[URBANTH-L]CFP: The Lefts and the Global Justice Movement

[Angela Jancius]

CfP - Partecipazione e Confitto 

N. 1/2010

CfP : The Lefts and the Global Movement: historical, political and 
cultural paths toward collective action transnationalization     


When the Global Justice Movement (GJM) entered the public arena in 
November 1999 with the protests against the third World Trade 
Organization conference in Seattle, it presented itself as an unusual 
coalition of traditional organizations, new social movements, and 
emerging groups contesting neoliberal globalization (Levi and Murphy 
2006: 652). Similar alliances developed on the old continent, although 
with an important difference: while organizations of the socialist or 
communist tradition, including political parties, are largely absent 
from the GJM in the US, they are quite central in the European GJM, 
where the large European trade unions are historically closely 
intertwined with these parties and organizations (Bartolini 2000). 
Alongside this block of parties, trade unions, and collateral 
organizations that we consider as the 'traditional Left', we find a 
'radical Left' sector of parties, grassroots trade unions and groups of 
autonomous, anarchist or Trotskyite tradition, with their roots in the 
New Left of the 1970s (della Porta and Rucht 1995; Tarrow 1989). 
Another context, in which the traditional and the radical left 
interacted at the moment of the Global Movement formation, was the 
Latin American one. Both in Europe and in Latin America, the 
relationships between these two sectors of the Left, and between them 
and the others groups, have not always been linear, but characterized 
by both cooperation and competition, openness and closure, cross-
fertilization and indifference.   

The emergence of the Global Movement has been an opportunity for the 
traditional Left to re-activate in social mobilization and to find a 
way out the domestic politics boundaries, within which it remained long 
time confined.  At the same time,  both sectors of the Left are able to 
guarantee resources and visibility, besides micromobilization potential 
to the young Global Movement. However, as the sketched comparison 
between the United States and Europe just suggests, the relationships 
between the Left and the Movement seem to vary from context to context, 
and this highlights the importance of national/local resources, 
traditions and political opportunities, somehow confirming the (only 
apparently rhetorical) image of "rooted cosmopolitans" (Tarrow 2005). 
If political science and sociology literature on the Global Justice 
Movement is already reach, it hardly systematically investigated its 
relationships  with the different sectors  of the Left.  This issue of 
"Partecipazione e Conflitto" is meant to overcome such lacuna, and 
wants to host contributions with an empirical, and possibly 
comparative, approach. We will also consider contributions with an 
historical approach on the past transnational activism (old 
internationalism, the '68, etc.). 

We call for contributions that deal with the following aspects:

a) Comparative analysis of leftist groups which mobilize within the 
Global Movement.
b) Diachronic (Historical) Analysis  of the leftist transnational 
activism.
c) (Possibly comparative) analysis of the relationships between 
traditional and radical left within the movement.
d) Analysis of the conceptions and practices of democracy  within the 
leftist groups involved in the movement.
e)  Analysis of the evolution and the cross-fertilization of leftist 
political cultures.

Those contributions which provide a deep theoretical framework and 
combine both quantitative and qualitative methods, will be highly 
appreciated.


Editors:
Massimiliano Andretta (University of Pisa) andretta at sp.unipi.it
Gianni Piazza (University of Catania) giannipiazza at tiscali.it

The articles must be sent to the editors (via e-mail) and to the 
Review via  its e-mail: partecipazioneeconflitto at gmail.com, before 
1/12/2008.

The articles will be published in Italian, but they can be submitted 
also in English. They must not overcome the maximum length of 60,000 
types (spaces, notes and references included). They must be sent with a 
short abstract (200 words). The articles will be assessed by three 
anonymous referees (one internal and two external to the Review 
Board),.