Translating Contention: Culture, History, and the Circulation of Collective Action.

Sean Scalmer [*]

The emerging forms of global economy and culture have stimulated a recent, feverish interest in the possibilities of social movements in a globalized environment. Transnational social movements have beckoned as new political actors; global civil society has loomed as a new forum for democratic decision making; and new(ish) technologies, such as the internet, have promised fresh forms of international mobilization and organization. [1] This has coalesced with the postmodern insistence on contemporary transformation, difference, and play, so that the near future has seemingly promised newly minted, international, performative, fractured, mass-mediated, and technologically wired social movements, operating in a historically novel fashion on the terrain of global civil society.

However, this enticing prospect has recently been questioned on a number of grounds. The political capacities of social movements to contest globalization have been found wanting; [2] the tendency of global civil society to amplify the values and powers of the advanced industrial societies has been highlighted; [3] and the cyberdemocratic appeal of the internet doubted. [4] More than that, the historical novelty of contemporary social movement practice has also come under strong attack. Historians have identified such playful and expressive activities as demonstrations, boycotts, and public assemblies in the eighteenth century. [5] They have emphasized the international circulation of ideas like popular sovreignty in the period before the American Revolution [6] and the transnational scope of such venerable movements as the campaign for working-class emancipation. [7]

Indeed, the emergence of a new, "modular" repertoire of collective action that could easily be translated from one setting to another is generally traced back at least two hundred years. [8] It was industrial capitalism, the modern state, and the printing press that stimulated actions and movements capable of crossing national boundaries.9 Neither a global civil society, an explicitly "transnational" framework, nor the rise of CNN were necessary to these developments. In this sense, the recent, much-heralded birth of the transnational social movement may not only be ridiculously late, it may be beside the point.

The problems of globalization need not be addressed by global political actors. They have long been contested by local political actors, capable of making connections with events, problems, and movements in other national contexts. Indeed, movements do "connect, converse, and learn from each other."10 They have been doing so in different ways for hundreds of years, and it is the form and consequences of such connections that are most likely to shape how, why, and when social movements will contest globalization. It is connection, translation, and circulation between existing local movements rather than the birth of new, qualitatively different, global movements that will continue to shape global political contention. It is precisely these processes that therefore demand theorized investigation: How do actors take up apparently "foreign" political tools? How does the process of connection and translation occur? Which political actors are most likely to do so? How rapidly? How readily? These more local, humble questions are most likely to illuminate the politics of social movements in a globalized context.

Connection and Translation: An Unacknowledged Problem

Unfortunately, theorized analyses of how social movements connect across national boundaries have only rarely been forthcoming. From within the international relations community, little attention has been paid to the sociological debate about social movements, [11] and the problem of "connection" between such movements has barely been grasped. From within historical sociology, attention has focused on the birth of the modern social movement and the "modular" repertoire of transferable collective action. The process by which connections between movements are made, and "modular" actions are transmitted from one context to another, has been comparatively neglected. Sidney Tarrow's widely respected Power in Movement (1998) is typical. It provides great detail on the birth of modular collective action, but elides its actual movement from place to place: "When a new form (of collective action) is 'discovered,' its appropriateness to a new situation is immediately obvious, and it is widely taken up, spreads rapidly, and gives the impression of a dramatic breakthrough." [12] This sheds little light on the processes of connection and translation; instead, it implies that it is an automatic, acultural, and unchanging phenomenon.