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In response to the recently rising number of academic papers that empirically examine local variances in China’s Belt and Initiative (BRI) projects in various foreign lands, this paper points out the tension between attempts to theorize BRI projects. The Sino-localized approach and the assemblage theory were the two main attempts used by scholars from disparate academic disciplines to conceptualize local agency and to understand how local conditionalities, practices, and norms may affect the outcome of BRI projects. We need to examine their differences and similarities, and determine whether they are really irreconcilable. In addition, how their ontological differences lead to epistemological, methodological and analytical differences in studying BRI projects should be clarified as well.

This paper investigates the entanglements of waste infrastructures and harm in the wider Athens region. It focuses on Fyli landfill, which is currently the only formal waste management facility to serve the entire region. Associated with pollution, privatization, and allegations of corruption, the landfill has been formative of differential modes of uncertainty, interruption, and (in)visibility. By paying attention to the infrastructural contestation surrounding Fyli landfill, we conceptualize waste infrastructures as techno-political devices that engender harm. Our paper, first, examines the ways in which the spatio-temporal modalities of harm play out within this context, and secondly, rethinks modes of contestation and (in)visibility in relation to urban infrastructures. It argues that thinking through harm further elaborates the complex enmeshment between spatio-temporal and moral dynamics of infrastructures and forms of disruption, accountability, and participation. Hence, while we rethink waste infrastructures through harm, we also attend to the infrastructural codifications of harm.

This paper looks at the experiences, vulnerabilities and contributions of womenhealth workers during Covid 19 pandemic in India. It elaborates upon theireveryday struggles and issues including incidences of violence against them,poor wages, temporariness of their jobs and other labour rights. The paperfurther discusses the transitioning characteristics of women health workersin the context of corporate globalization in India. The paper offers a criticalreading of health worker’s rights from a feminist perspective and raises thechallenges and opportunities the pandemic provides in rethinking the roleof women health workers in India and women welfare workers in general.

Soon after independence, Kazakhstan established the state-sponsored student mobility programme ‘Bolashak’, which has since provided almost 12,000 young people with full scholarships for their studies abroad. Bolashak is considered here as a multidimensional tool, promoting development and channelling authoritarian rule at the same time. Through a series of qualitative interviews with alumni of the programme, this paper investigates the authoritarian and paternalistic features in Bolashak-related policies and discourses, looking at how they contribute to the three ‘pillars’ of authoritarian stability: repression, co-optation and legitimation. The findings of this paper question the assumption that globalization is bringing only challenges to autocracies. Kazakhstan is an example of how contemporary authoritarian regimes may open up to the world in order to seek development as well as political stability.

This paper explores how a deeply embedded norm can be used to exert power and control in the governance of distributed infrastructures, such as the Internet. Through the lens of norm conflict, I analyse a case of resistance against the introduction of norms in the transnational governance of Internet routing. In a mixed-methods case study, I examine through an experiment how a community of network operators resists the introduction of data protection and human rights norms in the Internet routing infrastructure. To provide a possible explanation as to how a prevalent and deeply embedded norm enables the resistance to the introduction of new norms, I develop the notion of ‘infrastructural norms’. This concept could help explain why Internet infrastructure governance thus far has largely defied national and international democratic norms. The understanding of how norms are used in infrastructure governance contributes to the study of power in large technical systems.

The recent emergence of ‘transnational business feminism’ [Roberts, A. (2014). The political economy of ‘transnational business feminism’. International Feminist Journal of Politics, 17(2), 209–231] accompanied by numerous ‘transnational business initiatives for the governance of gender’ [Prügl, E., & True, J. (2014). Equality means business? Governing gender through transnational public–private partnerships. Review of International Political Economy, 21(6), 1137–1169] constitutes a significant area of debate in the feminist political economy literature. In this paper I focus on the confluence of the corporate social responsibility (CSR) agenda with the visibility of gender issues in development and the resultant corporate agenda for the promotion of women and girls’ empowerment. The paper draws on two gender-focused World Bank collaborations with private sector actors: the Global Private Sector Leaders Forum and the Girl Effect campaign. The paper argues that the dominant model of corporate citizenship inscribed within the discourse of transnational business initiatives is framed in terms of capitalizing on the potential power of girls and women, achieving an easy convergence between gender equality and corporate profit. I suggest that the construction of an unproblematic synergy between these goals serves to moralize corporate-led development interventions and therefore does not challenge corporate power in the development process, but instead allows corporations to subscribe to voluntary, non-binding codes and cultivate a socially conscious brand image.

