The Impacts of the Movement against Neoliberal Globalisation. Institutional Reforms, a New Conception of Politics, and Postcolonial Questions

This article discusses the protest movement against the neoliberal capitalist world order which emerged in the second half of the 1990s and was inspired by the Mexican Zapatistas. This movement was considerably globalised and, despite different currents, characterised by a pluralist and anarchist conceptualization of politics. The article argues that it partly succeeded in preventing further liberalisation of world trade and, above all, that it provoked numerous reforms in the global political economy institutions that were the targets of its critique. However, from a postcolonial perspective, the case of Jubilee 2000 demonstrates that the protest movement against neoliberal globalisation was not entirely free from paternalism and dominance in North-South relations, despite a heightened sensibility towards these phenomena.