9.1 Introduction
In the book For a Left Populism, Belgian political theorist Chantal Mouffe takes up the challenge posed in 1988 by the Jamaican-British political and cultural theorist Stuart Hall to theorists and political actors on the left, to ‘learn from Thatcherism’.Footnote 1 Hall – influenced himself by Mouffe’s work with Argentine philosopher Ernesto LaclauFootnote 2 – did so by seeking to account for the ideological formations on which former British Prime-Minister Margaret Thatcher’s neoliberal revolution depended. These formations led Hall to coin the term ‘authoritarian populism’. He described this as ‘an exceptional form of the capitalist state, which, unlike classical fascism, has retained most (though not all) of the formal representative institutions in place, and which at the same time has been able to construct itself around an active popular consent’.Footnote 3 In particular, Hall was interested in the modes by which an economic programme directed at benefitting the few was made sufficiently popular to garner electoral support. Central to this, Hall argued, was the patient and determined effort to construct a new common sense which combined authoritarian political and cultural values (what Hall called ‘authoritarian popular morality’) with neoliberal economics. In making this argument, Hall drew on the concept of ideological hegemony from Italian political philosopher Antonio Gramsci (which was also central to Laclau and Mouffe’s work).
Understanding the complementary and contradictory elements of the forces which combined to produce, in Hall and Mouffe’s terms, a ‘hegemonic’ common sense around neoliberal values is instructive today. While anger against the economic effects of neoliberalism may be a driver of populist disaffection, the modes of political identification and action favoured by right-wing populism tend to circle back in neoliberalism’s support. Indeed, as economic inequality increases, the sense of fear and social dislocation which fuels authoritarian popular morality increases along with it. Authoritarian populism does nothing to ameliorate the cultural and material maladies of neoliberalism. Instead, the forms of politics it produces involve little more than a performative rejection of some parts of the ‘system’ but not the still-prevailing common sense and the economic system twinned with it. So, in the common sense of authoritarian populism, the opposition to international institutions takes the form of nativism – consistent with the reactionary, fearful, racist, homophobic and transphobic elements of authoritarian popular morality. To displace the fear and insecurity engendered by the economic system, it takes aim rhetorically and juridically, primarily at the right of racialized people to move across borders, but it does not challenge the mobility of capital. This produces a highly unstable political environment, capable only of intensifying the problems it creates.
The crisis does, however, produce an opportunity. Mouffe argues that the ‘current crisis of the neoliberal hegemonic formation offers the possibility of intervening to establish a different order’.Footnote 4 Two lessons from the 1980s need to be heeded, in this respect, according to Mouffe. The first is that actors on the left cannot sit back ‘passively expecting the deterioration of economic conditions to work in their favour’.Footnote 5 Second, one cannot assume that an attempt to create a new order in place of neoliberalism will ‘bring about significant democratic advances’ and recognise that it ‘might even be of an authoritarian nature’.Footnote 6 Instead, and following Hall’s injunction for the left to ‘Learn from Thatcherism’, Mouffe argues that what is required is an organised, systematic effort to shift the prevailing ‘common sense’ towards a set of values supportive of left politics – a ‘new hegemonic order’.Footnote 7 This is the starting point for Mouffe’s call for a ‘Left Populism’. The essence of this for her is that ‘what is urgently needed is a left populist strategy aimed at the construction of a “people”, combining the variety of democratic resistances against post-democracy in order to establish a more democratic formation’.Footnote 8
This chapter will engage with Mouffe’s call for a ‘Left Populism’. It will argue that Mouffe’s attempt to ‘learn from Thatcherism’ provides a useful updating of Hall’s analysis of authoritarian populism under Thatcher in the context of contemporary populist politics in Europe. And yet, for us, Mouffe’s account of Left Populism risks remaining trapped by its reification of the nation-state, betraying the anti-essentialism she invokes. Casting contemporary politics as primarily a question of competing populisms and focusing on the nation-state as the primary locus of politics, Mouffe’s account may leave us unequipped to consider the international dimensions of right-wing populism and the way the nexus between the state and the global corporation figures in its rise. This may hinder the production of effective political responses to the rise of right-wing populism. Learning from the tension within Mouffe’s response to populism invites us to consider whether we need to find and foster approaches to countering right-wing populism which do not locate politics as (in the first instance) a fight over control of the identity and institutions of the nation state – but rather one which begins in transnational resistance and collective action. In the search for such approaches, we turn to David Featherstone’s account of trans-national solidarity. We explore this account through one current example – transnational opposition to the Adani conglomerate. We argue that activities around this opposition by a range of actors is a good illustration of what Featherstone describes, and could offer us, as scholars, some guidance in relation to both understanding and acting in solidarity with action against right-wing populism.
