Contentious Politics and the Global South

Referring to new challenges in the study of contemporary social movements, Tarrow claims that “To the extent to which we have allowed the examples of civil Western movements from 1960s to shape our models, we will not be able to understand them” (2011). The author refers to ethnic wars and terrorist movements, in particular Islamist groups; other movements from the Global South rarely appear as empirical applications of the framework Contentious Politics, but never in the role of challenging it to revisions like Islamists. The thesis of a movement society in two trends, a more contained in the "West", and a more transgressive in the "Rest", leaves out many issues around which movements in the Latin America have been contending.

However, attempts to explain the particularities of Latin American social movements has led to the development of specific theories, treating the region as sui generis (Costa 2010). Thus, in the analytical openness and systematic character of the framework on Contentious Politics lie its main virtues: it invites for dialogue and results in a collective process of knowledge construction. It has a serious limitation for that purpose, as Bringel (2011) objects: instead of its claimed epistemological turn, "Contentious Politics" is an ontological movement, a change on what to study (action and structure, relational dynamics by mechanisms and processes). The epistemological turn is yet to come, by the incorporation of epistemologies from the Global South.

This paper attempts to contribute to this challenge, based on claims raised by Latin American scholars and movements, organized in five elements: the spatiality of contentious politics, in particular subaltern strategies of place based identity building; the commodification and the coloniality of knowledge; the potential of contemporary peasant and indigenous movements; the social question as a cross-cutting issue; legal mobilization based on non-individualist conceptions of rights.