Rethinking Social Movements and Territorial Struggles in Latin America

This book analyzes and discusses recent reconfigurations in Latin America’s social movements, as innovative forms of political experimentation emerge to counter new threats.

Latin America has had a strong presence of social movements throughout its modern history; in the last thirty years, profound societal changes such as globalization, digitalization, and individualization have given rise to new subjects and modalities of collective action that contest neoliberalism. This book demonstrates the ways in which socio-environmental challenges across the continent are generating a plurality of social, community, territorial, ecological, ethnic, racial, and eco-feminist movements, with decolonial and cosmopolitan perspectives. This book explores various continuities, ruptures, and changes in the political languages, political ontologies, repertoires, and forms of organization being used by social movements, eco-feminist and Indigenous organizations, and environmentalists across the continent, as well as changes in relations between social movements and the state.

Putting forward new understandings of social struggles and societal alternatives, anchored in the territories in dispute, this book will be an important read for researchers across the fields of political science, global development studies, environmental politics, gender studies, and political sociology.