Many ‘Post-Modern Princes'? Rival Cosmopolitanisms in the Global Field of Justice Movements

In this article, Hosseini reflects on the recent organizational and ideational shifts in the so-called global justice movements. While some recent studies conceptualize these movements as ideologically mature and coherent, other inquiries, highlight growing disorganizations, fragmentations, disappointments, and disputes. The former argue that underlying global solidarities are coherent cosmopolitanist or globalist values, whereas the latter claim that the global justice movements lack the necessary ideological vision for uniting the masses behind a global project for changing the world capitalist system. Alternatively, by drawing on his research project (2002-2006) and examples from the post-GFC uprisings including the Occupy movements in 2012, Hosseini argues that there have been four major parallel trends of ideological changes, dividing the global field of transformative practices between rival camps in terms of their orientations towards cosmopolitanist values. There are however significant potentials for traversing the divisions between the cosmopolitanist camps. Among them is the rise of a new (meta-)ideological vision, coined here transversalism by him. Transversalism assumes the possibility of creating common grounds for dialogue, collective learning or actions among multiple progressive identities and ideological visions in the global field of resistance. It appears in two forms: (1) the extension of any the above mentioned camps to accommodate some of the principles of the other camps, such as regional Bolivarian cooperation between socialist/populist states in Latin America in recent years, or the idea of democratic global Keynesianism that attempts to improve the conditions for democracy within societies by adopting democratically developed international regulations; (2) in the form of independent integrative projects based on pragmatic adoption and combination of transformative practices from the camps, such as Economic Democracy.