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Social movements are experts in telling compelling stories. Engaged in political and cultural conflicts, social movements’ central strength is to challenge existing perspectives on reality and propose new ones. Narratives play a central role in this as a good story can convince us that something is wrong, that it needs to be addressed immediately and that it requires a specific solution. A...

Since the ‘cultural turn’ in social...

Observers have often identified the ‘Battle of Seattle’ as the Global Justice Movement’s (GJM) founding moment. However, as the quote above illustrates, opinions about the movement’s starting point diverge among GJM activists. Perspectives on the GJM’s central events and actors differ depending on whose GJM story one looks at, as this first empirical chapter will...

Do activists tell similar stories about the GJM beyond country- and sector-specific differences? This is the question this chapter addresses. Hence, in contrast to the previous chapter, this second empirical chapter explores the commonalities rather than differences in activists’ GJM narratives across countries and sectors. Examining such shared narrative patterns provides crucial insights...

How important is telling a particular story about the GJM to building and maintaining movement identity? As the previous chapter showed, activists share a specific ‘GJM narrative’ across sectors and countries which delineates the GJM’s shared frames, boundaries and emotional proximity. This chapter will underline the connection between this shared narrative and GJM identity by...

Most social movements bring together a diverse crowd and require activists to work across considerable differences in sociocultural backgrounds, political traditions and organisational routines. In order to understand how activist cooperation works despite such diversity, it is important to explore how commonalities are created across differences. Activists’ collective actions and continued...

This book developed in many different places, with interview locations ranging from abandoned bunkers to bustling campaign offices and cozy living rooms, and with countless hours spent in libraries and offices in Berlin, Florence, Frankfurt, London and Warsaw. But above all, this effort was made possible by the support of numerous people. My first thanks go to the many activists who took the time...

Table AppA.1 List of Interviews and Focus Groups by Country, Interview Date, and Sector

Table AppB.1 List of Selected GJM Publications by Countrya

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agency of GJM: