Band 9, Heft 2 -

Presuming the hegemony of transnational capital – and thus the perils of action at the global level – critical scholarship has looked with benevolent complacency upon what people actually resisting neoliberal world ordering in our time have been inventing in the course of their struggles. Here, I want to stay a little longer with praxis itself as it takes shape in moments of encounters between global power and its opposite, when world order can still be problematized as if it was at stake. Looking into the gatherings of global crowds, I find a common legitimizing notion. In contrast to the “steady-state” morality of peasants, the moral economy of global crowds is more properly thought of as a morality of situation. It is not about subjectivity but presence. In the second section of the text, I argue for the relative coherence of a “moral and ethical order” of resistance. That we may still be in a time when it appears unnatural for power to be defined outside concrete, historical, situations when presence is possible suggests that domination, not hegemony, should serve as our reference point for thinking about world order and resistance.

Initially rejected by the parties to the Kyoto Protocol, efforts to protect tropical forests are now an accepted strategy to mitigate the impact of climate change. Inspired by long-standing demands of Amazonia’s forests peoples, the notion of Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation (REDD+) has been embraced in global arenas. What accounts for this shift in perceptions about the relation between forests and climate change? Answers lie in the efforts of a transnational advocacy network (TAN) at norm dissemination and consensus-building within Brazil and in the Kyoto Protocol. This study highlights the importance of domestic activism unfolding in democratizing societies to enhance the influence of transnational advocacy networks in norm dissemination and consensus building in global arenas. It enlarges the explanatory power of normative approaches by documenting a case in which the idea and set of values being globally propagated do not emanate from a Western liberal tradition.

The multidimensional nature of globalization is a work in progress, in many different ways throughout the world. This assessment follows upon an earlier one about the so-called global systemic shift – away from linear, hierarchical, and largely Eurocentric systems of thought and action toward something new, still to be defined and understood.