The Making and Unmaking of the Global Social Movements in the Japanese Sixties

Preliminary scholarships in the field of global social movements more or less has been focusing upon successful cases that were able to create alliances with the movements abroad and/or various transnational activities they conducted. However, in order to comprehend the substantial mechanisms of the global movement, investigation of its difficulties and limitations including various obstacles as well as structural and cultural constraints particularly while the social movements attempt to cross national boundaries is decisive. Thus this paper explores, what makes the global practices possible and how it affects the development of global movement through comparing two social movements that aimed to create a cosmopolitan society during the 1960s and 70s in Japan; the Japanese Anti-Vietnam War movement, which created alliance with the movements in the First World western societies and the Japanese New Left that were influenced strongly from the Third World revolutionaries and aimed for global revolution through international hijacking and terrorism. My socio-historical investigation of the movements in the 1960s, which I consider as the beginning of the contemporary global social movements, therefore will reveal the way in which external political factors, differences in terms of network structure and culture as well as capitals, ideology and taste of the activists influence the making and unmaking of transnational actions and thereby shapes the distinct characteristics of the global movements.