Conveners
- Prof. Bernadette Andreosso-O’Callaghan and Dr. Frédéric Royall, Department of Economics, Euro-Asia Centre/ Department of Languages and Cultural Studies University of Limerick, Ireland
- Prof. Fan Hong, Irish Institute of Chinese Studies, University College Cork, Ireland
Venue: University of Limerick, Limerick, Ireland
Date: May 27, 2010
Objectives
The organizers wish to organise an international conference at the University of Limerick (Ireland) in 27-29 May 2010. The conference, provisionally entitled “Economic/Social Exclusion and Collective Action – Asia and Europe Compared”, will compare and contrast examples of social exclusion and the responses by civil society in Europe and Asia. It is expected that 30 papers will be presented.
Conference dissemination activities include:
- Book: Springer Verlag (Heidelberg, Germany) has expressed an interest in publishing a selection of the Limerick conference papers in book form. Proposed manuscript submission date – spring 2011 (documentation available if required).
- Journal special editions: Proposals to be submitted to the Journal of Asian Studies, to Asia Europe Journal and to the Journal of International and Area Studies in Spring 2010
- Post-graduate lecture series: University of Limerick, 2010-11 academic year.
Description of topic
Since Alain Peyrefitte published his now classic book in 1973 (Quand la Chine s’関eillera/ When China Awakens) major social, economic and political changes have taken place in China and in a number of its Asian neighbours. Economic change, without a commensurate political change, has brought about a number of unexpected economic and social consequences: increasing income disparity, unemployment, poverty, social inequality, rural-urban migration, Spartan working conditions, etc. The levels of poverty and social exclusion vary considerably from country to country and social and economic inequality often is linked to specific local/national conditions. However, these issues present major challenges for many developing Asian countries today and very visible signs of discontent and/or of political contention are becoming increasingly common.
To the western scholar, the collective action of the economically disadvantaged in Asia raises a number of key questions. For example, what theoretical approaches may best account for the emergence and the development of “poor” people’s movements? Can the theoretical approaches that have been used to a very great extent to discuss western movements be applied to the case of Asian movements? Do these movements jeopardize, or alternatively, do they reinforce economic growth in the various countries? How can the movements be compared from one group or issue field to another, or from country to country? What are the social, cultural and economic profiles of the people that participate in these movements? What effects or impact do these movements have or have had? Is political contention a consequence of a rise in grievances? Are there contagion effects or is there connectivity between the two regions of the world under study (i.e. Asia and Europe)?
The conference’s main objective is therefore to compare and to contrast the research tools and dominant paradigms in the social and economic sciences and, in particular, to assess the ways the mobilisation of specific groups have been analysed across the two regions. These are groups that can be broadly defined as having rather distant ties with political institutions. We wish to see if (classical) social movement approaches truly account for the various characteristics of “poor” people’s movements, or whether the approaches should or could be amended and redefined according to specific fields of study.
In short, the conference will address three key questions:
1. What is the sociology of the “poor” people that mobilise in Europe and in Asia? The objective here is to profile social actors in specific fields characterised by marginalisation/ disadvantage and, therefore, to assess the personal factors which enable these people to initiate collective action. The key question here is whether marginalised individuals have trajectories that are different in essence to those of the rest of the population.
2. What are the political and institutional opportunities – or constraints – that marginalised social actors encounter within the two regions? In other words, to what extent or in what ways have these people overcome political and social obstacles to mobilisation? Have the protest activities of marginalised social actors been facilitated or constrained by political developments? These questions focus in particular on the level of support, opposition or indifference which “poor” people encounter and notably on the alliances that they establish with various other actors – trade unions, civil society organisations, etc. – in order to emerge from their isolation. We also wish to consider the various levels at which collective action has been initiated in the two regions and to analyse why it has occurred at those levels. For instance, economic and political decentralisation in France (but only economic decentralisation in Ireland), European Union construction and the emergence of a relatively strong anti-globalisation movement (at least in France and an emerging one in Ireland) have provided many opportunities for relatively new forms of collective action. In the case of some wealthy Asian countries, such as Japan and South Korea, the scepticism towards economic liberalisation, orchestrated at the beginning by the international institutions, has stirred grass-root movements in this direction since the 1997 Asian crisis. In other developing Asian countries such as China, increasing wealth disparities since the economic reforms have been responsible for the emergence of social claims. The objective here is to establish the levels at which poor people’s groups find more favourable conditions to express their cause and to analyse why it has come about at various levels.
3. What are the social, political or media consequences of collective action? The impact may be internal to the group (to establish or to improve on a common identity, for example), protest-oriented (to reach specific gains) and/ or culturally oriented (to get the general public to see them in a different light).
In our view, the dominant social movement paradigms are useful but there is some scope to complement them by taking into consideration elements derived from the “politics of experience”, that is to integrate in a more systematic way the meaning that actors give to their actions. The activities of marginalised social actors in Asia may force scholars to (re)consider the processes of political socialisation and to take into consideration the valid criticism lodged against a number of the classical approaches to political participation. For specialists of collective action, the outcome of our research may be quite important. In our view, researchers may no longer be able to start from the postulate that the internal characteristics of “poor” people’s movements form obstacles to mobilisation. Scholars may also need to question the specific forms of resistance that take place in social movements’ inter-actions with the more formalised political structures.