9.2 A Left Populism?
Three theoretical insights underpin Mouffe’s call for a ‘Left Populism’. The first and overarching insight is that it forms part of an ‘anti-essentialist approach’ to thinking about ‘the domain of the political’.Footnote 9 The second is that an anti-essentialist approach involves understanding the political domain as ‘a field of conflict and antagonism’.Footnote 10 The third insight is that this conflict and antagonism occurs at the level of ‘hegemonic practices’, by which she means ‘the practices of articulation through which a given order is created and the meaning of social institutions is fixed’.Footnote 11 In calling for a Left Populism, Mouffe seeks to take advantage of a ‘double movement’ she considers to be constitutive of social life. One is a ‘movement of decentering which prevents the fixation of set positions’ (that is, a recognition of the contingency of all social formations).Footnote 12 The second is an ‘opposite movement’ which is ‘a result of this essential non-fixity’, towards ‘the institution of nodal points, partial fixations’Footnote 13 around which the contours and limits of the prevailing social order are formed. The challenge then, is to understand the hegemonic practices and discursive formations that support the current ‘partial fixations’ on which the prevailing social order relies and how to shift them towards a different (and in turn, ever contingent) articulation of social order.
The current social order Mouffe seeks to understand and challenge is ‘neoliberalism’, broadly conceived. More specifically, Mouffe’s target is the consensus around so-called pragmatic policies which tacitly or explicitly concede that neoliberalism constitutes a ‘post-political consensus between centre-right and centre-left’.Footnote 14 In Mouffe’s account, neoliberalism has failed to live up to its own economic promises and, especially since 2008, to ‘secure the allegiance of the people’.Footnote 15 More fundamentally, neoliberalism has eroded ‘the two pillars of the democratic ideal: equality and popular sovereignty’ through which inherent tensions within liberal democracy could be fought over.Footnote 16 For Mouffe, populism is what happens when the concepts of equality and popular sovereignty cease to structure the inevitable agonism of politics in liberal democracies. For Mouffe, Western European societies now live in a ‘populist moment’, in which:Footnote 17
[i]n the next few years … the central axis of the political conflict will be between right-wing populism and left-wing populism. And as a result, it is through the construction of a ‘people’, a collective will that results from the mobilisation of common affects in defence of equality and social justice, that it will be possible to combat the xenophobic policies promoted by right-wing populism.
Mouffe understands left populism as ‘a discursive strategy of construction of the political frontier between “the people” and “the oligarchy”’.Footnote 18 This requires ‘the construction of a people’, and the recovery and deepening of the ‘ideals of equality and popular sovereignty that are constitutive of a democratic politics’.Footnote 19 This approach argues that populism, of one form or another, is an essential political strategy in a political world shaped by neoliberalism and its failures.
The construction of the frontier between the people and the oligarchy demands the construction of ‘the people’. In this, Mouffe argues that it is important for the left to recognise the ‘democratic nucleus at the origin of many of [the] demands’ of right-wing populists and attempt to ‘provide a different vocabulary to orient those demands towards more egalitarian objectives’.Footnote 20 Where left populism differs from right-wing populism is that, for Mouffe, the latter conceives of ‘popular sovereignty’ as limited to ‘“national sovereignty” and reserved for those deemed to be “true nationals”’.Footnote 21 Nor does right-wing populism ‘necessarily present the adversary of the people as being constituted by the forces of neoliberalism’ and its ‘victory could lead to nationalistic authoritarian forms of neoliberalism’.Footnote 22
The challenge for ‘Left Populism’, by contrast to right-wing populism, is to establish conditions aimed at ‘recovering and deepening democracy’.Footnote 23 While this will ‘necessitate a far-reaching transformation of the existing relations of power and the creation of new democratic practices’, Mouffe argues that ‘it does not require a “revolutionary” break with the liberal-democratic regime’.Footnote 24 Indeed, one of the lessons Mouffe learns from Thatcher, is that (within the Western European societies to which she directs her analysis), it is possible to ‘bring about a transformation of the existing hegemonic order without destroying liberal-democratic institutions’.Footnote 25
It is clear that Mouffe’s left populism is set against neoliberalism. It is less clear, however, that it manages to avoid the nationalistic elements that right-wing populism engages in its construction of ‘the people’. Mouffe recognises the danger of this, and notes that a ‘frequent objection to a left populist strategy is that to bring together … democratic demands in the creation of a “people” will produce a homogenous subject, one that negates plurality’.Footnote 26 Instead, left populism, for Mouffe, is an ‘anti-essentialist approach according to which the “people” is not an empirical referent but a discursive political construction [which] does not exist previously to its performative articulation’.Footnote 27 For her, ‘collective will is created through a chain of equivalence’ formed through the ‘designation of [a common] adversary’.Footnote 28 With the adversary being the thing held in common, the ‘multiplicity of heterogenous demands’ and ‘internal differentiation of the group’ remains intact.Footnote 29
