Insurgent Encounters: Transnational Activism, Ethnography and the Political ed. by Jeffrey S. Juris, Alex Khasnabish (review)

Research on social movements underwent a florescence in the early 1990s brought on by the challenges of understanding a wide range of social movements that seemed to be coalescing around identity politics and cultural rights. These “new social movements,” in contrast to those that were rooted in class-based demands, grew out of not only discontent with the deepening of neoliberal economic reforms in many parts of the world, but also exploited the spaces opened up by states that were retracting social services and placing greater responsibility on the individual for her or his own wellbeing. The sociocultural dimensions of neoliberal reform placed the politics of identity central to collective struggle, as witnessed through the strengthening of indigenous movements, women’s movements, lgbt movements, and the landless peasant movements, among others, and the centrality of identity politics and cultural rights invited anthropologists to join those those who attempted to examine and interpret those movements.

This new collection of essays edited by Jeffrey Juris and Alex Khasnabish is a refreshing and welcome contribution to the study of social movements. They depart from central themes of social movement research of the 1990s and early 2000s that have tended to place the state or institutions of global finance and governance at the core of social movement analysis; these approaches have depicted activists as reacting to, and working within, dominant structures of power to seek “change from within.” As Juris and Khasnabish argue in their introduction to the volume, the tendency of social movement research to frame analysis around dominant political and economic institutions has the unintended consequence of obscuring movements that are working outside of the dominant structures of power with the intention not of pursuing change from within, but of replacing that system altogether. A second consequence of making invisible these radically alternative viewpoints is the illusion that these structures of power are more hegemonic than they may actually be.

Instead, the authors in this collection present an argument for the need to pay close attention to these alternative visions, not simply as a means of cataloguing the diversity of collective mobilization, but in order to take seriously social movements as knowledge producers capable of revealing diverse possible worlds outside of the ones defined by dominant institutions. As such, the authors take as their subjects activists and movements that are consciously organizing to create alternative visions outside of the constraints of dominant ideologies and institutions. Several of the chapters focus on transnational activist networks and gatherings: Jeff Juris explores the 2007 US Social Forum, Manisha Desai takes the Feminist Dialogues and the World Social Forums (wsfs) in Porto Alegre, Nairobi, and Bélem as her focus of analysis, and Giuseppe Caruso and Janet Conway each apply an ethnographic lens to their examination of the wsfs. Indigenous activists working beyond the boundaries of their states through global organizing are treated in Sylvia Escárcega’s contribution to the volume, while contributions by M.K. Sterpka and Tish Stringer draw attention to the application of technology for activist purposes.

This diversity of themes is coherently framed by the organization of the book into four subsections – Emerging Subjectivities, Discrepant Paradigms, Transformational Knowledges, and Subversive Technologies – each oriented around theoretical and substantive contributions that the authors aim to bring to the study of social movements. The first section, “Emerging Subjectivities,” argues that analyses of social movements must take into account the production of new subjectivities in the transnational spaces of activism. Moving beyond the simple production of multiple subjectivities, however, which was one element of the new social movements research of past decades; here the contributors focus on the ways in which these identities are mobilized in pursuit of new forms of political autonomy outside the constraints imposed by nation-states or multinational institutions. Thus, in his contribution, Alex Khasnabish explores the political resonance of Zapatismo in transnational activist networks. Working with a variety of activist groups in the...