POLITICAL CHARACTER OF THE SOCIAL ACTIONS IN THE PROCESS OF GLOBALIZATION: A CASE STUDY

Year 2011, Volume: 3 Issue: 2, 159 - 168, 01.12.2011

Derya Çakır Kamil Demirhan

Abstract

Globalization’s attribution of blurring the boundaries is not restricted to the economical and cultural terms. It is also notable for the questions of what is social, what is ecological and what is political. Due to the increase of ecological risks in the global world, some spontaneous social movements have developed to prevent the causes and negative effects of these dangers. Mostly, these movements are seen as in the respect of ecological and social actions. Today it is rather difficult to distinguish the ecological movements from the social ones, and the social and ecological ones from the political ones. This means that today, an ecological movement is at the same time a social and a political movement. The purpose of this study is to analyze the political character of social actions by means of a case study which centers upon ecological movements in Turkey in recent years. The study focuses on the social movements developing around HES project. Firstly, this study examines the development of a social-ecological movement reacted against the HES project. The first part of the study makes emphasis on the spontaneous nature of the movement in its early stage. Secondly, this study tries to make the characteristic of the way of organization of the movement clear. The movement has a distinctive nature compared to NGOs and their structure of organization. Lastly, the study tries to prove that just like the other social and ecological movements in recent years, the movement against the HES project can be evaluated as both a social-ecological and a political movement. In this part the political nature of the movement is tried to be examined within the scope of the issue of political participation, political pressure and political antagonism

Keywords

Social action, globalization, political action, ecologic movement

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