Abstract social movement networks in a multicultural world

Abstract

This text explores the empowerment potential of collective actions and social movement networks in Latin American contexts, especially in Brazil, considering their dimensions of solidarity, strategy and critical thought. It highlights some challenges to critical thought: the struggle against fundamentalism, de-construction and decentralization of identities, the defeat of essentialism in favor of inter-culturalism and of the separation of theory and practice in favor of a dialogic engagement in a network. It explores these dimensions on the basis of a typology of relevant empirical cases, in some Latin American countries, from the present historical moment. Finally, it looks at the configurations and changes in social movement networks' during and after the period of military dictatorship, examining the struggles for democratization, for the rights of citizenship and against the process of an exclusionary globalization and for peace.