The difficulty arises when it comes to conceiving of the action required to achieve a ‘radicalization of democracy’.Footnote 30 Here Mouffe turns to the ‘citizen’ as the primary ‘social agent’.Footnote 31 It is ‘qua citizen that a social agent intervenes at the level of the political community’.Footnote 32 Mouffe goes on (again, aware of common objections) to argue that ‘it is at the national level that the question of radicalizing democracy must first be posed’ and where ‘a collective will to resist the post-democratic effects of neoliberal globalization should be constructed’.Footnote 33 Once that is achieved at the national level, ‘collaboration with similar movements in other countries can be productive’.Footnote 34 This is the case even as Mouffe recognises that ‘the struggle against neoliberalism cannot be won at the national level alone’ and must involve (in respect of Europe) alliances ‘at the European level’.Footnote 35 This focus on the national and regional arises because there is, for Mouffe, a strong affective (even libidinal) investment in those forms of identification which she thinks is unwise to abandon to right-wing populism.Footnote 36 While Mouffe argues that acting ‘qua citizen … does not mean discarding other forms of identification’ and that a ‘radical democratic citizenship encourages … a plurality of engagements’,Footnote 37 her argument centres the citizen and the state. And in part this seems a consequence of her attempt to thread the line between establishing a new hegemonic formation while maintaining liberal-democratic institutions, and of her focus on (and reification of) the institutions of liberal democracy in Western Europe. There is at least a tension, if not a conflict, between her centring of the citizen and the state, and her resistance to the essentialising and homogenising affects of national identity that lie at the heart of right-wing populism.
Arguably, this tension cannot be resolved within the terms of Mouffe’s analysis. At the root of this tension is the concession that we (or at least, the audience she addresses in western liberal democracies) live in a ‘populist moment’ within which the main fight is over the control, meaning, and purpose of the category of ‘the people’ or its most entrenched proxy, the nation-state. But for us it is not clear that responding to the rise of right-wing populism (within western liberal democracies and certainly not outside them) demands that we make that concession.
Of particular concern to us as scholars of international law is that Mouffe’s prioritisation of the contest within the state and about who ‘the people’ are closes off ways of thinking about and responding to the international dimensions of right-wing populism and neoliberalism – and especially the connections between the state and global corporations. In our view, the task of responding to the rise of populism requires something other than meeting populism on its own terms. In other words, breaking out of the intensifying cycle of rising inequality, environmental catastrophe, the social dislocation of neoliberalism, and authoritarian populism, requires an asymmetrical response. It requires us to maintain a concern with radical plurality by keeping one’s eye on the margins rather than at the centre.
What we do draw from Mouffe, however, is that the identification of a common adversary (or constellation of adversaries) is foundational to a collective anti-right-wing populist form of law and politics. It is this foundation which, among other things, avoids the need for collective actors to first determine their identity before engaging politically. In Mouffe’s (and Laclau’s) own terms, it provides a way of thinking through the operationalization of the ‘chain of equivalence’ between different groups and interests, and a structure for observing agonistic politics in action.Footnote 38 In the terms we will draw on here, we take it up as an invitation to think about forms and operations of solidarity. While a concern with solidarities between interest groups in view of a common adversary might seem obvious in a way, in respect of politics writ large, we think it has useful implications for thinking about the relationship between populism and international law. This is particularly true in the context of international law which gives primacy to the state as both its key subject and the source of its authority.
We turn to solidarity not because it is absent from Mouffe’s work generally, nor in her thinking about populism. We don’t seek to elevate solidarity as a master concept that might uniquely address the rise of populism. Instead, we seek to experiment with a particular articulation of solidarity which concentrates on the idea of collective action formed in the absence of (pre-existing) identities. It is the idea of political action in the absence of pre-existing identities (and not any magic in the word solidarity itself) that we find most helpful in trying to avoid the reifications of ‘people’ and ‘nation’ common to both right-wing populism and Mouffe’s Left Populism. Though one frequently sees calls for solidarity between nations, we take up the work of David Featherstone, who argues that solidarity itself is not necessarily already trapped by the logic of nationalism, nor the need to identify and act in the name of a singular people. In Section 9.3, we will explore how Featherstone’s concept of solidarity can help us to resist nationalist logics but at the same time offer potential modes of engaging with the international legal order. After setting out that conception of solidarity, we will situate that concept in the context of trans-national solidarities formed by way of opposition to the Adani conglomerate.