This paper discusses the measurement of globalization with a view to advancing the construction of globalization indices. It critically analyzes the types of indices that can contribute to knowledge and policy on globalization. Three issues are particularly highlighted: (a) the focus of measurement (i.e. on activities or policies); (b) the dimensions of measurement (i.e. cultural, ecological, economic, political, and/or social); and (c) the units of measurement (i.e. local, national, regional, and/or global). This paper argues that a workable forward strategy should not seek to identify the single best composite globalization index, but rather should work in an interdisciplinary mode towards a set of complementary globalization indices. These quantitative analyses can then be productively blended with qualitative approaches in a fuller assessment of globalization's extent and impact.

This paper draws on antenarrative research and writing techniques to analyse the long-running transnational campaign seeking to improve respect for human rights in the supply chains of Nike and other major sportswear companies. The antenarrative approach challenges scholars to look beyond pre-existing expectations, both in terms of which actors and processes are likely to be most influential and in terms of what is motivating participation in those processes which are significant. In this paper we construct antenarrative accounts of two aspects of the Nike campaign and counterpoint each of our antenarratives with an established scholarly account based on more traditional narrative approaches. We conclude antenarrative analysis can provide useful insights into interaction between global activist networks and global corporations, particularly by drawing attention to the generative possibilities of the complex combination of ordered and disordered processes which often characterise that interaction.

Development, in an age of globalizations, has indeed become a global project. However, this project remains contested and contestable. While much attention has been given to this contestation at a macro-policy level, the dynamics of such contestations on the ground remain less studied. Noting that development projects, policies and programs are themselves products of power relations and social struggles, this paper focuses on the dynamics of these relations and struggles in relation to the dissemination of the global development project in Malawi. Drawing from the experiences and fractious journey from 2000 to 2006 of the broad-based civil society network involved in Malawi's ongoing PRSP process, the paper shows how local actors draw creatively on globalized discourses of participation and representation to contest and confound the objectives of the elites, thereby complicating the channels through which the global development project is promulgated. El desarrollo en la era de la globalizacion, se ha con...

Unfree labour has been central to the Indian tea industry’s ‘business model’ since its establishment under British colonial rule. In this paper, we investigate forms of unfree labour in south Indian tea plantations based on a mixed methods study. Conceptualizing unfree labour in a multi-dimensional way our analysis brings to the fore how economic and social coercions that work on tea workers’ desire to guarantee their household’s daily and generational reproduction enable companies to control workers’ time, that way facilitating profit making in the global tea industry. Gender ideologies and hierarchies normalize these coercions for women workers. They translate into gendered obstacles to exit plantation employment and lead to long working hours for low pay. At the same time, we show that the desire of women and men to secure their families’ present and future livelihood also triggers and fuels unfree workers’ resistance.

This paper explores the extraordinary symbolic resonance of Silicon Valley in global cultures. Through a case study examining a large electronic corpus of French newspaper articles (2014-2019), we demonstrate the extent to which the Californian tech hub’s reputation has been repurposed worldwide, probing in particular metaphorical uses of its name in descriptions of countless other places around the globe. Harnessing the explanatory power of Foucault’s concept of heterotopia, our analysis reveals how comparing a site to Silicon Valley carries a variety of discursive functions as a tool of political and commercial rhetoric with tangible advantages in a globalized setting. Uses of Silicon Valley to evoke a more prosperous future are, however, contested in the corpus, most visibly in interviews with political philosopher Eric Sadin. We argue that Silicon Valley as heterotopia thus reflects and reconfigures both our highest hopes and deepest fears amid the unsettling upheaval of the digital age.

It is commonly assumed that far-right populist and nationalist movements and parties emerge within, and in reaction to, liberal international orders. This paper challenges that assumption. It shows...

This paper investigates the politics of refugee arrival and integration at urban level in Germany following the migration influx in summer 2015. How have cities redefined themselves? How have newco...

This paper investigates how practices of (de)legitimation deal with regime overlaps by invoking the convergence or collision of norms, rules and procedures in regime complexes. It brings together t...

This paper explores the competition and interrelationship between a cooperative approach to protection of refugees pursued through the United Nations – one that seeks to ‘leave no one behind’ – and...

