What does it mean to think of social struggles as epistemic struggles? What happens if we see social struggles as questioning our worldviews? This paper seeks to advance answers to these questions as an alternative route of engagement in the Activism 2010+ debate. In our view, to think social struggles as epistemic struggles is an invitation not so much to study them as objects, but rather to recognize the questions that they pose to our forms of understanding. With this, we aim to instigate an engagement with social struggles that includes not only their relation to economic and political forms of domination (e.g. neoliberal globalization), but also their capacity to generate knowledges and reveal the limits of our academic frameworks.Our entry points in the Activism 2010+ debate are the questions 'why now ' and 'what makes it distinctive'. These questions point towards establishing a temporal demarcation.We can recognize the importance of this debate in order to see, for example the role that new technologies are playing in the articulation of contemporary activisms. Moreover, the Activisms 2010+ debate is from our perspective, a contribution to the understanding of 'different waves' of political activism traditionally associated in the literature on social movements to claims for political rights (XVII-XIX centuries), socio-economic rights (1950-1980s) and rights of recognition (1980s-to date). Although, following Zibechi (2005), we see in Latin America a movement that predates 2010 and that shows the emergence of activisms that are not anymore focused on claiming for rights in relation to the state, but that are fighting for 'dignity in autonomy'. These activisms have one of its most visible examples in the Zapatistas. They are activisms that fight to enact dignified life-worlds in autonomy from the major institutional framework of modernity: the state and the market. They are producing and theorizing other forms of the political, other economies, other knowledges.

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This paper represents a collective contribution to an ongoing debate on the benefits and disadvantages of export-based, industrial jobs for women as well as on the implications of global labor standards on these types of jobs. On the basis of extensive research on women in Mexico's and Central America's maquiladoras (assembly plants that produce export goods), this paper aims to problematize the viewpoints that present export-based, industrial jobs as dignified alternatives for women in the South and to question the skepticism about global labor standards as a possible alternative for improving work conditions in all sectors producing for export. In so doing, the paper stresses three interrelated issues: a) the relevance of local and regional contexts that inform diverse industrialization paths over time, b) the agency the women workers represent, and c) the legal instruments already existent in our common efforts to improve working conditions.Export-oriented growth, women's labor force participation, globalization, labor standards, maquiladoras,

On 21 October 2011, hundreds of Mexican civil society organizations formally submitted a petition to the Lelio e Lisli Basso Foundation in Rome to justify the opening of a Mexican Chapter of the Permanent People’s Tribunals (PPT). The PPT was established in 1979 as the successor to the Russell Tribunals on Vietnam (1966–1967) and on the Latin American Dictatorships (1974–1976). The PPT is considered an ethical non-governmental tribunal and their sessions are described as a mechanism for raising awareness of national and international public opinion on rights violations. This article investigates the potential of the PPT for contributing to epistemic justice in Mexico, by focusing on indigenous people communities’ long-term struggle for legal pluralism and autonomy. In so doing, it offers an analysis about the coloniality of international human rights law operating in non-governmental mechanisms of popular litigation such as the PPT; a perspective that has remained absent in critical international and global studies. In particular, the article argues that the PPT in Mexico is imbricated with Eurocentric modes of legal production but that it nonetheless has the potential to contribute, in a relevant but fragile way, to epistemic justice. On the one hand, it is observed that PPT key documents and statements explaining different forms of violence in Mexico emphasize causal relationships based on the all-encompassing power or logic of capitalism. This perspective, it is argued, has the effect of epistemic erasure: notions and practices of justice that exceed this logic are silenced in the process of legal translation for the construction of “model cases”. On the other hand, the article highlights the coexistence of different notions of justice in one of the PPT thematic hearings on Violence against Corn, food sovereignty and autonomy hold in Oaxaca, Mexico, to argue for a re-thinking of the monocultural state-centric legal frames that ground PPT legal qualification. As the PPT classify social grievances in legal terms through the lens/gaze of international law, this legal qualification works as an activity of “translation”, in some cases of incommensurable notions of justice or absence of justice, violence or well-being. The article concludes with an emphasis on the potential contributions of the PPT to epistemic justice as the political visibility of the many ways in which justice is understood and experienced despite the many forms of violence and oppression in contemporary Mexico.