Global Struggles and Social Change: From Prehistory to World Revolution in the Twenty-First Century by C. Chase-Dunn and P. Almeida (review)

In 1989, Charles Tilly published a book with the challenging title, Big Structures, Large Processes, Huge Comparisons. Many scholars have attempted to meet this challenge, few with much success. It is not easy to find the balance between over-generalizing and mobilizing sufficient microlevel evidence necessary to make sufficient convincing connections between what happens on the ground and the higher levels of theoretical abstraction (as this reviewer is only too well aware). In this scholarly and radical book, Chase-Dunn and Almeida take their cue from Tilly and work through Big Structures, Large Processes, and Huge Comparisonsin some surprising and instructive ways. This is a relatively short book that will appeal to both advanced undergraduate and graduate students seeking a readable introduction to the big social, political, and historical questions that arise in our troubled world. Seasoned researchers will also find much interesting material that rarely sees the light of day.

An introductory section "The language of social change," does not attempt to define the main concepts (always a contentious exercise) but rather explains how they are to be mobilized in the book. These concepts, characterized as "sensitizing" are globalization, the world-system, neoliberalism, Global North and South, the welfare state, social citizenship, and social movements. The authors emphasize the often-ignored distinction between "structural globalization" and the capitalist-inspired "globalization project," a clarification that is very useful for what is to follow. Chapter 1 begins with the bold statement: "Collective behaviour and social movements have been important drivers of social change since the emergence of human language," a view that sets the tone for the whole book, implicitly criticizing the "presentism" of most social science and enhancing it with very long historical perspectives. The theory behind this is labeled "institutional materialism." Chase-Dunn and Almeida see value in combining both functionalism and conflict theory, a view that will resonate with those who are frustrated by never-ending debates within sociology. If we look up note 2 (which might have been better placed and expanded in the body of the text), we discover that this is their "world-system Marxism"—a simple solution for a complex problem clarified, to some extent, in chapter 5, especially in the notes.

The substantive framework of the book is developed through three sets of crisis-creating structures, processes, and comparisons, namely climate change and the environmental justice movement, neoliberalism, and the movement against capitalist globalization, and authoritarian populism. This is a wise strategy, explaining clearly how each crisis arises out of a malfunctioning global system and inevitably brings out its own multifaceted social movements in an ongoing dialectic of change and resistance to change. A most original aspect of this book is the willingness of the authors to explore in depth the ways in which conventional social movements connect with unconventional collective behavior. This is most creatively expressed in the extended discussion of the Ghost Dance, and other "prehistoric social movements" (Chase-Dunn co-authored a book in 2014, Social Change: Globalization from the Stone Age to the Present). Most globalization theorists (and all theorists of the capitalist globalization project) would question this origin story, but it raises issues that deserve more attention. What it does do, is to provide ample evidence from a variety of sources that counter-hegemonic struggles are not simply a function of TV coverage and the internet. Also notable here is the discussion of the idea of the "interactive nature of social movements," another theme that is skillfully woven into the fabric of the book. In a series of tables and figures (some based on the original fieldwork of the authors), the global sweep and historical depth of the research...