ABSTRACT
As contemporary neoliberal globalization has intensified and consolidated since the 1980s, its hegemonic and exploitative nature has provoked new waves and modalities of contestation and resistance. The contested and politicized nature of neoliberal globalization, which Arturo Escobar aptly refers to as ‘a new US-based form of imperial globality, an economic-military-ideological order that subordinates regions, peoples and economies world-wide’ (2004, p. 207), has drawn attention to the challenge of resisting the global dominance of this new emergent imperialism. The key political tension exists between the forces of globalization and the forces of resistance, and at the heart of this is a paradox: globalization both weakens and simultaneously reinvigorates the forces of contestation and resistance. Put another way, imperial globality and global coloniality has marginalized and subordinated the knowledge, power and culture of subaltern groups in the Third World in general and Africa in particular and has provoked the emergence of new grassroots-based social movements, which are engaged in counter-hegemonic struggles that represent both a challenge and alternative to this new form of imperialism and colonialism.
