Chan explored the nature of labour relations changing in China by examing a Taiwanese-owned factory in rural China. He concludes that the rapid expansion of capitalism has raised marketplace and workplace power of workers, but that associational power is impeded by the state’s socialist (...)

This article provides a theoretical introduction to the other contributions in this special issue. The emergence of social movements is generally seen as an indicator of democratization. The article argues that such a view overlooks the nature of political change in China, which entails a more (...)

This is a short review of the article, available as an attached pdf file
This article looks employs a nation-wide village-level survey to evaluate the reasons behind a rise in self-governing social organizations in rural China. It concludes that, empirically, explained by growing distrust of (...)

Over the past decade, the internationalization of the world economy has changed the way societies and states are structured and governed simultaneously with the contraction of time and space that we usually know as “globalization” (Harvey (2005)
This essay focuses on the impacts of these (...)

It is a truism that no society is static. Space, processes and nature as well as the direction of social change vary from time to time and society to society. Social movements play an important role in escalating not only the processes of change, but also in giving direction to social (...)

This paper expounds on an Adivasi-Dalit subalternist critique of development and compulsory modernization drawn from a participatory critical-interpretive case study developed from several episodic engagements with these groups between 2006 and 2009 in Orissa, India. This critique is advanced (...)

Malnutrition and Starvation Deaths
‘Due to malnutrition people started falling sick, in the last five years more than 200 people have died on this (Tea) estate alone.’
‘They do not have any rice, they are hungry and they have to work on empty stomach- so they fall ill and die. All of them (...)

Most analyses of the Bhopal disaster have focused on the management decisions leading up to the disaster on 3 December 1984. This article examines the evolution of the global movement for justice in Bhopal that arose following the disaster. Recent developments in the study of transnational (...)

In February 2010, quietly, unannounced, Arundhati Roy decided to visit the forbidding and forbidden precincts of Central India’s Dandakaranya Forests, home to a melange of tribespeople many of whom have taken up arms to protect their people against state-backed marauders and exploiters.
She (...)

Anna Hazare’s hunger strike against corruption in April 2011 attracted disparate intellectual strands from within the Indian middle class. These strands brought complementary skills to the table. The neo-Gandhians conferred legitimacy; India Shining provided energy and finances; and Legal (...)

Drawing on fieldwork with Dalit movements inTamil Nadu,this article focuses on often neglected aspects of activism. A pervasive lack of resources has rendered Tamil Dalit movements overly incident-sensitive: reacting to caste atrocities rather than pursuing a positive agenda. Movement leaders (...)

Since the 1990s, and coinciding with the onset of liberalisation, a « new politics » aimed at associating the hithertodisempoweredwith aspects of governance appears to have takenshape across India’s urban, especially its metropolitan,centers. « Civilsociety » organisations that seek to make (...)

Civil society has over the last more than two decades become one of those ‘Hurrah!’ words – along with eg democracy and human rights – the meaning and inherent merit of which are taken for granted and left unexamined. For precisely those reasons, most anthropologists – myself included – are of (...)

The strike that broke out in Honda Auto Parts Manufacturing Co Ltd in Foshan city of Guangdong province on 17 May dragged on for nearly one and a half month ending in early July. The strike involved nearly the whole work force on the shopfloor who are mainly migrant workers. By laying down (...)

In May 2011, Students & Scholars Against Corporate Misbehaviour (SACOM) released a report, titled Foxconn and Apple Fail to Fulfill Promises: Predicaments of Workers after the Suicides1, which documented the labour rights conditions at the Foxconn plant in Chengdu, China, a supplier of the (...)

This article elucidates connections between two strategies of transnational social move- ments—external pressure and local mobilization—and two potential outcomes—paternalism and psychological empowerment. Application of this theoretical framework to the nascent Chinese labor movement (...)

The educated and affluent Internet users in China have posed great threats to the stability and legitimacy of Chinese communist’s regime where the access of non-government dom- inated information become a possibility. To restrain Chinese citizens’ access to any Internet contents that are (...)

The global financial crisis that took on its most recent and dramatic forms in 2008 is one that has had all eyes on China. While most of that focus has been on how China’s political leaders react to the crisis, especially in terms of currency revaluations and strategies to move from export (...)

In the context of China’s economic reforms and realignment with global capitalism, this article examines the role of the All China Federation of Trade Unions (ACFTU) and its failure to act as a genuine trade union organization. Rather than putting workers’ interests and the protection of their (...)

Occupy Wall Street’s anger is mostly directed at the ruling economic class. But the movement is gaining traction because it is exposing a larger failure of democratic representation.
Demonstrations under the banner of Occupy Wall Street resonate with so many people not only because they (...)

Access to information is a fundamental universal human right. It can make the difference between prosperity and poverty, freedom and captivity, life and death.
Since 2009, The Rosetta Foundation has worked to eradicate the knowledge gap based on linguistic discrimination. We connect 13,000+ (...)

Walmart blocked autonomous union elections in its supermarkets/shops, shutdown non-profitable shops without proper compensation for workers, force workers to sign on worse working standards, surveillance at workplace, etc. In this context we could discuss how to support the Chinese workers’ (...)

Since the beginning of the new period, which started with the eruption of the May 15 movement in 2011 and later with the creation of Podemos in Jaunary 2011, the main debate between the growing number of social activists and politicians who have become involved in this cycle of (...)

Social policies and the wellbeing of the planet demand that financial resources which are currentlyn put towards speculation should be redirected towards the inclusion, in a productive way, of the poor, and towards a productive paradigm which won’t destroy the planet. How can we ensure (...)

In light of the end of the progressive governments’ cycle in Latin America and the obstacles encountered by the Syriza in Greece, how the social movements that preserve a transforming horizon must deal with the institutional path? In this sense, what lessons can be learned from revolts and (...)

Questions asked by partner websites
1. Humanitarian disasters, climate victims: Where is our international solidarity? Pierre Rousset, Europe Solidaire Sans Frontières
2. The new relationship between social movements and political parties in the light of the recent experience in Spain, (...)

In the past, our social protection systems were organised at the national level. And even if, in developing countries, they have never been fully developed, before the ‘structural adjustment’ programmes of the 1980s and after, they all had social protection. To-day, these programmes are faced (...)

We are living a time of humanitarian disasters with multiple causes: geopolitical war, tear of social ties consumed by the neoliberal order, global ecological crisis ... But the social and progressive movements have since long abandoned the field of "assistance" to parastatal institutions, to (...)

Intercoll is an open space of development and confrontation of social and citizen movements. The ambition is to help the gradual emergence of a new "international collective intellectual" from the intellectual production of movements and research networks, and popular education connected to (...)

Greetings,
During the International Committee of the WSF in Salvador de Bahia last October, various comrades came together around the idea of an investigation that would facilitate further reflections on social movements. Globally, the question is this: faced with the growing power of (...)

From one crisis to the next
The WSF started at the turning of the century in the wake of the first massive economic and financial crises created by neoliberal globalization, which affected the peripheral nations of world-systems theory (Mexico, Brazil, Asia, Russia). The forum is composed of (...)