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.

What Makes Us Move?, the first of two volumes, provides a background and foundation for understanding the extraordinary range of uprisings around the world: Tahrir Square in Egypt, Occupy in North America, the indignados in Spain, Gezi Park in Turkey, and many others. It draws on the rich reflection that took place following the huge wave of creative direct actions that had preceded it, from the 1990s through to the early 2000s, including the Zapatistas in Mexico, the Battle of Seattle in the United States, and the accompanying formations such as Peoples’ Global Action and the World Social Forum.

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 Taiaiake Alfred, Tariq Ali, Daniel Bensaid, Hee-Yeon Cho, Ashok Choudhary, Lee Cormie, Jeff Corntassel, Laurence Cox, Guillermo Delgado-P, Andre Drainville, David Featherstone, Christopher Gunderson, Emilie Hayes, Francois Houtart, Fouad Kalouche, Alex Khasnabish, Xochitl Leyva Solano, Roma Malik, David McNally, Roel Meijer, Eric Mielants, Peter North, Shailja Patel, Emir Sader, Andrea Smith, Anand Teltumbde, James Toth, Virginia Vargas, and Peter Waterman.

Jai Sen's profile page

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

“Possible futures right now in the making become legible in how The Movements of Movements doesn’t shy away from the complex and unsettling issues that shape our time while thinking through struggles for social and ecological justice in the wider contexts of their past and present.”
—Emma Dowling, senior researcher in Political Sociology at the Institute for Sociology, Friedrich-Schiller-University Jena, Germany

“This collection offers a thought-provoking opportunity to parse multiplicities and recent directions in global justice organizing. Jai Sen’s framing in this book sets us up to take stock of two decades of social and political movement in terms of dynamic motion—not only as strategy and organization, but as kinaesthetic experience, embodied transformation through space and time. This agile cluster of contributors leads us through the cumulative dialectic of Zapatismo, altermondialisme, and their various permutations and relations in resistance to global capitalism, guiding the steps of the social dance repeatedly back to earth from the ethereal spaces of hypermobile globality to place feet on the ground in the most deeply rooted sites of embedded struggle.”
—Maia Ramnath, author of Decolonizing Anarchism and The Haj to Utopia

“Edited by Jai Sen, who has long occupied a central position in an international network of intellectuals and activists in movement, this is an important contribution to a developing internationalism that doesn’t assume that the North Atlantic left has all the answers for the rest of the world and which recognizes that emancipatory ideas and practices are often forged from below. The essays here range across the globe, look at the politics of caste, class, gender, religion and indigeneity, and move from the local to the global. This book will be useful for activists and intellectuals in movement—be they in universities, parties, trade unions, social movements, or religious organisations—around the world.”
—Richard Pithouse, Rhodes University, Grahamstown, South Africa