Agency, empowerment and utopian visions

Throughout the world we have seen proliferations of progressive, democratic social movements in which vast numbers of people have challenged neo liberal globalization and the legitimacy of its  elites whose self interested policies have ill served the majorities. From the Zapatistas to the Global justice movements, and more recently Arab Spring, Israeli Summer, the Spanish Indignados and now the Occupy movements, counter hegemonic mobilizations have proliferated.  We would argue that to understand these mobilizations requires considerations of both objective/structural conditions and contradictions, eg legitimation crises (Habermas) and the subjective/microsocial aspects of self, identity and emotions-those that sustain hegemony and those that challenge and contest. 

Recent thinking has fallen into 2 broad camps, resource mobilization and new social movement theory. RM has stressed how rational actors seeking self advantages through mobilizations, enabled by adequate resources and social movement entrepreneurs, often skilled in framing and taking advantage of political openings,  mobilize and secure some kind of "advantageous" change through political pressure.  NSM however has placed more emphasis on creating, negotiating identities and meanings and in turn, they are more likely to use the public spheres of civil society as sites for articulating alternative subjectivities.  But that said, we think that both perspectives fail to address the relationships of emotion to social mobilizations and to visions of the economically, politically and culturally possible. More specifically, we suggest that that structural conditions, inequality, oppression and crises of legitimacy, have led us to rethink the nature of citizenship-especially as it has changed from passive support of the nation and obedience to its leaders, to more active critiques challenges to nations and their leaders.  More specifically, across a variety of social movements, we note certain common factors-common emotions and desire and visions for new kind of democratic, inclusive subjectivities and citizenship