9.3 Solidarity from Below?
Before embarking on an analysis of solidarity as a conceptual frame for responding to right-wing populism which is not trapped by logics of ‘the people’ and the nation state, it is important to note that we are not disputing the importance of solidaristic practices between states in contesting unjust forms of international ordering, nor of particular processes or effects of neoliberalism or right-wing populism.Footnote 39 State-based organising originating from the Global South has been an important site of solidarity and challenge to imperialism and its legacies.Footnote 40 Recent examples of state led solidarities include Costa Rica’s ‘solidarity call to action’ on COVID-related medical technologiesFootnote 41 and perhaps the new, New International Economic Order.Footnote 42 South Africa’s application instituting proceedings against Israel before the International Court of Justice concerning violation of its obligations under the 1948 Genocide Convention in relation to Palestinian people in the Gaza Strip and the support for South Africa’s application from several other states (mainly, in the Global South) is another recent example of state–state solidarity.Footnote 43 South Africa’s action and the support for it has been described as reactivation of the South–South state based solidarity reminiscent of Third World internationalism of the 1950s–1970s and a challenge to the Global North.Footnote 44 The solidarity action is rooted in similar historical experiences of apartheid and colonialism in the Third World states, fostering a ‘collective consciousness’ among these states comparing their past struggles with the right of Palestinian people to self-determination.Footnote 45 This example also shows us how non-state solidarity activism can exert influence on state action.Footnote 46 As Erakat and Reynolds put it in relation to South Africa’s support for Palestine, ‘[t]he consistent commitment to this position at state level is also down to the strength of Palestine solidarity activism in South Africa through the unions and social movements.’Footnote 47 The state–state and non-state pro-Palestine solidarity movements have shown how the fight against imperialist-colonialist forces need not emanate from a single political space, but rather it gains strength through collective action of all those resisting the forces of imperialism. Thus, the focus of our analysis on solidarity practice outside the state is not opposed to state–state solidarity.Footnote 48
Instead, in this chapter we are interested in exploring forms of solidaristic trans-national organization and activity which are not centred on the primacy of the state as offering an important alternative yet simultaneous site of inquiry.Footnote 49 These modes experiment with trying to avoid the idea that, before collective action can occur, a fixed identity (state, nation or people) has first to exist or be constructed. One account of such forms of solidarity is given by David Featherstone in his Solidarity: Hidden Histories and Geographies of Internationalism.Footnote 50
Solidarity, in Featherstone’s account, is ‘a relation forged through political struggle which seeks to challenge forms of oppression’.Footnote 51 Two elements are crucial here. First, what is being forged is not primarily identity but relation. It is only in the relation (and not in advance of it) that new forms of ‘political identification’ are shaped.Footnote 52 Second, that relation is formed in the process of struggle against oppression.Footnote 53 Solidarity, in this account, is not a form of co-operation or co-ordination between powerful actors (such as states, even if they are hierarchically less powerful than other powerful actors), but a force able to be activated by those with less power.
For Featherstone, effective solidarity constructs and cements relations between places, diverse groups and activists. He identifies a ‘double sense’ in which ‘solidarities [are] made’. First, they are made through the creation of ‘political imaginaries link[ing] different parts of the world’.Footnote 54 That creation happens in the course of ‘translocal political organising’.Footnote 55 Second, they are made in the course of ‘contesting particular arrangements of social and material relations’. Solidarities, for Featherstone, do not ‘just produce abstracted political ideologies or identifications’. Rather, they are ‘interventions in the material relations between places’.Footnote 56 Through such action ‘agency … emerge[s] from below’. This kind of solidarity can be contrasted with a sense of solidarity that arises out of a given shared abstract conception, such as a ‘shared sense of “humanness”’.Footnote 57 Taken as a heuristic, it also helps us to avoid the reflex to find solidarities as existing only between people who are already alike,Footnote 58 or to look for them across patterns of identification. This way of understanding solidarity also foregrounds the creative, inventive character of practices of solidarity. Transnational solidaristic action offers a distinct way of configuring spaces and political relations and, therefore, is part of the ‘process of politicisation’.Footnote 59
In other words, what we might call solidarity from below arises from the creation of political imaginaries in the course of action and through contestation over particular social and material relations. As scholars and researchers, attending to this enables us to think about forms of transnational solidarity which might be capable of challenging the existing global social, political and economic relations without having first to imagine a transformation of power within the state or to limit ourselves to looking for movements which activate existing international structures.
