Chapter 6 Making or unmaking a movement?: Challenges for civic activism in the global governance of migration

In: Rethinking Globalizations

Abstract

This article discusses dilemmas of global civic activism from a neo-Gramscian
perspective as both subordinated and a potential challenge to hegemonic
neoliberal order. With the investigational focus on the People's Global Action
on Migration, Development and Human Rights (PGA) event, the space for
civic activism relating to the intergovernmental Global Forum on Migration
and Development (GFMD) and its associated Civil Society Days and Common
Space is analysed. The article asks how the future of PGA activism may be
influenced by its formalized representation within the GFMD. It posits that
the PGA has landed at a crossroad between becoming a global activist
counterhegemonic movement to a dominant neoliberal migration policy and
being captured in a tokenist subordinated inclusion within a truncated
'invited space' for interchange. This ambiguous position jeopardizes its
impact on global migration governance, discussed with reference to theories
of transversal politics and issues of counterhegemonic alliance-building.