Contrapuntal geographies: the politics of organizing across sociospatial difference

This chapter is written against the background of two closely interlinked developments. The first is the increase in the number and type (or at least visibility) of transborder political movements this last decade or so, particularly during the years of what David Slater (2003: 84) calls 'the post-Seattle conjuncture'. The second is a sharp increase in geographical writing on these multifarious attempts to bridge sociospatial difference in order to challenge neo-liberal versions of 'globalization'. To oversimplify matters, we can say that this literature relates to two groups of space-spanning social actors: those associated with the labour movement (broadly conceived) and those who are part of the New Left social (and environmental) movements that emerged in the 1980s and 1990s.