A focus on practices and oppositional struggles, rather than essences or identities, also fosters an attentiveness to the contestations around the particular political formations and dynamics of specific instances of solidaristic practices, including their problematic aspects.Footnote 60 Understanding such ‘tensions and conflicts over how solidarities are constructed’ is, for Featherstone, a ‘necessary condition for a “politics of solidarity”’.Footnote 61 The ‘crucial set of questions’ which then emerges, are: (1) ‘What kinds of relations do [solidarities] generate between different actors?’; (2) ‘What kinds of power relations are crafted through solidarities?’; and (3) ‘What kinds of political trajectories do [solidarities] shape?’Footnote 62 For the scholar interested in studying solidarity from below, or for scholar-activists interested in supporting or even practising it, these questions can be both heuristic and strategic. In the remainder of this chapter, we will consider these three questions in the context of one example: transnational solidarities which have been created through the process of challenging the operations of the Adani group of companies in India, Sri Lanka, Australia and Germany.
9.4 The Adani Group and Its Rise
The Adani Group is a conglomeration of companies founded in 1988 by Gautam Adani.Footnote 63 Its headquarters are in Ahmedabad, Gujarat, and it has vast and varied operations in about 50 countries, including Australia, Bangladesh, Indonesia, Israel and Sri Lanka.Footnote 64 A person living in India cannot escape Adani. It is everywhere: edible oil, electricity, housing, fruits, water, education, news channels – the list is long.Footnote 65
Although the Adani group is vast, it has achieved its rise recently. In 2013, the group had 44 projects in India, centred on Gujarat. By 2018, the number of projects had grown to 92. In 2019, it was reported that it was present in more than 260 cities in India.Footnote 66 Until 2013, the Adani Group was confined mainly to sectors like energy and edible oil. It now covers significantly diversified business areas. At the start of 2014, Gautam Adani’s net worth was 7.1 billion dollars; it increased by 121 percent to 15.7 billion dollars by 2019.Footnote 67 In April 2022, Forbes reported that Adani has become the ‘richest Asian billionaire ever’ and ‘the world’s newest centi-billionaire’ joining ‘an elite group of just eight other business moguls – including Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, and Bill Gates’.Footnote 68 On 16 September 2022, Gautam Adani overtook Jeff Bezos to ‘briefly become’ the second richest person in the world, trailing behind only Elon Musk.Footnote 69
The turning point for Adani came in 2014, the year when the right-wing Bhartiya Janta Party (‘BJP’) led by Narendra Modi came to power in India.Footnote 70 Since then, the two men have risen together. Before Modi was elected as India’s Prime Minister, he was the chief minister of Gujarat, the home state of Adani. It is an open secret that Adani and Modi enjoy a close relationship.Footnote 71 When Modi was chief minister of Gujarat, Adani offered him both corporate backing and supported his electoral campaigns.Footnote 72 Even before Modi became India’s PM, there was speculation that his election would benefit the Adani group.Footnote 73 Opposition parties in India have consistently alleged that the Adani group enjoys Modi’s support, and they benefit each other.Footnote 74
Since his election, Modi’s foreign policies have facilitated Adani’s expansion.Footnote 75 In 2022, the chairman of Sri Lanka’s Electricity Board, MMC Ferdinando, claimed before a parliamentary committee that Modi ‘pressured’ Sri Lankan President G Rajapaksa to award a power project to the Adani group.Footnote 76 After the controversy erupted, an official document resurfaced revealing that Ferdinando was instructed by Rajapaksa to facilitate Adani projects.Footnote 77 However, within three days of making the statement, Ferdinando retracted it and quit his job.Footnote 78 Following this episode, on 17 June 2022, protests were held in Colombo against the alleged favour given to the Adani group in granting the energy project.Footnote 79
