Center for Research on Global Social Movement

zapata@sezampro.yu,razsa@fas.harvard.edu, 24.05.2003 15:00

-Eastern European Institute-

> A collective of scholars and activists in the former Yugoslavia are
> founding
> the Center for Research on Global Social Movements that will be a
> site of
> support for and research on the global movement against
> neoliberalism.
> Located at the Faculty of Social Science in Ljubljana, Slovenia, the
> institute will be regional in focus and global in consciousness,
> seeking to
> develop a critical language on global processes in the space of
> south-eastern Europe through an engagement with the new forms of
> knowledge
> and experience produced in the struggles of movements for a
> different
> globalization.
>
> The purposes of the institute as they have been formulated thus far
> reflect
> the needs of the movement as they are most accutely felt in our
> region: 1)
> to link the emerging network of scholars-activists in South-Eastern
> Europe,
> especially but by no means exclusively those from the former
> Yugoslavia 2)
> to link local activists and scholars with the experiences of global
> movements which originate in other world reagions, in other words to
> circumvent the persistant hub and spokes, all roads lead through
> Western
> Europe, channels of movement communication 3) to create a setting in
> which
> the reltionship between the scholars-activists could move beyond the
> simple
> exchange of experiences and informations and towards common
> intelectual and
> political engagement 4) to develop, through this exchange and
> political
> engagement, a new common language that will reflect and enable
> practical
> political interventions built on the new dynamic between local and
> global
> that is caracteristic for the emerging planetary society:
>
> It is our hope that through this common engagement we will be able to
> chart
> a course beyond the reconstituted institutions of the post-socialist
> world
> and the dominance they currently enjoy in our region, i.e. 1.
> discourse and
> practice of building ethnically exclusive nation states; 2.NGO,
> humanitarian, philanthropic discourse and institutions that prepare
> the
> conditions to integrate S-E European societies into the neoliberal
> order.
>
> Towards this end, and with dozens of projects already demanding to
> be
> launched, we invite you to join us in this project in a collaborative
> and
> advisory capacity. It is our hope to create not just a new language
> on
> social movements but the enactment of a new relationship of
> intellectuals to
> social movements, one of collaboration rather than vanguardism and
> service
> rather than parasitism. We begin from the assumption that activists
> frequently understand processes of social and cultural change as well
> as
> relations of power in their society with greater acuity than
> intellectuals
> and that it is from academics who are engaged with the critical,
> reflexive
> praxis of social movements that the most important theoretical
> insights now
> derive. We thus hope that you will join us in contaminating academic
> life
> with the knowledge of the movements.

e-mail:: razsa@fas.harvard.edu,zapata@sezampro.yu