From June 17 to 19, an international workshop titled “Mobilizations in the 21st Century Neoliberal Order: Comparing Latin America and the Middle East and North Africa” was held at Universidad Nacional de Educación a Distancia (UNED) in Madrid. Irene Weipert-Fenner and Jonas Wolff contributed to the program with a joint presentation on the topic “Mobilization and the Global Energy Transition: Tunisia and Colombia in Comparison.”
The workshop aimed at furthering a comparative research agenda concerning social movements in the Global South. The scholars from Europe, the Middle East and North Africa, as well as the Americas focused particularly on the interplay between the political economy and the origins and development of these movements, as well as their interconnectedness with processes of political transformation.
Weipert-Fenner and Wolff also addressed these aspects in their paper, in which they compare mobilizations at the local and national levels in Colombia and Tunisia targeting renewable energy projects. Their study shows how past struggles over the primary-resource-based development model and center-periphery relations shape the emerging conflicts over the global energy transition.