Adani’s association with right-wing populist political parties is not limited to India. Nor are its battles with indigenous peoples and destruction of environmentally sensitive lands. In 2010, Adani bought parts of the Galilee basin in Queensland in Australia. The basin contains an estimated 23 bn tonnes of coal.Footnote 80 Since then, with the support of the former Australian government, Adani developed the Carmichael coalmine and railway to the harbour. Carmichael is the largest coalmine in Australia and one of the largest in the world.Footnote 81 Despite extensive indigenous protest and NGO and direct-action campaigns against it, as well as numerous legal efforts to disrupt its progress, the mine started exporting coal at the end of 2021. Shipments take place through the environmentally vulnerable Great Barrier Reef.Footnote 82 The former government of Australia tended to a right-wing populist style. Both the then ruling Liberal Party (the conservative party in Australia) and One Nation, a significant minor party firmly in the right-wing populist camp, received extensive financial donations from the Adani group.Footnote 83 Further, Adani’s operations have been called out for assisting in the acts of genocide by Israel against Palestinians and Myanmar against Rohingyas.Footnote 84 For instance, amidst Israel’s assault on Gaza, it was credibly reported that a joint venture between Adani Defence & Aerospace and Israel-based Elbit Systems (Adani Elbit Advanced Systems India Limited) manufactured and delivered military drones to the Israeli military.Footnote 85
Adani’s meteoric rise would have been impossible without the collaboration of governments in its respective countries of operations. Friendly governments continue to facilitate its projects, tolerate their impacts on people and the environment and quell dissent. In each of Australia, India and Sri Lanka, the governments have both granted favours to the Adani group and ignored protestors’ demands. One example of this is ‘the 30-year, renewable leases [received from the Gujarat government] for as little as one U.S. cent a square meter (the rate maxed out at 45 cents a square meter)’.Footnote 86 Adani has ‘in turn sublet this land to other companies, including state-owned Indian Oil Co., for as much as $11 a square meter’.Footnote 87 Similarly, it was reported that, between 2005 and 2007, at least 1,200 hectares of grazing land in Gujarat was taken away from villagers and redirected to Adani concerns.Footnote 88 Modi was the chief minister of Gujarat during this period.
In Sri Lanka, Adani was able to bypass the competitive bidding process in obtaining a wind energy project.Footnote 89 Likewise, in Australia, then Prime Minister Scott Morrison granted environmental approval to Adani’s Carmichael coal mine and railway infrastructure project despite widespread opposition.Footnote 90 Similar allegations have been made in relation to Adani’s power project in Bangladesh.Footnote 91
Reflecting the symmetry of interest between the right-wing populist government of India and the Adani group, criticism of the company is often portrayed as ‘anti-Indian’. This was exemplified in a recent scandal in which Hindenburg Research, a New York based investment research firm, accused the Adani group of manipulating stock and engaging in fraudulent accounting on a grand scale, with significant market ramifications for the group’s value.Footnote 92 The Adani Group responded to the published report by asserting that it was ‘not merely an unwarranted attack on any specific company but a calculated attack on India, the independence, integrity and quality of Indian institutions, and the growth story and ambition of India’.Footnote 93 Just as populists such as Modi, or Australia’s Morrison claim that questioning their policies is ‘Anti-Indian’, or ‘un-Australian’, criticising the corporations they are intimately connected with is similarly attacked as anti-Indian, whether being unpatriotic for those within, or racist and colonial for those without. In this instance, despite facing questions from the members of Indian Parliament, activists and media, Modi remained silent on the issue.Footnote 94
There is a bigger story to be told here about the relationship between right-wing populist governments and global corporations in many countries. For the purposes of this chapter, we are treating the anti-Adani protests as a useful site to explore the explanatory power offered by Featherstone’s account. This is not to elevate that account as a transcendent measure. We take it up because of the political attraction of the historical examples he provides which centre on politically anti-racist, anti-capitalist solidarity. The non-nationalist frame he provides is part of its attraction in the repertoire of forms of action we might engage in or support in the struggle against right-wing populism. But it is analytically useful too because state–state solidarity has no purchase in an example directed towards pushing back against a politics structured around an embedded state–corporate relation.
