Transcript Geographies of Solidarity and the Making of Counter

Space, Neo-liberalism and
Contestation
David Featherstone
University of Glasgow
Graeber: Global Justice Movement a
Success?


The Washington consensus lies in ruins. So much so it’s hard
no to remember what public discourse in this country was
even like before Seattle. Rarely have the media and political
classes been so completely unanimous about anything. That
“free trade”, “free markets”, and no-holds-barred
supercharged capitalism was the only possible direction for
human history, the only possible solution for any problem
was so completely assumed that anyone who cast doubt on
the proposition was treated as literally insane. Global justice
activists, when they first forced themselves into the attention
of CNN or Newsweek, were immediately written off as
reactionary lunatics. A year or two later, CNN and
Newsweek were saying we’d won the argument.
(Graeber, 2007).
Neo-Liberalism and Common-Sense
Neo-liberalism has been seen as re-constituting the
common-sense of the age (Peck and Tickell, 2002).
 Importance of attending to Gramsci’s account of
‘common-sense’ as not a stable end point or
consensus, but as characterized by instability and as
a terrain of contestation.
 Contesting the idea that neo-liberalism has
successfully re-constituted common-sense is a precondition for opening political imaginaries in the
current conjuncture.

Activism and the Political
Social movements, advocacy groups and NGOs are
opening up a second tier of politics in civil society,
and the new internationalists are building its
supranational tier. Yet this expansion is not a mere
arithmetic sum, for it also modifies what Rancière
calls the partition of the sensible and therefore
transforms the way the political field is coded; it
creates a new condition of the sensible.
 (Arditi, 2007: 145).

People’s Permanent Tribunal
This was very good at bringing diverse
aspects of BP’s conduct in Colombia into
contestation .
 The event also brought together different
activists with concern against BP.
 This fed into a broader set of transnational
organising practices through the PPT.

Tensions: Networks Formatted in
Particular Ways
The political struggles of other places, including
Scotland, were not connected to the politics/
political situation in Colombia as effectively as
organisers sought to do.
 The political outcomes were structured by a strong
concern with human rights. This framing did
important work but arguably shaped debates in quite
narrow ways.
 As a result broader aspects of environmental/ social
relations such as climate change politics were slightly
edged out of this set of political interventions.

Productive Forms of Contestation

‘Plachimada’s struggle against the Coca Cola Company’ was
and ‘is important in having raised serious issues about the
role of transnational corporations and globalization in India.
It is now firmly tied in the hearts and minds of many
activists to the struggles against the Coca Cola Company in
Colombia [...] or the victory against Bechtel in Cochamba,
Bolivia’. Further ‘their struggle has been inspirational and
played a significant role in generating opposition to The
Coca Cola Company and PepsiCo in other rural communities
in India’ (Aiyer, 2007: 652).
Tensions of Transnational Organising


Although the coalition looks very “representative”— that is,
students of color and womyn are at the center of the
coalition—the process through which the coalition was built
over the period of a year has been a point of contention
among some. I do believe that this campaign was initiated
with the intention of synthesizing anti-racism and antiglobalization struggles, yet to some the outreach and
coalition-building process seemed to put the racist aspects of
Coke’s violations as more of an afterthought rather than at
the center of the movement.
(Hardikar, 2006: n.p.)
Actually Existing Alternatives
Movements have generated translocal connections
through their organising against neo-liberal
globalisation.
 Movements have combinded environmental
concerns and issues of social justice are combined
in innovative and significant ways.
 This has generated new ways of articulating social
and environmental relations.
 Movements have intervened in shaping local
resistances/ practices of localisation in
internationalist and solidaristic ways.

Emerging Maps of Grievance in
Relation to the Current Crisis
Emerging attempts to politicise the crisis,
predominantly shaped by diverse activist groups
through events like the G20 protests.
 New parochialisms of some climate change politics.
 Tensions of some of the nationalist imaginaries
used to contest the crisis, eg Derek Simpson of
Unite using terms such as ‘indigenous workers’
during the protests at Total’s Lindsey oil refineries.
 Importance of shaping solidaristic opposition and
alternatives.
