Cooptation or resistance? Problematizing the legal strategies and rights of social movements in the socio-economic domain

• Main Author: Alberto FIERRO
• Format: Article
• Language: Spanish
• Published: Universidad Autónoma de Madrid 2018-08-01
• Series: Relaciones Internacionales
• Subjects: rights; social movements; counterconducts; legal strategies; governmentality
• Online Access: https://revistas.uam.es/relacionesinternacionales/article/view/9412

This paper elaborates an analytical template to problematize the politics of legal strategies and rights. In the literature, scholars have been arguing that courts have an individualizing effect on collective struggles, or that (human) rights constitute neoliberal subjects. Yet, it is possible to open this theoretical understanding to further complexities: the inclusion of movements into certain governmentalities may have positive effects for their struggle. The discussion follows two main argumentative axes: first, social movements using legal tools and rights language are possibly deploying strategies of ‘counter-conducts’: exactly because the law is part and parcel of neoliberal governmentalities, it can constitute a strategic element to redirect and subvert established power relationships. Second, rights in the socio-economic domain (e.g. labor, housing and land) have specific properties which work against economic neoliberalism. Following a classic Polanyian argument, the idea of socio-economic rights pulls away these goods from the market domain. This creates difficulties to the capitalist economic system, which is based on a rather strict conception of land and housing as commodities.