9.5 Anti-Adani Protests as a Form of Solidarity from Below
Over the last decade, protests against the Adani group have been organized in several countries, including Australia, Sri Lanka, Germany and in several states of India.Footnote 95 Activists and tribal residents (Gond Adivasi) of the Hasdeo Aranya forest in Chhattisgarh have protested against the Adani group’s coal mining project on their lands.Footnote 96 They argue that mining will affect the biodiversity in the region and lead to the loss of livelihood, identity, and culture of the tribal residents. Similarly, the 2020–2021 Indian farmer’s protest around Delhi opposed the three farm laws passed by the Indian parliament on the basis that they put small farmers at the ‘mercy of corporates’.Footnote 97 In particular, farmers believed that the Adani group would benefit from the three farm laws.Footnote 98 After more than a year of protests in 2020–2021, parliament repealed the three laws. In Sri Lanka, protests took place against the alleged pressure by Modi on then Sri Lankan President Rajapaksa for granting Adani a wind energy project.Footnote 99 In Australia, protests have been held against the Adani Group’s Carmichael mining and rail project now for several years. Questions over Adani’s projects have also been raised in other countries, including Bangladesh, Indonesia and Myanmar.Footnote 100 In the Australian case, the protest rippled outward through the German engineering firm, Siemens’, decision to support the Adani coal mining project in Australia. Protestors in Germany demanded that Siemens reverse its decision.Footnote 101 Climate activists, including Thunberg, joined the fray, calling on Siemens to ‘stop, delay or at least interrupt’ the building of the Adani mine.Footnote 102
A cumulative assessment of the protests against Adani does not reveal one common cause. For the Adivasis, it is a demand for ‘jal (water), jungle (forests) and zameen (land)’, a popular slogan signifying the rights of tribal forest dwellers over forest resources in India. For the Indian farmers protesting against the three farm laws, it was a question of livelihood and a fight against the state and its neoliberal policies. The farmers’ protest has also been seen as presenting ‘an alternative vision of democracy’Footnote 103 and ‘defeat of populism’.Footnote 104 Sri Lankan protesters decried the ‘non-transparent and illegal’ deal that allowed Adani to avoid the competitive bidding process.Footnote 105 Australian protesters highlighted the way Adani’s coal project would desecrate the sacred land of the traditional owners, fuel climate change, wreck water resources and destroy the Great Barrier Reef.Footnote 106
While all these protests are directed against the activities of one corporation, at their core, they ask different questions and are concerned with diverse issues. For instance, the protests in Australia are concerned with the rights of indigenous people and the environment. In contrast, in Sri Lanka, it concerned arbitrary and non-transparent granting of a project to Adani. In India, it has involved land rights, environment protection, tribal rights and democratic deficit. Indeed, we find anti-Adani protestors conceiving their struggles differently, ranging from local and national to transnational. Thus, protests by indigenous people in India affected by the Adani projects have mainly been directed at redressing the immediate harm (such as land grabbing). In some instances, they see transnational opposition to Adani as a way to put pressure on the company to stop its activities in their region. For example, indigenous people protesting the Adani coal power plant in Godda, Jharkhand, have highlighted that the coal used for the project comes from Australia and called on people in Australia to protest against it.Footnote 107 This framing presents the call for the transnational boycott of Adani as an effective complement to their efforts to ameliorate their immediate concerns. Indeed, not in all cases do participants portray themselves as fighting against a transnational adversary or themselves as transnational actors. Following Featherstone, we want to hold on to this difference in anti-Adani protests and show how – within the limits of such difference – new forms of relationships have emerged between places, activists and diverse forms of social groups. Even though anti-Adani protests are not all alike, we show how the practices deployed in these protests (or at least in some of the protests) have forged real solidarity. Our analysis of anti-Adani protests pays attention to those ‘creative practices’ which have shaped new relations, linkages and connections.Footnote 108 This does not mean equating different groups, tactics or the forms of oppression they face. Rather, for us, it means paying attention to how links forged through their opposition to a common opponent ‘can open up new political terrains and possibilities’.Footnote 109 Practices that forge transnational links are more discernible in protests by some groups than others. In what follows, we draw out the practices that have forged solidarity across these very different groups.
9.5.1 Practices Producing Transnational Solidarity
The transnational solidarity between the protests has been constructed through different practices, strategies and techniques which bring together diverse concerns emerging from Adani projects. In addition to a common strategy of protest and demonstration across different places, one of the main practices that has shaped the solidarity between groups is sharing and disseminating knowledge about the activities of Adani and the revelation of common patterns of oppression that these activities continue to generate in different countries.
Through the practice of continuous sharing of information about the effects of Adani projects, the solidarity between different groups has been crafted as a political activity bringing together the voices of oppressed and marginalized people, and activists from different parts of the world. The compendium of knowledge encapsulating diverse experiences and opinions has actively produced and shaped the solidarity movement as based on shared opposition to the government/corporation nexus. In this sense, the solidarity of anti-Adani protests is a result of creative processes based on particular practices.Footnote 110 This solidarity has deepened with increased knowledge about the actions of governments and Adani in affecting the lives of ordinary people in different parts of the world.
One example of this is AdaniWatch, established by the Australian Bob Brown Foundation. AdaniWatch reports and brings together information regarding protests and concerns against the Adani group.Footnote 111 Its website offers a rich set of resources for people worldwide to know about Adani’s projects, their impacts and peoples’ movement. Similarly, a grassroots environmental movement, #Stop Adani in Australia, has been instrumental in raising concerns and organizing protests against the Adani group.Footnote 112 The activities of #Stop Adani and AdaniWatch have included collating and bringing together the concerns emerging from Adani’s project in different parts of India, Myanmar, Indonesia, Sri Lanka and Australia. Information sharing has been pivotal in exposing how Adani has generated its wealth and assets, revealing Adani’s close connection with governments and its associations with other companies. This has helped the solidarity movements to learn about and question the intimate state–corporation relationship.
