ABSTRACT
What has been particularly intriguing about our conference and the dialogues it generated is that it brought into focus a need for analysts to be far more attentive to the epistemological and ontological positioning of social movements and their relationships to power and social structures. Our discussions centered on the idea that any transformation of the world-system would require some basic rethinking of our ways of seeing the world as well as of scholarly practices. Indeed, as authors in Part I make clear, we even need to rethink the very concept of a social movement. As the papers in this volume reveal, gaining a full understanding of the complexities of social movements requires an openness to thinking the unthinkable. That is, to considering alternative world-systems – systems which are already being envisioned and even implemented by some social actors and movements. As we set out to explore the variety of contemporary movements that help
make up what Christopher Chase-Dunn has called the “world revolution of 20xx” we noticed that diverse individuals and groups from all over the world were not just resisting the particular injustices of contemporary capitalism: each struggle in its own ways was offering less visible but far more threatening challenges to the intellectual and cultural edifices that undergird the modern world-system. The fact that these movements are all emerging simultaneously around the
world and at a time of particularly urgent crisis in the world-system makes these kinds of challenges to what Wallerstein (2014) has called the system’s “geoculture” especially significant. Indeed, it may be the context of world-systemic
crisis that has expanded the chorus and amplified the voices of movement actors who have been waging what in the past may have seemed highly quixotic struggles against the system’s invisible structures of discourse and thought. Such structures have long constrained possibilities for building strong and cohesive antisystemic movements. The fact that women’s and indigenous peoples’ movements – marginalized in hegemonic discourses and institutions – have been such critical voices in the world revolution of today supports the idea that the ground has shifted. It is becoming more plausible to think the unthinkable. The papers in this section provide both a challenge and a road map to guide
readers and analysts as they engage with our authors in thinking about the nature and meaning of contemporary social movements, and how looking at today’s movements can help us rethink understandings of the world-historical trajectory of antisystemic struggle. The challenge for us as readers and as scholars is to deepen and sharpen our sociological imaginations and to engage in what Santos (2004) calls the “sociology of absences and emergences.” Conway and Dalsheim do this by considering how dominant ways of viewing the world are obscuring what we “know” and preventing us from appreciating emergent identities, normative orders, and practices that are integral to social change. Methodological nationalism and the normalization of Western notions of modernity obscure the emergent (yet no less “real”) alternative subjectivities and trajectories of resistance to a modernist, developmentalist paradigm and the structures that reproduce it. Conway’s discussion of the modernist paradigm and its implicit notions of
progress, development, and social relations calls into question virtually all major categories embedded in the conceptual frameworks of not only the dominant culture but also of activists and social scientists. Indeed, Conway calls upon readers and thinkers in the global North/core to be more reflexive about how our own positionality in the world-system impacts what we can see. As she observes, “Seeing the third world is not the equivalent of seeing or engaging colonial difference” (p. 30). The essential feature of what is erased through the normalization of the modernist paradigm is the violence inherent in its actualization – violence that is reproduced even in the thoughts and actions of those aiming to alter unequal social relations. Thus, our challenge is to recognize that antisystemic struggles “cannot be adequately understood through the same rationality that underlies the processes that they are breaking with” – they must be seen not as political struggles waged within hegemonic frameworks but rather as decolonizing, epistemic struggles (Icaza and Vázquez 2013: 689). Dalsheim’s contribution reinforces Conway’s key points and delves more
deeply into the matter of how conceptualizations of the state impact our ability to see emergent forms of resistance. Her explorations of some of the absences in prevailing accounts of the Israel/Palestine struggle provide an alternate lens through which to see this particularly violent and intractable conflict. While this struggle is reproduced in mainstream thought and actions as one over territory, security, and citizenship, on the ground it is manifested in actual practices of
survival and mutual co-existence that disrupt dominant narratives about identity and difference. In other words, what are often interpreted as struggles over rights and representation are actually about dignity and autonomy (Icaza and Vázquez 2013: 684). The practices of challengers involve various forms of “counter-conduct” that put forward multiple “heterotopias,” or spaces where “hegemonic structures are represented, contested and inverted” (p. 36, original emphasis) that resist the “scattered hegemonies” through which dominant forms of power are exercised. Both Conway and Dalsheim point to the ways scholarship “reinforces the
racialized thinking that forms the episteme of separate and distinct ‘nations’ and reinscribes [oppositional] categories” (Dalsheim, p. 48). Accepting hegemonic conceptualizations of territorial states and citizenship as well as of other differences such as gender, race, etc., involves “particular forms of forgetting that may undermine the best intentions of those seeking the ends of oppression” (Dalsheim, p. 43). Thus, accepting the dominant narrative around a “two-state solution” on the question of Israel/Palestine necessarily involves the “forgetting” of the violent displacement and continued suppression of Palestinians by the Israeli state. Similarly, in Conway’s account, the continued marginalization of indigenous peoples and their stories in dominant narratives erases their histories and experiences of both extreme violence and resistance and resilience, in order to avoid the uncomfortable moral contradictions such historical reckoning would entail. Although movement actors may articulate their challenges as epistemic/ ontological ones, the modernist lenses through which even critical scholars and activists operate continue to reflect the prevailing categories and logics of the existing, state-based order, enabling us to continue to “forget” uncomfortable realities and thereby help sustain the foundations of the prevailing system. What these chapters call attention to is the ways social movements help
articulate and demand attention to the other forms of knowledge and ways of knowing that are incommensurable with modernist thinking. Such knowledges have been erased, displaced, and systematically excluded from the realm of legitimate thought and discourse. Thus, Icaza and Vázquez (2013) argue that we should understand social struggles as essentially “epistemic struggles,” where activists “are producing and theorizing other forms of the political, other economies, other knowledges” that lie outside dominant market and state institutions and are seen as advancing more dignified life-worlds (Icaza and Vázquez 2013: 684). Such theorizing by social movements entails opening into “question the epis-
temic structures that tend to normalize the order of oppression,” and in doing so “making visible the plurality of alternatives through which social life is organized and experienced” (Icaza and Vázquez 2013: 685). Thus, Conway argues that we need a “paradigm shift” in the study of social movements, since social movement theory’s Euro-modernist lens obscures the alternative discourses and projects being articulated by antisystemic movements. Similarly, in Dalsheim’s account, one must imagine a reality outside the inter-state order to appreciate the meaning of the interactions she portrays. Even actors themselves may not be intentional
about how their practices subvert dominant narratives about the state, citizenship, and the “other,” but their actions nevertheless suggest that we must “[shift] the grounds of analysis of contemporary conflict away from the nation-and state-based norms of international relations, [allowing] us to see different human alliances and ways of living together” (Dalsheim, p. 50). The discussions in these opening chapters should help our readers better
appreciate the following analyses of the diverse ways social movement actors are struggling to transform the modern world-system, even as they operate within it. Conway and Dalsheim’s discussions also help connect this collection with what appears to be a growing body of scholarly and other work that highlights the epistemic violence inherent in mainstream social science. They point to the importance of work to decolonize our thinking so that we can observe the multiple ways subaltern groups are resisting oppression and laying a foundation for worldsystem transformation. They encourage us to engage in a “dialogue across a plurality of epistemic locations” in a search for “cognitive or epistemic justice” (Icaza and Vázquez 2013: 683). We hope this volume contributes to such a collective effort for both cognitive and social emancipation.
