Articulating the Web of Transnational Social Movements

This chapter investigates the history and background of broad-based left-wing movement coalitions and analyzes the potential for transnational social movements and progressive regimes to transform the capitalist world-system into a more humane and democratic world society within the next fifty years. The authors’ research on transnational social movements and global civil society investigates the potential for a network of radical social movements to come together to play an important role in world politics in the coming decades. In order to investigate this potential, Chase-Dunn et al. focus on the interconnections among existing movements and the processes by which movements have merged, collaborated and articulated in the past. The general logic of coalition formation is considered and the sociological literature on coalitions among social movements is reviewed. The histories of united and popular fronts are particularly relevant for contemporary efforts to promote coalescence among progressive movements. The world-systems perspective sees the evolution of global governance and the capitalist world economy as driven by a sequence of world revolutions in which local social upheavals, rebellions and/or revolutions that are clustered together in time pose threats to the structures of global power. Each world revolution reflects the nature of contemporary contradictions, the ideological heritages of earlier world revolutions, and the institutional structures that are predominant during its historical period. This chapter seeks to understand how this could happen in the twenty-first century.