ABSTRACT
As the world faces important and urgent ecological and social crises, questions about how change happens become critically important. Our project has explored the role of social movements in advancing social transformation towards a more just, equitable, and ecologically sound global order. The contributions to the conference and to this volume urge us to reflect on the question of “What would a revolution look like?” Interestingly, the answers they suggest diverge from common associations of revolution with the militant takeover of the state. The agents identified by most participants are not organized military groups, and many if not most explicitly reject violence as a political tool. Their targets are not states but a more amorphous system of globalized capitalism. Moreover, these movements do not seek to acquire authority so much as to change understandings of authority. They are more about changing modes of thinking about power than directly confronting the structures of power. Our notions of revolution shape how we think about what constitutes a con-
sequential social movement challenge to existing social arrangements and ideologies. Many of the movements discussed here have received comparatively little attention from scholars and mainstream media, as they are not seen as “revolutionary.” Methodological nationalism has also led many mainstream accounts to view these movements in isolation from their global context, obscuring the historical and transnational links among movements that pose the strongest threat to the prevailing order. We argue that the movements explored here are at least part of an emerging global “revolution.” We use the term “revolution” in the sense we’ve outlined above, to refer to the kind of change these movements are advancing in this particular political moment, where states and the world-system are themselves undergoing crises and transformations.
