edition.html
- Kay, S., Mattheisen, E., McKeon, N., De Meo, P., & Faus, A. M. (2018). Public policies for food sovereignty. TNI. https://www.tni.org/en/publication/public-policies-for-food-sovereignty
- Kothari, A., Salleh, A., Escobar, A., Demaia, F., & Acosta, A. (2019). Pluriverse: A post-development dictionary. Tulika Books.
- Latour, B. (2018). Down to earth: Politics in the new climatic age. Polity.
- Manski, B., & Smith, J. (2019). ‘Introduction: The dynamics and terrains of local democracy and corporate power in the 21st century. Symposium: Corporate power and local democracy: Challenges, opportunities and strategies. Journal of World-Systems Research, 12(1). https://doi.org/https://doi.org/10.5195/jwsr.2019.919
- McKeon, N. (2009). The United Nations and civil society: Legitimating global governance – whose voice? Zed Book. pp. 62–63.
- McKeon, N. (2015a). Food Security governance; empowering communities, regulating corporations. Routledge.
- McKeon, N. (2015b). The United Nations and civil society: Legitimating global governance – whose voice? Zed Book.
- McKeon, N. (2017a). Are equity and sustainability a likely outcome when foxes and chickens share the same coop? Critiquing the concept of multistakeholder governance of food security. Globalizations, 14(3), 379–398. https://doi.org/https://doi.org/10.1080/14747731.2017.1286168
- McKeon, N. (2017b). Transforming global governance in the post-2015 era: Towards an equitable and sustainable world. Globalizations, 14(4), 487–503. https://doi.org/https://doi.org/10.1080/14747731.2016.1244757
- McKeon, N. (2018). Global food governance: Between corporate control and shaky democracy. Development and Peace Foundation. https://www.sef-bonn.org/en/publications/global-governance-spotlight/22018.html
- The People’s Knowledge Editorial Collective. (2017). Everyday experts. How people’s knowledge can transform the food system. Centre for Agroecology, Water and Resilience (CAWR) at Coventry University. https://pureportal.coventry.ac.uk/en/publications/everyday-experts-how-peoples-knowledge-can-transform-the-food-sys
- Prato, S. (2016). Editorial: Financing for development: The progress money cannot buy. Development, 59(1-2), 1–4. https://doi.org/https://doi.org/10.1057/s41301-017-0096-7
- Regions Refocus. (2018). Intersecting movements resisting authoritarianisms. Feminist and Progressive Analysis and Tactics. https://regionsrefocus.org/
- Scoones, I., Edelman, M., Borras Jr., S. M., Hall, R., Wolford, W., & White, B. (2018). Emancipatory rural politics: Confronting authoritarian populism. Introduction to Forum on Authoritarian Populism and the Rural World. Journal of Peasant Studies, 45(1), 1–20. https://doi.org/https://doi.org/10.1080/03066150.2017.1339693
- Shivji, I. G. (2011). Democracy and democratisation in Africa: Interrogating paradigms and practices. Pambazuka. https://www.pambazuka.org/governance/democracy-and-democratisation-africa
- Wallgren, T., Pd. Pyakural, U., Pardo, C. R., & Teivainen, T. (2020). Introduction: Social movements and forums in times of authoritarian capitalism. Globalizations, 17(2), 177–182. https://doi.org/https://doi.org/10.1080/14747731.2019.1682326