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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.

This chapter traces the ways that translocal media practices, deployed by Oaxacan migrants on a daily basis to strengthen connections between their places of origin and their new communities abroad, are often used in times of crisis to build social movement visibility and power. The focus is a series of protests by the Asociación Popular de los Pueblos de Oaxaca, Los Angeles (the Popular Association of the Oaxacan Peoples, L.A., or APPO-LA). In June 2006, the southern Mexican state of Oaxaca was convulsed by a general strike against the corrupt (and questionably elected) governor Ulises Ruiz Ortíz. Teachers, indigenous peoples, women, students, and workers joined forces in a popular assembly that occupied city plazas for months, took over radio and TV stations, demanded the governor's resignation, and called for a constituent assembly to rewrite the state constitution. Oaxacan migrants in L.A. organized a powerful series of solidarity actions, raised thousands of dollars to support the general strike, and generated attention for the situation in Oaxaca both online and in Spanish-language mass media. The chapter explores the importance of translocal media practices in an age of mass migration.

This chapter tracks the dynamics of contestation over biofuels projects in Kenya’s Tana River delta, providing the first of two case study chapters that analyze how the dynamics of financing, ownership, and trade shaped local responses to proposed energy projects. Enthusiasm from some community members for producing bioethanol and biodiesel in coastal Kenya collided with concerns about land transformation and access, livelihoods and identities, and the distribution of benefits and burdens. By examining the adaptive strategies and shifting composition of pro- and anti-biofuels coalitions and campaigns in and beyond the delta, the chapter reveals how political economy characteristics of development initiatives shape mobilization efforts. The chapter exposes that biofuels debates bring together local social histories and economies, national interests, transnational activists, foreign investors, and international markets. As a result, it argues, a blended political economy and contentious politics analysis is needed to understand resistance to agriculturally based renewable energy projects.