The Movements of Movements ─ Rethinking Our Dance

Our world today is not only a world in crisis but also a world in profound movement, with increasingly large numbers of people joining or forming movements: local, national, transnational, and global. The dazzling diversity of ideas and experiences recorded in this collection capture something of the fluidity within campaigns for a more equitable planet. This book, taking internationalism seriously without tired dogmas, provides a bracing window into some of the central ideas to have emerged from within grassroots struggles from 2006 to 2010. The essays here cross borders to look at the politics of caste, class, gender, religion, and indigeneity, and move from the local to the global. Rethinking Our Dance, the second of two volumes, offers a wide range of essays from frontline activists in Afghanistan, Argentina, Brazil, Niger, and Taiwan, as well as from Europe and North America that address the question, ?What do we need to do in order to bring about justice and peace?” The Movements of Movements aim to make the bewildering range of contemporary movements more meaningful to the observer and also to be a space where global movements speak to each other. Edited by Jai Sen, who has long occupied a central position in an international network of intellectuals and activists, this book will be useful to all who work for egalitarian social change?be they in universities, parties, trade unions, social movements, or religious organisations. Contributors include Kolya Abramsky, Ezequiel Adamovsky, Oussenia Alidou, Samir Amin, Chris Carlsson, John Brown Childs, Lee Cormie, Anila Daulatzai, Massimo De Angelis, The Free Association, David Graeber, Josephine Ho, John Holloway, François Houtart, Jeffrey Juris, Michael Löwy, Tomás Mac Sheoin, Matt Meyer, Muto Ichiyo, Rodrigo Nunes, Michal Osterweil, Shailja Patel, Geoffrey Pleyers, Stephanie Ross, and Nicola Yeates.

Jai Sen, based at the India Institute for Critical Action: Centre In Movement (CACIM), is an activist/researcher/author on and in movement. He has intensively engaged with the World Social Forum and contemporary emerging movement at a world scale, as moderator of the listserv WSFDiscuss and as coeditor of several books including World Social Forum: Challenging Empires and World Social Forum: Critical Explorations.