The rise of Trumpism and the Covid-19 pandemic have galvanized debates about globalization. Eric D. Larson presents a timely look at the last time the concept spurred unruly agitation: the late twentieth century. Offering a transnational history of the emergence of the global justice movement in the United States and Mexico, he considers how popular organizations laid the foundations for this “movement of movements.” Farmers, urban workers, and Indigenous peoples grounded their efforts to confront free-market reforms in frontline struggles for economic and racial justice. As they strove to change the direction of the world economy, they often navigated undercurrents of racism, nationalism, and neoliberal multiculturalism, both within and beyond their networks. Larson traces the histories of three popular organizations, examining the Mexican roots of the idea of food sovereignty; racism and whiteness at the momentous Battle of Seattle protests outside the 1999 World Trade Organization meetings; and the rise of dramatic street demonstrations around the globe. Juxtaposing these stories, he reinterprets some of the crucial moments, messages, and movements of the era.
Eric D. Larson is Associate Professor in Crime and Justice Studies at University of Massachusetts Dartmouth. He is the editor of Jobs with Justice: 25 Years, 25 Voices.
“Grounding Global Justice charts how responses to changing conditions of austerity and of imperial and corporate power led to plans that envisioned a new world but also accommodated a perilous and unevenly developed old one, marked in the United States by handy recourse to racial hierarchies.”—David R. Roediger, The Sinking Middle Class: A Political History of Debt, Misery, and the Drift to the Right
"Eric Larson develops, with originality, imagination, and audacity, the keys to explain alter-globalism in Mexico and the United States. In that way he develops not only a new look at popular struggles in the past twenty-five years but a window to envision another horizon."—Luis Hernández Navarro, author of Self-Defense in Mexico: Indigenous Community Policing and the New Dirty Wars
"In the context of our current overlapping global crises of health, inequalities, and climate change, Eric Larson's Grounding Global Justice is a cautionary tale of how even "grassroots globalism" in the United States and Mexico in the 1990s and 2000s failed to adequately address local issues of settler coloniality, racism, and empire in their otherwise locally grounded struggles against neoliberal globalization. The answer, Larson argues, is not to retreat to xenophobic nationalism, unfortunately on the rise everywhere, but to continue to develop ongoing solidarities among grassroots struggles informed by their historical and ongoing local injustices and embeddedness in global injustices."—Manisha Desai, author of Subaltern Movements in India: Gendered Geographies of Struggle against Neoliberal Development
"The Battle for Seattle. Teamsters and Turtles. Black blocs. Summit hopping. Anti-globalization movements are inextricably linked to spectacles of direct action and street protest. In Grounding Global Justice, Eric Larson sketches the longstanding forms of organizing that laid the groundwork for the movement. Drawing on interviews with Indigenous Mexican peasant organizers, US-based labor activists, and Oaxaca’s radical teacher union members, as well as archives of transnational social movements, Larson offers a new portrait of this 'movement of movements.' Larson shows how in building local and global alliances, organizers simultaneously navigated racist nationalist appeals as well as multiculturalism’s cynical disguises. This compelling text reveals how global justice dreams of the future were built on a shared recognition of neoliberalism’s nightmares."—Christina Heatherton, author of Arise! Global Radicalism in the Era of the Mexican Revolution
"Eric Larson makes us rethink traditional histories by adding Global South perspectives and contributions to our understanding of global justice.”—Steve Striffler, author of Solidarity: Latin America and the US Left in the Era of Human Rights
“This crisp analysis grounds grassroots global justice movements in their broader social and political contexts. This timely rethink addresses how challengers to top-down globalization navigated key tensions—both between race and class and between nationalism and internationalism.”—Jonathan Fox, Professor of Development Studies, School of International Service, American University
344 pp.6 x 9Illus: 5 b/w figures, 2 maps
9780520388574$29.95|£25.00Paper
Sep 2023