ABSTRACT
The notion of modernity is the dominant frame in histories of the present, both in the West and globally. Across competing intellectual traditions, including world-systems theory, the “social movement” is regarded as a distinctively modern phenomenon, appearing in Europe around the time of the French Revolution, stabilizing as a social form and diffusing with processes of modernization to the rest of the world. In this lineage, social movements are creatures of European modernity and the privileged carriers of modernity’s emancipatory traditions. Central to dominant narratives of modernity are ideas of rupture and difference.
The former involves a temporal break between the modern present and a traditional past; the latter associates the appearance of modernity uniquely with Europe and positions the West as the maker of universal history, setting the pattern of development for societies everywhere. This Eurocentric knowledge regime is marked by constructions of history that interpret events in Europe/the West as world historic in significance, singular in nature, and as having emerged endogenously in the West as a bounded space (Bhambra 2007: 4-5). Social movements as a historical phenomenon and an analytic category, as well
as the dominant traditions of their interpretation, are deeply intertwined with such Eurocentric narratives of modernity. This has myriad implications for what has been seen and valorized as a social movement, containing resistance and alternative possible futures to what can be countenanced within Euro-modernity. What are the implications of this epistemological condition for seeing, representing, analyzing, and understanding the array of social forces that are today contesting globalization, that involve “new” actors, from different world regions, deploying unfamiliar discourses, and claiming that “other worlds” are possible? Do we need a paradigm shift in the study of social movements, more able to
contemplate this diverse array of resistances, their possible relations to each other and to the globalized past and present? If the provisional answer to this is yes, then one path to this end must travel
through the colonial, for there is no adequate way today, neither empirically nor ethically, of thinking the global without the colonial. Informed by the work of the Latin American research group on modernity-coloniality,1 this paper departs from the premise that coloniality is the constitutive underside of modernity and is thereby constitutive of the modern world-system, from its inception in the 16th century to the present. With lineages in dependency theory and world-systems theory, reconfigured through post-colonial thought, the modernity-coloniality perspective provides an important alternative critical discourse of globalization and a source of critique and reconstruction in theorizing social movements. In this article, I engage in a ground-clearing exercise while only pointing to
starting points for the reconstructive project. I examine three major critical traditions of interpretation of social movements for the degree to which Eurocentric discourses of modernity structure their inquiry and thus our ways of thinking about social movements. I first elaborate the problematic of modernity’s relation to coloniality before turning to: (1) the contentious politics framework through the work of Charles Tilly; (2) new social movement theory through the work of Alain Touraine; and (3) world-systems theory’s approach to antisystemic movements through the work of Immanuel Wallerstein.