In this brief commentary we provide some parallel points to complement Steve Keen’s paper in the recent Globalization’s special forum on ‘Economics and Climate Emergency’. Keen’s critique of climate and economy Integrated Assessment Models (IAMs) is wide-ranging, but there is still scope to bring to the fore the general issues that help to make sense of the critique. Accordingly, we set out six key inadequacies of IAMs and argue towards the need for a different approach that is more realistic regarding the limits to growth.

This paper is based on the question as to whether humanity is now for, rather than simply in, itself. This issue is of particular significance at this time for two major reasons. First, there is th...

This paper makes three arguments. First, it provides an embryonic blueprint for ‘reglobalization’ by crystallizing the insights of the special issue. We can and should build a better globalization ...

With fires, storms, social protests and climate strikes sweeping the world, 2019 should have been a tipping point in how the world responds to global heating. This was the backdrop to the COP25 climate change summit which took place in Madrid in December 2019. This paper assesses the outcomes of the meeting and the path towards the critically important meeting in Glasgow at the end of 2020. It analyses and explains the key points of contention over levels of ambition, the rules which should govern global carbon markets and sensitive issues such as loss and damage associated with the impacts of climate change. The analysis is situated within a broader geopolitical and economic context of right-wing populism, deepening forms of marketisation and financialisation of responses to climate change and against a background of a world increasingly feeling the effects of the climate crisis.

This paper contributes to debates on left-wing convergence by reflecting on the convergence of a diverse transnational peasant movement around a value of and demand for food sovereignty. It reads c...

The illicit drug crops opium and coca are conventionally regarded as sources of instability, an ‘evil’ that breeds fragility and violence. Fragile states are supposed to be most vulnerable to their production and consequent harms. Yet by looking into the local contexts of the world’s leading opium and coca producers – Afghanistan, Myanmar, Colombia and Bolivia – these illicit crops are found to also be sources of stability, even drivers of economic growth. They enable marginalized communities and territories abandoned by the state to be reinserted into national and global markets. Within so-called ‘fragile’ and conflict-affected areas are displaced and dispossessed households adopting innovative and unorthodox strategies for coping and survival in changing and insecure environments. This paper maps out an approach, useful for examining the resilience that has emerged amidst violence and uncertainty in illicit-crop-producing territories, and which can hopefully tackle the continuing disconnect between drugs and development policy.

This special issue of Globalizations builds the case across a diverse group of papers that law is in need of decolonization, especially law systems structuring settler-colonial societies. This is b...

The global food system has severe implications for human health, soil quality, biodiversity, and quality of life. This paper provides an analysis on how transnational alliances challenge the global food system. We illustrate this byfocusing on the activities and hearings of the International Monsanto Tribunal (IMT), held in the Hague in 2016. The IMT provided a platform for civil society and enabled transnational alliances to demand attention for local struggles and legal disputes in relation to Monsanto’s products. With the involvement of independent and renowned experts, the knowledge exchange between local victims and civil society was enhanced, and the IMT reinforced social movement’s goals towards demanding justice for the negative effects associated with the global food system. The advisory opiniondetermined that Monsanto’s practices are in violation with human rights standards. The IMT exemplified that there is an immediate need for structural change in the current global food system.

If globalization is conceived as an outcome of negotiations between places and relational processes, how do researchers capture such amorphous complexity? Drawing upon the framework of assemblage theory this paper unpicks the plethora of processes and practices encompassed within the problematic term ‘globalization’. Focusing on the ‘banal’ object of a can of Fanta, we demonstrate how this exists in an assemblage which maintains coherence across space (i.e. is universally recognizable) yet is spatially differentiated in its components. Shedding light on how these processes coalesce in place we argue for the acknowledgement of the ‘ubiquitous’ in making place and the importance of difference in underpinning the ‘global’.

In his essay, “It is imperative to reconstruct the Internationale of workers and peoples”, Samir Amin (2018) suggested that in order to “deconstruct the extreme centralization of wealth and the power that is associated with the [capitalist world] system”, we should seriously study “the experience of the worker Internationales [...], even if they belong to the past. This should be done, not in order to ‘choose’ a model among them, but to invent the most suitable form for contemporary conditions.” In this paper, I will follow Amin’s (2018) suggestion and provide a brief examination of the past experiences of first Internationales in the nineteenth century and conditions that produced them with an eye to the present moment. By comparing the political climate of the early twenty-first century to analogous comparable periods in world history, I will argue that today we need two distinct forms of global political organizations that are modeled after the International Workingmen’s Association and the Communist League. First one should serve as a horizontal “movement of movements” that would reflect the spontaneous and creative energy of mass movements from below; the second one should serve as a hierarchically organized world communist party.

