Center for Global Justice

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"Women and Globalization" Conference
Conclusions of the Plenary, August 2, 2005

Notes by Ann Ferguson

Graciela Monteagudo of the Program Committee chaired the meeting. After some announcements, the group broke up into 5 small groups to discuss two questions:

1. What were some of the most important points made and problems raised in the conference papers and activist sessions?

2. What suggestions are there for strategies and projects to confront these problems?

One of the small groups was all the Spanish speakers and the other groups were English speakers. This was to facilitate fast communication, with the plan that the reports back from the group to the large plenary would be translated into both Spanish and English.

Here is a summary of the reports from the five groups:

GROUP 1 (Spanish Speakers)

This group concentrated on what was mostly absent from this conference and which should be included in subsequent conferences. This included:

panels on criticism and self-criticism, to evaluate mistakes made in the organization and process of the conference;
work groups organized in beginning plenaries to work on a particular issue, arranging their own meeting times and reporting back to the concluding plenary;
try to involve more local women in the assemblies of the conference, not just on a Saturday activist session; and
more coverage of issues of sexuality.

Their ideas for next year’s conference included:

a panel on issues of working people with comments from locals;
increasing communication and outcomes of this conference to create international support and solidarity;
networks that the conference creates should be open to academic institutions, political parties and activists for a wider debate on issues of globalization and justice;
try to avoid the theorist/activist split that occurred to some extent in this conference;
that the Center for Global Justice create an archive on our website, not only of academic papers but also of political campaigns involving global justice issues so that activists can know about and support each other’s struggles.

GROUP 2
The important themes that this group summarized from the conference were:

The issue of violence against women, for example in the Ciudad Juarez case, and the question of why and how this male abuse of women’s rights continues with impunity and lack of justice for the victims.
The violation of women’s social and economic rights
The analysis of the AIDS crisis as having its roots in poverty and structural economic inequalities
The separation of production/productive work and reproduction/reproductive work as a structural cause of women’s double and triple working days and of women’s oppression
The control of women’s bodies and the way that this perpetuates violence against women
The imposition of Western values on non-Western peoples and cultures and the need to empower women from their own traditions, for example, not to promote individualism but a women-friendly communalism
Migration issues and migrant’s rights
Patriarchy in US foreign policy, e.g. war policy, the example of “Shock and Awe” military strategy which respects neither civilian’s rights nor the right of nations to self-determination
The important of women’s participation in movement building, and
The need for healthy economic development.

In terms of what can be done, the group divided this into two foci: local projects and suggestions for the Center for Global Justice.

Locally, they suggested:

The importance of giving an analysis of the effects of globalization in all popular education about progressive issues; and also
Creating alternative economic choices, such as alternatives to Walmart, e.g. cooperatives, barter fairs, etc.

For the Center for Global Justice, they suggested:

It should try to bring sociologists, economists and more popular educators to its conference, that is, more of a diversity of academics and educators;
It should support collaborative comparative research: Many issues in developing countries are similar.
It should work with local communities to find out how globalization impacts local women’s lives.
Our research method should be Participatory Action Research (PAR); that is, we should not do research on communities, but with communities so that they identify what issues need research to solve and then work with them as researchers to figure out how to solve them.

GROUP 3

The themes this group identified were:

Neo-liberal policies have more negative impact on women due to the intersection of gender, race, and class (e.g. poverty).
The impacts of neo-liberalism impact the US, with increasing poverty, particularly in the Southern US, as well as impacting the global South.
Neo-liberal strategies are a response to the crisis of financial capitalism and the resistance to this.
The repressive nation state is male-gendered to have a military response to this social crisis, rather than peaceful forms of conflict resolution, and the state’s priority is to protect financial capital through military means.
In this neo-liberal process, women and children are the majority of those deprived of health care and education because of mandated cuts in state spending.
As resistance to globalization from above, there is globalization from below, through resistance to neo-liberal corporate globalization, that organizes alternative production, such as cooperatives, and communities of resistance, such as the Movimiento sin Tierras (MST) in Brazil.
Alternatives to capitalist production are more open to non-exploitative relations for women workers.

