Eva-Maria Hardtmann, Socialantopology Stockholm University

2008-2013

The aim of the study has been to increase the understanding of the processes taking place when activists in the global justice movement, from different parts of the world, create and maintain transnational interrelations between the movements, involving varied categories of people; each with different goals at the top of the agenda.

The project is based on anthropological fieldwork among activists in the global justice movement. It has specifically investigated the processes taking place when activists in South Asia and Japan create networks between: 1) the Dalit movement with a focus on so-called untouchables in South Asia; 2) the Burakumin movement among the largest minority in Japan; 3) Via Campesina, working for land rights; and 4) No-Vox, a movement working for the rights to work and housing.

My main focus has been the day-to-day work among the activists, but I have also conducted participant observation at a number of World Social Forums. The World Social Forums are huge conferences organized every second year in different parts of the world under the slogan 'Another World is Possible'. The conferences are important occasions for the activists belonging to the global justice movement to come together. During five days up to one hundred thousand participants gather: activists, academics, journalists, musicians and performing artists from different parts of the world. I have participated in the WSF in Mumbai (India) in 2004, in Nairobi (Kenya) in 2007(followed by a short trip to Johannesburg with feminist Dalit activists from South Asia), in Belém (Brazil) in 2009 and in the South Asia Social Forum in Dhaka (Bangladesh ) in 2011.

Three results

I will describe three important results of the project under the following headings: 1) Discourses and ethics; 2) Organizational aspects (network); and 3) Transnational Dalit feminism.

1) It is common among the activists in the global justice movement to be critical of neoliberal economic globalization. They protest against the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Trade Organization (WTO) and the slogan 'Another World is Possible' sums up their vision. Many scholars have already described the activists' discourse but in order to better understand the activists' arguments I have paid attention to another discourse and ethics: the context of the first UN Millennium Development Goal (MDG) to eradicate extreme poverty and hunger with the sub target to halve extreme poverty and hunger between 1990 and 2015. This is a discourse that increasingly has come to characterize the work among international NGOs (INGOs) and it is also something the activists in the global justice movement gradually have had to relate to. It may at first sight appear as if the first UN MDG is in line with the discourse, ethics and visions among the activists in the global justice movement. However, I have shown that the activists' discourse is significantly different from the neoliberal discourse, ethics and vision surrounding the first UN MDG. These differences in discourses have been of importance as regards the organizational aspects for the activists in the global justice movement in South Asia.

2) In terms of organizations, the situation within the movements that I have studied is very complex. At grassroots level, the two discourses that I have outlined above are often found within the same organization, and parts of them may be combined in different ways. This creates an ambivalence and conflicting directions, goals and visions within the movements. Some members of the organizations have come to work closer to the UN framework and in line with the Millennium Development Goals. They are positive to microcredits and entrepreneurship. At the same time as ethics has become a top priority within the World Bank another process has become visible in South Asia: some activists and groups within the global justice movement have become radicalized and with the help of social media, for example, they have been part of a process to create a transnational counterpublic.

3) The World Social Forum in Mumbai in 2004 was unique and historical in the way that Dalit feminists in South Asia put feminism on the agenda within the global justice movement. I have thus described the processes taking place when networks are created and maintained within a specific transnational network of feminists, in-between the huge events of the World Social Forums, i.e. the Dalit feminists in South Asia and the International Movement Against All forms of Discrimination and Racism (IMADR), formed by activists among the Burakumin minority in Japan. IMADR has its head office in Tokyo with branches in, for example, Sri Lanka, Nepal and India. Also within this feminist network the activists have been divided along the different lines as described above. At the same time as some feminists are increasingly working within the UN framework and are positive to the discourse on the Millennium Development Goals, other feminists are radicalized and have become more active within a transnational counterpublic criticizing the World Bank and increasingly also the UN.

Two publications generated by the project

I am completing a manuscript for a volume with the working title 'Transnational Networks in the Global Justice Movement: Focus South Asia'. According to our agreement it will be sent to Oxford University Press in New Delhi in the end of March 2014. (With the same publishing house I have previously published the volume 'The Dalit Movement in India: Local Practice and Global Connections'.)

