Who Has the Power to Change the World? Activism and Global Governance

• In Event: Democracy and Governance from above and Below: Vulnerability and Possibility

Abstract

International Relations as a field has long prioritized top-down forms of governance as more legitimate forms of societal organization. Increasingly, calls to decenter the state have resulted in a proliferation of focus on bottom-up forms of resistance, activism, and mobilizations.. While precarious people across the world have been organizing for years in the face of state violence, their efforts are rarely recognized by International Relations scholars. Amongst the various forms of mobilizations, sex workers offer a particular insight into both local and global efforts to achieve better conditions for people globally due to their highly stigmatized and criminalized positionalities. How do their efforts speak to broader projects of global governance? What influence does their organizing have on international efforts for peace and prosperity? Their efforts are inspired from multiple vantage points, such as anticolonial, antiracist, anticapitalist, queer rights, and worker’s rights. As they build on the efforts of their predecessors and allies, sex workers create new possibilities for governance.
In this paper, I investigate more deeply what these possibilities are, how they are sustained by the people creating them, and the barriers or backlash activists face as they create these alternatives. Using ethnographic methods, I draw on sex worker movements in various states to highlight multiple aspects of the relationship between their organizing work and broader human rights projects. The first is the barriers they face in being perceived as legitimate knowledge-builders in efforts to promote better forms of governance. The second is how their work contests, supports, or otherwise speaks to global governance projects. I also identify methods utilized by sex workers to self-govern and resist state-inflicted harm while creating anticarceral forms of governance. By confronting and dismantling carceral logics, sex workers are at the forefront of world-building. This research contributes to literature on social movements and human rights broadly, and illuminates ways marginalized communities create alternatives to state-centric visions of a just future.

Author

• Alisson Rowland, University of California, Irvine