Blackwell Reference Online

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Global justice movements (GJMs) are a loose alliance of contemporary leftist movements whose common denominator is their resistance to globalizing neoliberalism that promotes free trade, deregulation, and privatization as keys to universal progress. In the eyes of its critics, neoliberalism serves the interests of economic and political elites at the cost of the large majority of the population within, but especially beyond, the most developed countries ( Rucht 2003 ). GJMs identify the driving force of neoliberalism in relentless profit-seeking that causes a plethora of evils, such as violation of human and civil rights, destruction of indigenous cultures, growing unemployment and increasingly precarious jobs, environmental degradation, and the widening gap between the affluent and the poor. According to most mass media, the birth of what they dub the “anti-globalization movement” was marked by the protests of a broad transnational coalition, ranging from left-wing radicals to trade unionists to Catholic associations, against the 1999 summit of the World Trade Organization (WTO) in Seattle. While many groups initially accepted their designation as the anti-globalization movement, they now widely reject it. Rather, they refer to themselves as global justice movements (or global solidarity movements) because, first, they deliberately create transnational networks and organize transnational, ... log in or subscribe to read full text