Globalizing collective identities : from the global justice movement to the "global wave"

Eschle, Catherine and Alexander, Kirsty; Elliott, Anthony, ed. (2019) Globalizing collective identities : from the global justice movement to the "global wave". In: Routledge Handbook of Identity Studies. Routledge International Handbooks (2nd). Routledge, Oxon, pp. 392-404. ISBN 9781138649064

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Abstract

From the Battle of Seattle to the Iceland Saucepan Revolution, and from the 'Arab Spring' to Gezi Park, we live in an age of globalized social movement activism. A distinct body of literature examining the relationship between globalization and social movements has emerged in response, covering two distinct periods of mobilization: the 'anti-globalization' or 'global justice' movement as it became known, from the 1990s and early 2000s, and the 'global wave' of protest since 2011. Intriguingly, both sets of mobilization are frequently postioned as post-identity, or more specifically as post-identity politics. In this chapter, we seek not only to condemn the broad-brush condemnation of 'identity politics', but also, more generally, to defend the category of identity, and particularly of collective identity, in the context of the study of contemporary activism. Moreover, we hope to demonstrate that approaching the global justice movement and the global wave through the lens of collective identity enables us to paint a more expansive empirical picture of both, revealing that they are not so much transcendent of identity, as doing distinctive forms of 'identity work'.

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