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Chapter 1 provides an overview of the volume and outlines the research question, the argument, and the methodological approach. The volume combines three broader discussions: the first one concerning the GJM, the Occupy Movement, and the World Social Forum process; the second one concerning international non-governmental organizations ([I]NGOs) in relation to the United Nations and the World Bank; and the third one concerning Dalit activists and Dalit feminists in South Asia working in collaboration with Burakumin activists in Japan. In this chapter the author positions her discussion within these three scholarly debates. She also points out links between the social movements in South Asia and Japan and social movements in other regions, such as the United States, Latin America, and Europe. The methods of transnational fieldwork and the intricate relation between activists and scholars are discussed at length.

Chapter 3 outlines parts of the neoliberal values and visions to which the activists in the GJM are opposed. Activists protest against neoliberal ideas and international financial institutions like the World Bank, the World Trade Organization (WTO), and the International Monetary Fund (IMF). This chapter, however, discuss ethics and visions in a specific context, in relation to the United Nation’s first Millennium Development Goal (MDG) that reads: ‘Eradicate extreme poverty and hunger’. The contrast between, on the one hand, the values behind the first UN MDG and, on the other hand, the values and visions of the activists in the GJM is not insignificant but originates from conflicting worldviews. It is argued that in extension these worldviews are related to conflicting ethical values on debt and individual guilt, now locally experienced and expressed among activists and (I)NGO workers.

Chapter 7 serves as a commentary to the ethnography and as a summary. It considers how neoliberal values have influenced parts of the GJM at the same time that activists have been radicalized, and it reflects on how these incongruences are dealt with practically among activists and NGO workers on a local level. This chapter deepens the understanding of processes in South Asia and Japan when many transnational activists have been professionalized during the 2000s, interacting locally with activists and (I)NGO workers, who are temporarily employed and in a constant flux between projects. The chapter is also a comment on how the regional forms of discrimination in South Asia and Japan historically gave rise to unique traditions of protest, but still activists entered into transnational collaborations, in tune with activists in other parts of the world, to form what is known as the Global Justice Movement.