Latin America - [03/13/2009]

Europe-Latin America: the approaches of social movements since the 1970s

On 12 March, Camille Goinard (Institut d’Etudes Politiques (IEP)-Lille, France) presented her study “Europe-Latin America: the approaches of social movements since the 1970s”.

Through a comparative analysis of the viewpoints adopted by social sciences on both sides of the Atlantic, the author highlighted the fact that in Latin America the emphasis on the rise of social movements was on the values, identities and sociology of the subject; in contrast, European and North American academia placed the stress on theories of collective action and models of the mobilisation of these movements' resources. The author made the point that the sociological analysis of social mobilisations is crucial to an understanding of the roots, institutionalisation and the process of professionalisation of this phenomenon in Latin America. She also stressed that the new social movements that are multiplying in the region are coming into being in a context of democratisation and the trans-nationalisation of social networks; they are more organised and ideological, their demands are values-based, and they are heterogeneous in composition, since they do not represent one single social class. Their high degree of autonomy, though it can often be interpreted as a weakness, may in contrast represent a positive value and a strategy for achieving their demands. Thus Goinard stressed that in a new Latin American sociopolitical context, new approaches need to be devised in order to understand the social movements in the region.

The guest commentator, Gemma Ubasart (UAB-IGOB, Institute of Government and Public Policy), emphasised the importance of the speaker's study as a starting point to consolidate the sociological studies of social movements in Spain, a country in which the subject area has not been examined in any great depth.