This paper will attempt to rethink Samir Amin's concept of delinking in terms of selective delinking and selective engagement. The notion of delinking is perhaps Samir Amin's most distinctive contr...

This paper analyses how the fates of different peripheral localities (Emsland, Gütersloh, and Lippe in Germany) were linked to the outside world in the course of the seventeenth to twentieth centuries. In the first centuries, these localities' translocal relations with the world economy were dominated by relations with the Netherlands. Later the German context became more important for these translocal relations and development. But this paper shows that there are underlying continuities in local developments from the era before the rise of the nation states through to the current era of relative de-nationalisation and globalisation. This paper shows that local development very much depends on the local ability to ‘link up’ with development corridors, sometimes through seasonal labour migration, but also through trade and other relations. Long-term development trajectories also show how local autonomy can obstruct development. Regional development policies and private sector behaviour are also crucial. All these cases show that translocal development is regionally based and embedded in social and political contexts and decisions.

The ‘meatification’ of human diets has been subject to increasing scholarly attention in recent years, along with its many impacts. While the rapidly expanding meatification in many Asian countries has been noted, the geographies of these processes have been left largely unexplored. This paper maps the changing geographies of meat with special focus on Southeast Asia. We use Tony Weis’ concept of ‘the industrial grain-oilseed-livestock complex’ to analyse how forms of systemic meatification are taking place in Asia. We map and analyse regional trends in meat production and consumption, as well as trade patterns in meat products and dominant feed crops. We argue that the regional meat complex emerges through increasingly regional development processes and capital, as well as through new South-South connections. The geographies of meatification in Southeast Asia thus constitute an empirical manifestation of the emerging multipolarity of the global food regime.

Does exile affect activism and if so how? In this paper, the case of Egyptian activists exiled in England is taken as illustrative of processes typical of exiled activism. The case study dr...

In the midst of a growing global market for migrant care work, there is a need to investigate not only how such labour is consumed but how ‘ideal’ care workers are also produced. This paper...

This paper argues that past research has overlooked how the way problems and solutions are framed contribute to a prevailing gap in the global governance of climate and energy. Empirically, this pa...

There is widespread recognition that neoliberal rhetoric about ‘free markets’ stands in considerable tension with ‘really existing’ neoliberalizing processes. However, the oft-utilized analytical distinction between ‘pure’ economic and political theory and ‘messy’ empirical developments takes for granted that neoliberalism, at its core, valorizes free markets. In contrast, the paper explores whether neoliberal intellectuals ever made such an argument. Using Friedrich Hayek and Milton Friedman as exemplars, our reading of canonical neoliberal texts focuses on author framing gestures, particular understandings of the term ‘science’, techniques of characterization, and constructions of epistemological legitimacy. This enables us to avoid the trap of assuming that these texts are about free markets and instead enquires into their constitution as literary artefacts. As such, we argue that the remaking of states and households rather than the promotion of free markets is at the core of neoliberalism. Our analysis has significant implications. For example, it means that authoritarian neoliberalism is not a departure from but actually more in line with the ‘pure’ neoliberal canon than in the past. Therefore, neoliberalism ought to be critiqued not for its rhetorical promotion of free markets but instead for seeking to reorganize societies in coercive, non-democratic and unequal ways. This also enables us to acknowledge that households are central to resistance to neoliberalism as well as to the neoliberal worldview itself.

Coronavirus (COVID-19) policy shut down the world economy with a range of government actions unprecedented outside of wartime. In this paper, economic systems dominated by a capital accumulating growth imperative are shown to have had their structural weaknesses exposed, revealing numerous problems including unstable supply chains, unjust social provisioning of essentials, profiteering, precarious employment, inequities and pollution. Such phenomena must be understood in the context of long standing critiques relating to the limits of economic systems, their consumerist values and divorce from biophysical reality. Critical reflection on the Coronavirus pandemic is combined with a review of how economists have defended economic growth as sustainable, Green and inclusive regardless of systemic limits and multiple crises – climate emergency, economic crash and pandemic. Instead of rebuilding the old flawed political economy again, what the world needs now is a more robust, just, ethical and equitable social-ecological economy.

