Les altermondialistes : des activistes transnationaux ?
Boris Gobille est maître de conférences en science politique à l’École normale supérieure – Lettres et Sciences humaines de Lyon. Ses domaines de recherche portent principalement sur Mai 68, les crises politiques, l’altermondialisme et la sociologie de la littérature. Il a notamment publié (avec Aysen Uysal) « Cosmopolites et enracinés », dans Éric Agrikoliansky, Isabelle Sommier (dir.), Radiographie du mouvement altermondialiste. Le deuxième Forum social européen (Paris, La Dispute, 2005, p. 105-126) et « Les mobilisations de l’avant-garde littéraire française en Mai 1968. Capital politique, capital littéraire et conjoncture de crise », Actes de la recherche en sciences sociales ( 158, à paraître en juin 2005). E-mail : boris.gobille@free.fr
Résumé de l'article
Anti-Globalization Activists: Transnational Actors ?
Social forums are now some of the most salient instances of anti-globalization activism on both the European and the world scale. As such, and because they lend themselves to empirical investigation, studying them advances our knowledge of this “new cause.” This article, based on a collective multi-method study conducted during the European Social Forum in the Paris area in November 2003, describes the sociographic features of the participants and discusses two common beliefs about them. The first, popularized at the end of the 1990s, describes anti-globalization militants as “the losers of globalization.” Rather than bear this out, our survey findings point out their high level of cultural resources and strong job stability. The second, put forward mainly by North American studies, on the contrary analyses them as the cosmopolitan elites of an emerging “transnational civil society.” The article qualifies this thesis: their intense involvement in international issues is indeed distinctive, but the reasons for their commitment to fighting for “another form of globalization” and the resources they