Alter-Globalization: Becoming Actors in a Global AgeISBN: 978-0-7456-4675-6
Hardcover
272 pages
January 2011, Polity
Other Available Formats: Paperback
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Henrietta L. Moore, Archives of European Sociology
"What is missing from much of today's media coverage of the Occupy Wall Street movement and related international struggles against corporate globalization and Western imperialism is the question of where these movements have come from and why they've all emerged at this particular time. Geoffrey Pleyer's book makes an important contribution to addressing the prehistory of the Occupy protests, and it can inform those participating in these struggles as well as students and scholars of social movements."
Jackie Smith, Mobilization
"Pleyers reconsructs the 'grammar' of the movement beyond the habitual dichotomies of reform/revolution, action/structure, unity/heterogenity, and instead seeks to value the diversity of the movement through the social meanings shared by the actors that compose the alter-globalization movement in its struggle against neoliberal ideology."
International Sociology
"An impressive book that demonstrates the differences of opinion over what a transnational movement like the alter-globalisation movement shoul do to change the world and what changing the world could look like."
Australian Journal of Political Science
"Provides an excellent overview of the main debates within the movement through a meticulously constructed research programme … [Pleyers'] thorough and balanced account of the development of alter-globalisation offers an immensely valuable resource for both researchers and activists."
Capital & Class
"Now that it looks as if neo-liberalism has run its course, the resulting cracks and fissures give breathing space to alternative movements and hybrid experiments. Pleyers' book opens up some vistas of these developments in the middle of a serious crisis, and does it from the ground up."
Contemporary Sociology
"The kind of book that students of the alter-globalisation movement have been waiting for years for … An indispensable read for anyone - students, academics, activists or politicians - who is looking for an elaborate and sophisticated discussion of some of the most crucial political issues of our time."
Journal of Democratic Socialism
"Utterly convincing and theoretically robust ... This kind of
scholarship is what the alter-globalisation movement and indeed the
world deserve."
Giuseppecaruso's Weblog
"This important book is the first scholarly account of the
alter-globalisation movement. This highly original analysis of the
way the movement is constructed around the tension between its two
logics - subjective experience and expertise based on reason -
helps us to understand not only the movement itself but also the
role that the movement plays in inventing global
citizenship."
Mary Kaldor, London School of Economics
"Pleyers has traveled the world to offer readers the most
sweeping look yet at this crucial global movement, including how it
has changed in the face of the recent crisis of the very capitalism
it criticizes. By showing us a movement grappling continuously with
the Pyramid Dilemma over top-down versus bottom-up approaches, this
book helps us think about the most basic issues of democracy and
social change."
James M. Jasper, City University of New York
"An outstanding example of contemporary sociological research
that rises to the immense demands of a truly global ethnography.
Pleyers' book is bound to become the definitive account by a
contemporary of the alter-globalization movement. Because of its
assured scholarship, easy familiarity with theoretical arguments
and intimate experience of the social movement it describes this is
going to be one of those rare research reports that immediately
becomes a student required text and eventual classic."
Martin Albrow, London School of Economics, author of The
Global Age
"Well-documented and relying on the most in-depth analyses. This
book presents a movement both truly global and adapted to the
economic context of each country and region. The main contribution
of Geoffrey Pleyers, and what makes this book an indispensable
tool, is that he clearly exposes the mixed strengths and weaknesses
of a movement which was, and remains, a grassroots movement in
which activists from poor countries occupy a place observed in no
other movement."
Alain Touraine, Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales,
Prince of the Asturias Award 2010
"This masterpiece will be the main reference for those who want
to understand how the alter-globalization movement shapes today's
world, how it modifies our perception of action, but also of
democracy, and how this new actor articulates local and personal
meanings with general concerns for the future of humanity. This
study enables us to discover with precision the short, but real
history, the aims, the functioning, the internal tensions, the
hopes and the difficulties of the first real global
movement."
Michel Wieviorka, President of the International Sociological
Association 2006-2010, and Director of the Maison des Sciences de
l'Homme, Paris
"The distinction between the way of subjectivity and the way
reason that Geoffrey Pleyers proposes in his book clarifies the
dynamics and some tensions that we experience in groups and
assemblies of the 'Indignados' in Barcelona. It is a
conceptual tool that has been of great help me in group
facilitation and positive management of conflicts, both online and
in assemblies as it allows overpassing tensions among positions
that seem irreconcilable and developing an empathy based on mutual
understanding."
David Leal Garcia, Indignado (15M) in Barcelona