E. Osei Kwadwo Prempeh - Against Global Capitalism: African Social Movements Confront Neoliberal Globalization

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.

Over the years, critical scholars have made considerable effort in exploring and revealing the new forms of hegemonic power inherent in neoliberal globalization. This research has resulted in the deconstruction of the hegemonic knowledge and praxis of globalization and the emergence of a new construct that captures the emergence of new social movement networks engaged in counter-hegemonic globalizations as a challenge and alternative to empire. Yet it remains underappreciated the extent to which the disruption of this new hegemonic mode of thinking and contestation is also occurring from a number of other sites of knowledge production outside the core Western countries especially in Africa, from where resistance strategies and alternative approaches are being envisioned and articulated. This book seeks to lay out a new research agenda for examining the landscape of contestation and resistance in Africa with an emphasis on specific African popular struggles and manifestations of the deglobalization of capital orientation and the anti-capitalist movement. Indeed, the eruption of these emergent social movements and civil society groups, beginning in the mid-1980s and continuing to the present, has posed serious challenges to the hegemonic discourse and project of neoliberalism. We seek to outline a dialectical perspective about the hegemony of neoliberal globalization and the counter-hegemonic contestation and resistance of social movements by capturing the resistance and struggles of social movements in Africa with issues of development, the New Partnership for Africas development (NEPAD), debt, trade, HIV/AIDS and the privatization of water. In contesting and resisting neoliberal globalization, these emergent movements challenge the prevailing system of a globalized world whose rules are rigged in favour of the rich countries and big transnational corporations to the detriment of the poor.