Reconfiguration of territory and social movements: disputed territories

Abstract

This article aims to offer a theoretical reflection that allows to account for social movements that, in a specific way, establish processes of struggle and resistance against the reconfiguration of territory that the capitalist system has produced as it develops its global geopolitical measurement in the context of the contemporary planetary ecological crisis. This subject is approached from a certain type of social mobilizations that—under neoliberal economic policy—have set as the main political objective the fight against the ecological devastation that has occurred as a correlate of the simple and expanded reproduction of capital and social production of the space that the economic development and the gain accumulation of neoliberal cut has produced. The relevance of addressing in the following pages the theme of socioenvironmental movements in relation to the capitalist reconfiguration of the territory is, first, the need to reflect on a highly complex social process, which represents great challenges for the social sciences and humanities, since critical reflections are required that address —from a multicriterial, multi-temporal and trans-disciplinary mantra— the struggle and resistance that civil society carries out to highlight and stop the overexploitation and contamination of the biophysical conditions of the territories. Second, the relevance of offering a reflection on the socio-environmental movements of struggle and resistance is that they face the ecological unsustainability that the reconfiguration of the territory has produced in an exacerbated manner. Ergo, contemporary socio-environmental movements have to fight for the defense of their territories and natural riches under the uncertainty, risk, and vulnerability of the current planetary ecological crisis.