Is it accurate to describe the Global Justice Movement as a 'global movement' - Essay Example

For instance, the global character of these emergent social movements reflects the contemporary movement of ideas, information, products, and people. The movement of people outside national borders are viewed as outbursts of aspirations, and by itself, they are considered integral to sociological analysis (Goodwin & Jasper 2009). The French sociologist Bourdieu (2001 cited in Ruggiero 2002) asserts that governments should meddle with the rules running the economy. At the same time, he emphasises the appearance of new kinds of political movement, and new forms of organisations driven by self-supervision, and “characterised by a structural lightness allowing agents to reappropriate their role as active subjects” (Ruggiero 2002: p. 48). These present-day social movements are described to develop precise goals, to take on kinds of activity of high representative character, to be global, and to demand highly dedicated personal involvement from members, and to form themselves as freely organised systems (Della Porta & Diani 2006).

The Global Justice Movement exhibits almost all of these features. This paper tries to determine whether it is accurate to describe the Global Justice Movement as a ‘global movement’. The Contemporary Global Movement The initial years of the 21st century were a period of hope and enthusiasm for many people across the globe. A new form of social movement was developing. Driven by the dialogical and varied networks of protest envisioned by the Zapatistas, an array of popular movements and militant-directed non-governmental groups, maybe mostly but absolutely not totally from the global North, were banding together to form a mobilization of movements opposed to neoliberal globalisation (Eschle & Maiguashca 2005).

Some of them are enemies of the World Trade Organisation, World Bank, and the International Monetary Fund; supporters of global finance capital taxation; critics of the strengthened control of multinational entities; proponents of debt assistance for Third World countries; and detractors of capitalism motivated by different expressions of socialist and revolutionary principles. Nevertheless, the 9/11 attack and their consequences have raised difficult challenges to the GJM. The social significances connected to the terrorist attack in the U.S., the legitimisation of militaristic nationalism forces and the accompanied transformations in the political arena of global governance have merged to change the political setting where in the movement works (Amoore 2005).

In this environment of terror and nearly unanimously exercises of U.S. power, mechanisms of political, social, and economic de-territorialisation which had reinforced the development of global movements may be more and more re-expressed in nationalistic ways (Mayo 2005). Whether the Global Justice Movement is capable of calming the neo-imperial rage, holding back the powerful drag of nationalisms, and thus preserving its thrust towards a more unified, peaceful, and just global order remains unresolved.

There are major similarities between the current global anti-war movement and GJM. These similarities attest to the fact the GJM is indeed a ‘global movement’. Primarily, a great deal of the anti-war movement has taken on GJM’s very effective network framework of global grassroots political movement feature. Second, organisations and leaders integral to the GJM have turned out to be strongly involved in the anti-war move