Digital communication technologies have given dissidents from authoritarian contexts better opportunities to pursue political activism from exile. After the exit from their home country, activists stay involved in domestic debates and channel politically relevant information to international audiences, building up external pressure on the regime. Yet, at the same time, digital media and social networks create multiple points of exposure that state actors can exploit. Using the case of Iran, this paper shows how digital communication technologies enable new and influence established tactics of state repression beyond borders. Based on interviews with Iranian activists and journalists who were forced to leave the country after the controversial elections of 2009, I analyze mechanisms and aims of repressive measures targeting exiled dissidents. I argue that in an environment of intense transnational communication and information exchange, authoritarian regimes can monitor and respond to the activities of political exiles rapidly and on a large scale. State actors seek to undermine the links of exiles into the country (horizontal voice) as well as to punish claims to public attention that challenge the regime’s position in the domestic and international arenas (vertical voice). With these measures, authorities pursue a parallel strategy: expanding authoritarian power and practices beyond borders while distancing political exiles from contacts in the home country.

This paper argues that a class against capital emerged in Guangdong province between 2007 and 2014. I base my arguments on data drawn from significant strikes in the province and the processes of collective bargaining that partially resolved them. I observe that the formation of a working class against capital in Guangdong, made up primarily of migrant workers, has at least partially overcome fragmentary pressures it continues to face. I argue that it is the self-activity of workers themselves that is chiefly responsible for the significant improvement in wages and, to a lesser extent, working conditions that unfolded during this period. While collective bargaining remains mostly—but not exclusively—outside institutional norms, workers’ agency pushed the practical application of forms of collective bargaining on to both the political and labour relations agenda in Guangdong and beyond. Continued pressure from below will keep it there.

By examining the contradictions in China’s model of growth and the shifting dynamics of its place in the global division of labour, the aim of this paper is to understand the tensions in the class relations that underpin the Chinese ‘success story’. The theoretical lens will be that of uneven and combined development. The notion of ‘combined’ informs the way in which China’s integration with global capitalism and global circuits of capital has been a major source of its meteoric growth, but has increased its economic vulnerability, particularly after the 2008 crisis. The element of unevenness explores the differentiation between and within sectors and regions, and the way that the inherent dynamics of equalisation and differentiation, and the role of labour within these processes, underpin the dynamics of China’s insertion into the global divisions of labour.

© 2016 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group In this paper, I set out some of the key aspects of the Paris COP 21 Climate Change Agreement. The Paris Agreement was initially reported as a major success. However, this was in so far as many thought any kind of agreement at all was unlikely, and because the Agreement includes Article 2: an aspiration to maintain average global temperature increases to significantly less than 2°C. I then ask the question: if the Paris Agreement is a success of sorts, has anything fundamental changed in order to translate the conditional success of achieving an agreement into an actual success that will realise the goals of the Agreement? I address this in terms of early assessment of trends and the Nationally Determined Contributions, how responsibility is positioned in the Agreement, and the political economy context, which has called forth the need for an agreement.

This article questions the continuing invisibility of the significant scale of the involvement of women in historical movements/moments. The focus is on Mahatma Gandhi-led Civil Disobedience movement (1930–1933), which was a historic turning point enabling the political involvement of masses of women in South Asia. Using an individual narrative, multi-archival research, and secondary literature survey, this article contends that the thriving subaltern and feminist historical traditions have had limited impact on historical ‘gender mainstreaming’. Furthermore, the paper argues that revealing the diverse nature and the substantial scale of women's involvement in social/political change is important for two reasons: firstly, it contributes to a fuller understanding of history and, secondly, because historical research is essential for contemporary policy-making. Reclaiming the role of ordinary women in disparate history writing traditions thus can be a tool to understand and counter persistent gender...

The influence of neoliberalism on culture and subjectivity is well documented. This paper contributes to understanding of how neoliberal ideology enters into the production of subjectivity. While subject formation takes place in multiple and contradictory ways and across multiple social sites, we focus on the increasingly popular media discourse of self-development, and examine it as a technology of neoliberal subjectification. Drawing on Foucauldian understandings, we analyze data from two different newspapers from two different national contexts, both of which are heavily influenced by neoliberalism. Based on our analysis, we detail four interrelated discourses—rationality, autonomy and responsibility, entrepreneurship, and positivity and self-confidence—demonstrating how these discourses constitute the neoliberal subject in ways consonant with neoliberal governmentality. There is no observable resistance to subject positions offered within these discourses. Self-development discourse instills s...