With respect to what is to be done, the group raised three questions:

How can academics and activists support each other within and across borders?
How can we avoid class, race (and male) privilege as the starting points of research?
How can we in the First World be aware of First World effects on the Third World?

To do, they suggested:

We should share what we have learned in this conference with students and community members with talks and films.
We should work out some practical directions for local networks to work on the issues raised by globalization
The Center and our local networks should bring pressure on the US government and US business to hold Ciudad Juarez accountable for the women’s murders there.
The Center needs to debate further how it can model principles of our new vision of society in its distribution of resources and decision-making.

In terms of the focus of the Center and the question as to whether the focus should be US/Mexico, Central and South America or the world, they suggested facilitating Yolanda Millan’s idea that focuses more on Mexico and local people’s, particularly women’s, struggles.

GROUP 4

In terms of themes the group listed:

Water issues as key both to environmental justice and as a key problem of neo-liberal corporate globalization for people’s subsistence,
The immigration issue in US communities. This should be discussed with popular education based on causing people to question, why there is immigration? What causes people to leave their country of origin? So they will begin to grasp the structural reasons for this.
The importance of self-empowerment through cooperatives and autonomous communities
Masculinist Gender culture and its relation to war, and the need to bring this analysis into the anti-war movement
The nature of the split between productive and reproductive work under globalization

In terms of what can be done in popular education in the US regarding globalization, the group suggested:

Using elementary and high schools as resources, trying to get talks and videos shown there
The articles on the Global Justice Center website
Using videos: The Center should inform people on its website how to get the videos shown at the conference and other relevant videos
Speaker networks: Participants should try to get some of the speakers at the conference to come to their schools, universities and/or communities

GROUP 5

The themes this group listed were:

The contradictory consequences of neo-liberal globalization
The important social movements and alternative production resisting neoliberal globalization
The difficulties of finding overall strategies to challenge global capitalism
The importance of thinking more about the relation between theory and practice
Poverty as one of the key themes of the conference, as a major effect of corporate globalization
The necessity of grassroots groups, collectives and cooperatives
The theme of violence against women and how it is connected not only to the murders of women in Ciudad Juarez but also to the US War on Terrorism and the violence of poverty caused by neo-liberal globalization.

Their suggestions for what to do involved two parts, local actions and networking

Locally, they suggest:

Report about conference to local institutions, organizations like universities and churches, etc.
Invite speakers from the global South at the conference to the global North
Honor the Walmart boycott
Go after mainstream media and journalism to report the conference

For our networks they suggest:

Using a participatory action research model (PAR) for collaborative research to do together
Publish the proceedings of the conference
Commit ourselves to financial support of the producer and activist groups at the conference, e.g. by buying their products, videos, etc.

PETITIONS and STATEMENTS

The second part of the plenary involved the following petitions and general statements:

#1. A petition against the proposed dump, or sanitary landfill, at Apaseo el Grande in Guanajuato, Mexico

#2. A petition to lift the blockade on Cuba

#3. A statement to the US government to end the War and occupation of Iraq

#4. A statement to the Mexican government, State officials in Chihuahua and in Ciudad Juarez as well as multinational corporations there to end the murders of Women and the impunity of their perpetrators

#5. A statement in solidarity with the Movimiento Sin Tierra (MST - Movement of the Landless) in Brazil

#6. A statement in solidarity with the piqueteros and unemployed workers’ movement in Argentina

#7. A statement on the water crisis in Mexico

The first four items above were discussed, and the petitions passed around. It was decided that statements 3 and 4 would be posted on the Conference discussion list serve so that those who wanted to make additions or suggested corrections to the language would do so by [August 15], after which point if a consensus was reached on the discussion list, the statement would be published in local and national press venues (meaning the home countries of the participants) as the unanimous resolution of the Women and Globalization conference plenary. It was also decided that statements would be drawn up on 5,6, and 7 and posted on the discussion list.