Crisis, Movement, Management ─ Globalising Dynamics

Globalised neo-liberalism has produced multiple crises – social, ecological, political. In the past, crises of global order have generated large-scale social transformations, and the current crises likewise hold a transformative promise. Social movements become a crucial barometer, in signalling both the demise and rise of political formations and programs. Elite strategies, framed as crisis management, create their own disordering side-effects. Experiments in movement strategy gain greater significance, as do contending elite efforts at repressing, managing or displacing the fall-out. In this book we investigate both movements and management in the face of crisis, taking crisis and unanticipated consequences as a normal state-of-play. The book enquires into the winners and losers from crisis, and investigates the movement-management nexus as it unfolds in particular localities as well as in broader contexts.

The book deals with some of the most pressing conflicts of our time, and produces a range of theoretical insights: the ubiquity of crisis is seen as not only a hallmark of social life, but a way into a different kind of social analysis.

This book was published as a special issue of Globalizations.

James Goodman researches social movements and globalization with a focus on global justice and climate change. He is coauthor ofJustice Globalism: Ideology, Crises, Policy (Sage 2013) Disorder and the Disinformation Society, andClimate Upsurge: An Ethnography of Climate Movement Politics (both Routledge 2013).

Jonathan Paul Marshall is an anthropologist who primarily focuses on issues of technology, society and disorder. He is author ofLiving on Cybermind: Categories, Communication and Control (Peter Lang) and co-author ofDisorder and the Disinformation Society (Routledge 2013).