ABSTRACT

This chapter explores the dynamics of social movements at a global scale. My underlying hypothesis is that social movements, arising out of local situations, periodically link up with each other so as to create aggregated social movements, occasionally with worldwide impact.1 In addition, the aggregated social movements later decouple from each other through various processes, so that in sum the aggregated social movements expand and then decline. The processes of linkage and delinking are here studied through a narrative of the social movements of 1989-1990, with some reference to the succeeding two years. To emphasize that the links were genuinely global and not simply imposed by great powers, my narrative focuses on Africa, South America, and Southeast Asia rather than on Tiananmen, the Berlin Wall, and Soviet collapse. The dynamic of linkage is but one of the major issues in analysis of global

social movements. Most fundamentally, there is the question of the underlying cause of popular social contestation. For the movements of 1989 and 1990, the potential for social contestation arose especially out of demands for political democracy and an end to economic constraints, particularly among professionals and other educated strata, who were commonly able to make common cause with urban wage workers, rural commoners, and youth generally.2 A second issue, long under discussion, is that of the spark launching the linkage of social movements. Lenin’s newspaper Iskra or “Spark” adopted this metaphor. I have tinkered with other metaphors for the launching of social movements including that of song, in which the songs of one group encourage others to take up a similar refrain. The process of progressive linkage among social movements, while it may not

be the central issue, is in need of further study. The social movements, however they are launched, expand through alliances by class, ethnicity, gender, and other

social groupings. Symbolic communication is important in establishing the mutual identification among groups, so the various movements can imagine that they share common causes. In this way, out of the great pell-mell of diversity and complexity in human society, implicit or explicit coalitions of various social movements occasionally gain broader attention, especially if they appear to be achieving some of their objectives.3