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This chapter summarises the key themes and findings of the book and evaluates current theoretical and empirical debates about global civil society, participative democracy, and transnational solidarity within global justice networks (GJNs). It argues that issues of space and scale are critical to the sustainability and future strategy of GJNs. Tensions arise between developing more horizontalist networks that facilitate democracy and grassroots participation, and the need to develop structures that can relay a global consciousness down to local activists. This chapter argues that understanding the potential for GJNs to develop a sustainable politics of international solidarity involves not just understanding the way that the ‘local’ is enmeshed in wider spatial relations, but also, and perhaps more critically, assessing how the ‘global’ is invoked in struggles that take place nationally and locally.

This chapter expands the boundaries of comparison to include three additional postcommunist EU applicant-states over the same time frame as the previous chapters: Hungary, Slovakia, and Romania. These case studies offer further support that hard-right backlash against transnational norms builds activism even where extant domestic mobilizing structures are weak. At the same time, they highlight new variations-the possibility of extraparliamentary backlash, the consequences of backlash in the absence of external leverage, and the trade-off between policy gains and grassroots participation. These variations open up vistas for applying the argument beyond Eastern Europe.

This chapter highlights the cultural politics of paramilitaries' revanchist state project by detailing their attempt to build an electoral political movement. It focuses on Urabá Grande, a coalition which formed the electoral wing of the paras' state-oriented war of position. Urabá Grande was an effort to give lasting institutional form to the political, economic, and military power the bloc had gained on the battlefield. It also reflects the broader way in which the paras and their allied politicians all over the country presented themselves as the defenders and saviors of Colombia's supposed forgotten regions, promising to bring an end to what they called the regions' abandonment by the state. The paras built a powerful brand of agrarian populism by fusing the discourse of state absence with the politics of Colombian regionalism. As an instance of the frontier effect, paramilitary populism turned statelessness into an affirmative political project of regional affirmation and state formation that tried to reconcile their narrow self-interests with practices of grassroots political participation.