This concluding chapter, “Governing the Unknown: Legal–Scientific Settlements,” offers a new framework to describe the momentary stabilization of scientific facts in and through lawmaking: legal–scientific settlements. From these legal–scientific settlements emerge a range of distributional consequences that have material effects on people’s lives and shape the ability of individuals to survive and thrive despite public health crises.

During the paradigmatic moment in the 1990s that Hirschl refers to as “juristocracy,” the global institutionalization of neoliberalism effectively untethered economic control from nation-states. States’ capacity to regulate economic flows diminished, as did their ability to fulfill many of the entitlements that were then aspirationally included in progressive constitutions. Peasants, small-scale food producers, and rural workers felt the effects of neoliberalism especially hard as global trade agreements and structural adjustment policies dismantled state support and made them vulnerable to global competition. With states constrained by binding global rules, these groups were forced to rethink existing grammars of social justice. Rather than simply claiming rights, they therefore devised new claims and repertoires of mobilization in the attempt to subordinate global capital flows to popular control. Through the claim of food sovereignty, rural communities formed transnational movements that today mobilize at sub- and supra-national levels with the goal of building decentralized, democratic, and sustainable food systems. This chapter describes how transnational food sovereignty movements have reconceptualized rights around the networked form of transnational governance. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork in the UN Committee on World Food Security (CFS), one of the key arenas of global food governance, it illustrates how food sovereignty movements creatively mobilize the right to food to institutionalize their own symbols and practices of representation. In doing so, the chapter argues that food sovereignty movements have rearticulated the right to food as a “representative claim” through which they seek to democratize transnational governance.

Drawing on an ongoing conflict over hydrocarbon development in a protected area in Southern Bolivia, this chapter explores resource frontiers as key sites of juristocratic reckoning, where international and national discourses of rights are simultaneously invoked and undermined by violent processes of accumulation by dispossession. A leading example of transformative constitutionalism, Bolivia’s 2009 Constitution defined the country as a “Plurinational State” and recognized an array of new rights for Indigenous, originary, and peasant peoples, including in relation to territory and the environment. Yet state dependence on natural gas extraction has produced a widening gap between legal discourse and practice. This chapter asks: What new forms of politics emerge as communities at extractive frontiers reckon with the possibilities and limits of law and rights to confront ongoing processes of environmental dispossession? The arrival of oil companies in the Tariquía Reserve catalyzed a wave of human rights education in remote rural communities, yet a series of failed constitutional challenges have exposed the limits of law and rights as instruments to counter state-led extraction. Rather than turning away from rights, the chapter argues that community activists in Tariquía see themselves as custodians of the 2009 Constitution against the state. Their embodied praxis of territorial defense points to a form of juristocratic politics from below, in which the state’s monopoly on political and legal authority is called into question.

Chapter 6 situates the case studies of activism in Argentina and South Africa in global trends in LGBT rights and distills some general lessons from the research. It explores the implications of the book’s arguments for understanding LGBT activism in two additional national contexts that differ drastically in terms of LGBT legal inclusion: the Netherlands and Russia. The Dutch case illustrates additional applications of the book’s theory and the Russian case points to the limits of this study in underscoring contingency of identity deployment on the ability to express identity in public and to meet collectively in public and private spaces. The chapter then tackles the contemporary challenge of backlash against LGBT rights gains and considers how an intersectional approach to identity strategizing clarifies the stakes of some lesbians’ participation in anti-transgender mobilization. The chapter concludes with a reflection on directions for future research, including how the book’s framework can help scholars understand identity strategizing by movements in other national contexts.

This chapter introduces the book’s motivation: to understand how activists use identity to manage the apparent contradiction between the promises of legal inclusion and persistent forms of marginalization. The chapter illustrates the importance of the issue through discussion of the activism of two lesbian groups – Free Gender in Cape Town, South Africa, and La Fulana in Buenos Aires, Argentina – that form the focus on the book. Both organizations strategize sexual identity in tandem with other racial, class, and gender identities, albeit in different ways. The chapter presents the conceptual background of the book, which adopts a historical approach to understanding LGBT inclusion into citizenship and explains the relevance of intersectionality to contemporary LGBT organizing. The chapter previews the theoretical framework developed in Chapter 1 that accounts for key differences in how the two organizations strategically use multiple identities. The chapter concludes with a discussion of some of the methodological aspects of the research and presents the plan for the rest of the book.