The manuscript consists of seven chapters:
1. Introduction
2. The Global Justice Movement and the World Social Forum Process: Focus on South Asia
3. The Ethics of a 'Neoliberal Bricolage': The World Bank, the UN and the Rock Stars
4. An Ethnographical Example: Dalits and Burakumin in the Global Justice Movement and as Transnational Counterpublic
5. South Asian Dalit Feminism and the Global Justice Movement
6. The Organizational Logics of Creating Networks in South Asia: Transnational Social Movements in relation to international NGOs
7. Concluding Comments

Another publication relevant in this context is an article with the title 'A Dialogical Writing Experiment between Scholars, Activists and Activists / Scholars: The Tensions and Joy of Writing Together' (see references). Together with other scholars and Dalit activists, I discuss in the article the advantages and difficulties for scholars and non-scholars to collaborate in writing. The article is based on a two-day workshop, which I organized in Nepal. The article belongs to a particular scholarly tradition to take an interest in the question of how collaborations beyond the academic world should ideally look like and be performed - it could be in relation to other professional groups or, as in this case, in relation to activists.

New research questions generated by the project

I would like to put the activists' means of communication in relation to the three results of the project. An interesting question is to what extent the conflicting discourses within the movements are related to different generations: the senior activists and the younger activists. What is the importance of social media in shaping the discourses and the ethics, and, in the longer term, the counterpublic among the activists? Also, as regards the organizational aspect, it would be interesting to more thoroughly examine to what extent the internal organizational differences are related to the means of communication and if so, how this has had an impact on how the networks are created and maintained. Finally, as a number of scholars previously have discussed, a greater proportion of female activists compared to male activists in South Asia have lacked access to both computers and computer skills and have consequently been excluded from leadership positions in their movements. Cell phones are increasingly used by the activists in transnational communication and they have become more accessible to women as well as men. Did the use of cell phones strengthened or weakened the process for feminists to create a transnational feminist counterpublic from within their own movements?

International contacts

In connection to the project I have, for example, with a colleague organized an international conference funded by RJ. On the 28th and 29th September 2012, we organized the eighth Stockholm Anthropological Roundtable on the theme 'Social movement, alternative public spheres and political resistance'. The aim was to exchange ideas among scholars with an interest in social movements and political resistance in different parts of the world. During two days participants in the roundtable, which took place at Stockholm University and the Museum of Mediterranean, discussed the theme at five sessions that were directly related to my project. The scholars who participated are all in the forefront of international research in terms of activism in the context of the global justice movement.

Research informative efforts outside the scientific community

Outside the scientific community I have, for example, been part of the reference group in the project 'Outlook on Civil Society', which has been a collaboration between the Collegium for Development Studies, the Centre for Sustainable Development (Uppsala University), Sida and the Dag Hammarskjöld Foundation. The project ran between 2009 and 2013 and has published volumes related to yearly international conferences. During the conference in 2012, I organized a panel on social movements and ethnography and contributed to the volume with the article 'Introduction. Social movements in a neoliberal era: Ethnographies of local activists in transnational networks' (see references).

The project's publishing strategy and open access

Within the next few months I will discuss with Oxford University Press in New Delhi how the manuscript or parts of the manuscript could be made available for open access, and how this can be formulated in the final agreement.

Publications

Hardtmann, Eva-Maria (kommande). Transnational Networks in the Global Justice Movement: Focus South Asia. New Delhi: Oxford University Press.

Hardtmann, Eva-Maria, Vincent Manoharan, Urmila Devi, Sabrina Francis and Jussi Eskola (kommande). ‘A Dialogical Writing Experiment between Scholars, Activists and Activists/Scholars: The Tensions and Joy of Writing Together’. I Helena Wulff (red.), The Anthropologist as Writer. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Hardtmann, Eva-Maria. 2012. ‘Introduction. Social movements in a neoliberal era: Ethnographies of local activists in transnational networks’. I Heidi Mokshnes och Mia Melin (red.), Global Civil Society: Shifting Powers in a Shifting World, Uppsala: Uppsala University, CSD.

Länk till mina publikationer och forskning på socialantropologiska institutionens hemsida på Stockholms universitet:
http://www.socant.su.se/forskning/v%C3%A5ra-forskare/eva-maria-hardtmann