Christopher Chase-Dunn - Global Struggles and Social Change: From Prehistory to World Revolution in the Twenty-First Century

I n the early decades of the twenty-first century, an international movement to slow the pace of climate change has mushroomed across the globe, reaching small island states in the South Pacific and the most impoverished countries in the interior of sub-Saharan Africa. The self-proclaimed Climate Justice movement urges immediate action in reducing carbon emissions and new bold policies to address global warming before irreversible and catastrophic damage threatens the habitability of the planet. By October 2014, during global climate talks at the United Nations, climate justice activists successfully organized 400,000 people in an enormous street demonstration in New York City while also coordinating thousands of collective events around the world. The October 2014 climate campaign was perhaps the most extensive international mobilization in history, and these efforts repeated themselves in November 2015 with the global mobilizations leading to the Paris Climate Accords as well as in September of 2019 with Fridays for Future planetary-wide protest demonstrations. This global movement infrastructure may be humanitys best hope to sustain progressive transnational collective action into the 2020s and push us on an alternative path for ecological survival (Almeida 2019a).

On another front, since the 1980s, multiple waves of resistance have occurred around the globe against the uneven transition from state-led development to neoliberalismthe process of moving from government-directed to unregulated market-driven economies. These waves of opposition have been characterized by mass mobilization against subsidy cuts, price increases, privatization, and trade liberalization. The collective actions are largely driven by the loss of social citizenship rights of access to the welfare state that expanded at an unprecedented rate in the mid-twentieth century but continues to contract in the twenty-first century (Somers 2008). After ethnic and religious-based strife, societal opposition to neoliberal reforms has generated the largest demonstrations and rallies and sustained novel transnational movements such as the World Social Forum (WSF). The social movement struggles against neoliberalism have also eventuated in the rise of post-neoliberal political parties and governments in Latin America and Europe attempting to offer alternatives to free market forms of globalism. Increasingly, free trade globalization is also sparking rightist and xenophobic mobilization throughout Europe, North America, and beyond (Standing 2011; Robinson 2014; Muis and Imerzeel 2017; McVeigh and Estep 2019).