Labour conflicts in the Global South: towards a new theory of resistance?

ABSTRACT

This article reflects on the insights generated by the contributions to the special issue on labour conflicts in the Global South. We emphasize first the need to go beyond Eurocentric industrial relations concepts forged in the historically specific circumstances of post-World War II industrialized countries. This also includes going beyond the fetishism of regarding trade unions as the privileged agents of workers’ interests. As the various empirical contributions to this special issue demonstrate, labour struggles against capitalist exploitation in the Global South go beyond the workplace and generally also include organizations different from the traditional trade union form.

KEYWORDS:

• Global South
• labour
• resistance
• trade unions
• theory

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No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Andreas Bieler

Andreas Bieler is Professor of Political Economy in the School of Politics and International Relations and Fellow of the Centre for the Study of Social and Global Justice (CSSGJ) at Nottingham University/UK. He is author of Global capitalism, global war, global crisis (with Adam D. Morton) (CUP, 2018) and Fighting for water: Resisting privatization in Europe (Zed Books, 2021).

Jörg Nowak

Jörg Nowak is Visiting Professor at Universidade de Brasilia, Brazil. He has been a Visiting Professor at City University of Hong Kong and a Marie Curie Fellow at University of Nottingham, UK. His last book publication is Mass strikes and social movements in Brazil and India (Palgrave, 2019).