1st Edition
People Power in an Era of Global Crisis Rebellion, Resistance and Liberation
A quarter of a century has now passed since the historic popular uprising that led to the overthrow of the Ferdinand Marcos dictatorship in the Philippines. The mass movement known as the "People’s Power Revolution" was not only pivotal to the democratic transition within the Philippines, but it also became an inspiration for subsequent mass movements leading to further democratic transitions throughout the Third World and in the former Communist bloc in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union. However, the neoliberal economic policies subsequently pursued by newly democratic governments throughout the Third World led all but the most celebratory observers to note the constrained and limited nature of these formal political transitions. This volume poses the question of the extent to which ‘people’s power’ has been able to play an active role resisting neoliberalism and deepen substantive democracy and social justice. Through a series of case studies of the regions and individual countries of Asia, Africa, Latin America and Eastern Europe, the contributions in the volume provide a new set of original and in-depth critical assessments of the nature of the longer-term impact of the democratic transitions commencing in the 1980s and continuing until the present, and questioning their impact and potential influence on human dignity, freedom, justice, and self-determination, and thus opening new avenues of enquiry into the future of democracy.
This book was originally published as a special issue of Third World Quarterly.
1. People’s Power and the Globalisation of Democracy, Kevin Gray, University of Sussex and Barry Gills, Newcastle University.
2. People’s Power Redux, Joel Rocamora.
3. South African People's Power since the mid-1980s: Two steps forward, one back, Patrick Bond, University of Kwazulu Natal.
4. Dilemmas of New Democracy in the Age of Neoliberal Globalization: The Case of South Korea, Kwang-Yeong Shin, Chungang University.
5. People’s power and the struggle for social democracy in Latin America, Henry Veltmeyer, St Mary’s University.
6. How did democracy lose its Green? Taiwan’s democratization and its social content, Hsin-Hsing Chen, Shih-Hsin University.
7. Reconstructing ‘popular power’: The ALBA-PTA and the regionalisation of "revolutionary democracy, Thomas Muhr, Bristol University.
8. Competing Ideologies of Representation in Southeast Asia, Garry Rodan, Murdoch University.
9. Beyond free markets and liberal democracy: the quest for an ‘emanicipatory’ Pan-African democratic project, Fantu Cheru, The Nordic Africa Institute.
10. Populism, regressive nationalism, and the limits to neoliberalism? Contradiction and paradox in Poland’s post-communist transformation, Stuart Shields, Manchester.
11. Iraq: Formal Democratisation and Popular Challenge, Kamil Mahdi.
Biography
Barry K Gills is Professor of Development Studies, University of Helsinki, Finland. He is sole or joint editor of a number of edited volumes including The Global Politics of Globalization: ‘Empire’ vs. ‘Cosmopolis’; Globalization and the Global Politics of Justice; and Globalization and Global History. He is also editor of Routledge journal Globalizations.
Kevin Gray is Lecturer in International Relations at the University of Sussex, UK. He is author of Korean Workers and Neoliberal Globalisation (London: Routledge, 2008) and a number of scholarly articles on the political economy of East Asia.