Malaysian government planning and policy-making have increasingly come to recognise the role of women and the household in the promotion of a number of strategies aimed at enhancing economic competitiveness. Government planning documents emphasise the need to boost women's labour market participation, increase women's levels of entrepreneurship, and the need to strengthen and support the family unit—developments that can be understood in terms of a market-building agenda in which women's labour and the household are viewed as untapped resources in the struggle to maintain international competitiveness. This article explores an important dimension of this policy turn: the role of civil society in both promoting and resisting this market-building agenda. The paper focuses in particular on two case studies: religious non-governmental organisations involved in implementing ‘family strengthening’ programmes and civil society engagements with the issue of women's representation on corporate

In recent years masculinity studies writers, in particular R. W. Connell, have focused on the relationship between globalization and ‘hegemonic’ forms of masculinity. This paper provides an assessment of this scholarship and argues that whilst Connell and others have usefully identified the gendered nature of globalization, masculinity scholars have also provided a somewhat limiting account of the global hegemonic role of a monolithic top-down ‘transnational business masculinity’. By contrast, we suggest a demassification of this notion of hegemonic masculinity. Such a demassification enables the opening up of a dialogue between masculinity studies and feminist and other critical globalization scholars, allowing for a more nuanced analysis that can attend to both the unevenness of globalization in different settings and more detailed awareness of interactions between global and local/cultural/state imperatives. Our aim here is to move away from conceptualizations of globalization and hegemonic masculinity...

This article aims for a critical engagement with the new spaces for social movement politics. Recent literature focusing on the relationship between globalization and these spaces foregrounds the new opportunity structures for political practices. Yet amid talk of ‘grassroots globalization’ and ‘globalization from below’, it is important to remain sensitive to how certain forms of practice and organization, particularly those of labor unions, are marginalized within the political spaces of globalization. This paper investigates how the political spaces of globalization shaped the nationalization of gas resources in Bolivia. Nationalization was achieved by new social movements partly negotiating within political spaces opened by globalization. Yet the interests and demands of labor unions were significantly marginalized in implementation. ‘Actually existing’ nationalization can best be described as a pragmatic renegotiation of contracts, in response to a dual pressure from new social movements and from eco...

Some of the first images rapidly circulated globally in news media of the London Bombings on 7 July 2005 were taken by non-journalists using mobile camera phones. This paper explores some of the ethical issues raised by mobile phone witnessing in the ‘war on terror’. The article uses a performative approach to witnessing in which mobile testimony is seen in terms of performances and speech acts between different parties, including mute witnesses, the survivor witness and the witness(es) to the survivor (s). The approach enables us to see the significance of global mobilities and mobilizations in relation to ethics and mobile witnessing, rather than focusing only the ethics associated with the discrete mobile witness image itself. The article examines some of the global virtual traces and data trajectories on the World Wide Web associated with a mobile camera phone image taken by a witness survivor, Adam Stacey in the 7 July 2005 London Bombings. This suggests that mobile witnessing involves a fluid and tr...

This paper argues that contemporary child and youth experiences of globalization call for retheorizing global justice around a new concept of empowered inclusion. The first part of the paper examin ...

This paper uses Freirean theory and field studies of counter-globalist campaigns to add greater lucidity and normative deliberateness to our understanding of resistance to neoliberal globalism. A difficult tension exists between complete submersion in movement struggles, versus a mythical position of objective analytic detachment. We sketch out the basis for a productive dialogue between these two competing pulls of political engagement and analytic objectivity. To do this, we draw from the writings of Paulo Freire, a Brazilian thinker famous for his theories of popular education. Freire's writings have not seriously entered academic studies of globalization, even though activists in the 'globalization-frombelow' camp frequently draw on his words for inspiration. We seek to remedy this omission, and construct a dialogue between Freire and social movement struggles on four dualisms centred on epistemology, normativity, methodology and strategy. In each dualism, we outline how Freirean concepts can help redefine these binaries as productive tensions to be developed, rather than conflicts to be suppressed. These insights are not intended as a theoretical injunctive delivered from upon high, but are used in dialogue with examples from global justice campaigns in order to clarify what is already taking place on the ground. Identifying Freirean priorities can also encourage openings for more emancipatory approaches to critical globalization scholarship. While academics cannot engineer resistance to neo-liberal globalism from the top down, they can contribute their research energy and resources, becoming more actively engaged in the process of envisaging alternatives. © 2006 Taylor & Francis.