Chapter 1 lays out the theoretical framework that guides the rest of the book. The chapter makes the case that social movement scholars have not yet fully integrated the insights of intersectional theory on social movements’ strategic identity work. The first part of the chapter reviews the literature on collective identity, collective action framing, and identity strategies to generate a synthetic picture of the factors that influence identity strategizing: political and discursive opportunities, opposition and oppositional discourses, and intramovement and organizational dynamics. Through applying an intersectional lens to these factors, the chapter explains the conditions under which organizations choose to strategize multiple identity categories at once. The chapter continues with an intersectional approach to illuminate the political effects of identity strategies. An intersectional approach focuses on the embodied dimension of identity deployment. This section develops the idea that when activists embody identity strategies in public, they challenge the concept of the universal subject of rights by giving rights a specific form. This conceptualization of identity strategies clarifies the influence that they allow organizations to have on politics even without directly engaging the formal political system.

Besides discussing previous scholarship on gender and the rhetoric of slavery, the introduction provides a historical overview and historiography of the nineteenth-century international women’s movement, particularly illuminating interpersonal and cultural connections with organised antislavery. The introduction also outlines an understanding of the woman–slave analogy as part of the international women’s movement’s memory culture. It sets up a common-sense conceptual framework that guides the rest of the book, introducing the terms usable past and the (collective) memory work involved in creating it, as well as the umbrella term memories of antislavery, narratives which were circulated transnationally both during the campaign to end slavery and afterwards.

From the 1960s onwards, New Household economists like Theodore Schultz and Gary Becker shifted focus onto the poverty-alleviating impacts of family investment in human capital. This move was informed, first, by increased cultural and political awareness of what Becker referred to as an impoverished ‘underclass’ (1964/1993); second, by the social movements, including civil rights challenges to racial discrimination in schools and labour markets; and third, by government debates during the War on Poverty about the causes of Black family instability. Becker explained family instability as a rational response to price changes in the goods – including children – that families wanted. Given a set of preferences for basic commodities, and facing a defined range of choices, families were conceptualised as maximising utility, subject to constraints of income and time. This permitted hypotheses about how wages and human capital investment affected the cost of children, with effects on family formation and dissolution, fertility, and care-provision by women. As for poverty-alleviation, Becker favoured low-interest education loans. He rejected progressive income taxation and family welfare for incentivising underinvestment in education. Compensatory education programmes would fail by being offset. These policy positions were described by Nancy Folbre and Randy Albelda as a War on the Poor.

Despite the influence of key figures like Henry Sigerist and the Rockefeller Foundation, social medicine achieved a formal presence at only a handful of medical schools in the US, partly reflecting the political context in which “social medicine” was often heard as “socialized medicine.” Work that might otherwise have been called social medicine had to pass under other names. Does “social medicine” in the US only include those who self-identified with social medicine or does it include people who worked in the spirit of social medicine? Beginning with the recognized work of Sigerist and the Rockefeller, we then examine several Black social theorists whose work can now be recognized as social medicine. The Cold War context challenged would-be proponents of social medicine but different threads endured. The first, clinically oriented, focused on community health. The second, based in academic departments, applied the interpretive social sciences to explore the interspace between the clinical and the social. These threads converged in the 1990s and 2000s in new forms of social medicine considered as healthcare committed to social justice and health equity.

New possibilities of communication and a widening range of fair trade products prompted an evolution in the direction of a less hierarchical global network of actors since the late 1980s. The advent of the ‘network society’ has had a fundamental impact on civic activism. The history of the fair trade movement is particularly instructive in this respect, because activists had attempted to muster transnational coalitions ever since its inception. This chapter highlights the history of the Clean Clothes Campaign, which mustered a coalition of trade union representatives and human rights activists from the global South and solidarity activists in the North to pressure companies in the textile industry to improve working conditions. The history of the Clean Clothes Campaign also provides a perspective on the altered landscape of fair trade activism in the wake of the success of fair trade certification, which was extended into textiles with the introduction of fair trade-certified cotton in the early 2000s. Surveying the breadth of the movement, this chapter develops a typology of adversarial and collaborative approaches employed by activists targeting businesses.