The solidarity generated by and within anti-Adani protests is continuously strengthened by sharing knowledge about the ways in which Adani and governments are engaged in oppressing indigenous and marginalized people and causing damage to the environment. Knowledge sharing has helped understand linkages between different protest sites. One example of the way sharing information and strategies has formed more explicitly collaborative or joint activity is the 2021 global campaign by the Youth Action to Stop Adani (YAStA). YAStA brought together young people in India and Australia to protest against the Adani group. YAStA organized a week-long call to action involving more than 25 environmental youth organizations.Footnote 113 The Caravan magazine described the activities of various groups participating in YAStA in the following words:
These groups mobilised the public for weeks ahead of the scheduled date, urging people to participate in the global movement through their social-media pages. The action week comprised various online events, including a video screening of statements by individuals affected by Adani project sites in India and Australia, a playlist of songs of resistance and hope curated from across the world, a masterclass on art and activism, a documentary film festival on corporate crime, and a Q&A session with the writer Amitav Ghosh on climate fiction.Footnote 114
The solidarity fostered and expressed by YAStA involved engaging with the concerns of the people who suffered at the hands of Adani by bringing together different voices and looking at corporate oppression through the prism of resistance, art and fiction. These activities represented ‘passionate articulations of relations and connections’.Footnote 115 Similar forms of solidarity have been enacted from Australia.Footnote 116 For example, Australia’s #Stop Adani campaign came out with a statement declaring solidarity with the protesting Indian farmers in 2020.Footnote 117 Recently, protests have taken place outside the Indian High Commission in Australia and elsewhere against Adani’s project in Hasdeo forest, Chhattisgarh.Footnote 118 In addition to demonstrations, solidarity is expressed through statements, signature campaigns, online events and information sharing on websites and social media.Footnote 119 Paying attention to these practices ‘through which solidarities are constructed situates such practices as transformative’, in the sense that it helps ordinary people and activists make ‘political connections’ with those situated and struggling against government/corporation nexus in different parts of the world.Footnote 120
Sharing information between groups provides an opportunity to understand the practical ways in which the relationship between the corporate group and the respective states in which it operates affects peoples of all kinds.Footnote 121 Such a level of organization and information sharing has helped people engage with the concerns of Adani’s project worldwide, and to recognize the link between the local and transnational character of oppression. So, in the solidarity narrative, it is not an accident that indigenous peoples in Australia and India are being oppressed by the same corporation supported by the respective governments and state institutions. Practices of informational solidarity have brought to light the fact that the coal extracted from the Carmichael mine is planned to be used by Adani in the proposed Godda power station in Jharkhand to produce electricity.Footnote 122 The electricity produced at the Godda plant will be exported to Bangladesh.Footnote 123 Thus, Adani’s operations in Queensland (Australia), Jharkhand (India) and Bangladesh are directly connected through the coal supply chain.Footnote 124
The solidarity created amongst global anti-Adani protesters has also engendered practical and tactical techniques in fighting Adani. The activist groups in different places have urged other global and local corporations to join them in opposing Adani’s projects. The Stop Adani movement in Australia demands that investors withdraw their investments from Adani projects in Australia. It maintains a webpage containing information as precise as the list of companies that have invested in Adani’s Carmichael project and those that have ruled out investing.Footnote 125 Similarly, protests against Siemens in Germany, calling upon it to ‘stop, delay or at least interrupt’ the building of the Adani mine in Carmichael, reveal the different strategies and practices the movement has called on to subvert the Adani-State project in a transnational sense.Footnote 126
9.5.2 Practices Generating (Non-essentialist/Plural) Relationships
The solidarities emerging from the anti-Adani protest offer a compendium of relationships between ordinary people and activists sensitive to environmental concerns, indigenous peoples’ rights and pathologies of neoliberalism. The solidarity against Adani’s activities exemplifies the idea that solidarities need not emanate from likeness between activists, places or social groups. The solidarity movement has not just attracted and brought together pre-existing communities. Instead, the protests involve(d) people divided by culture, language, geography, nationality and borders. What unites them is the common opponent. Their immediate concerns and ambitions are different and yet they are united against the form of oppression effected through corporate-state relationships. The protests have provided a stimulus for activists to bring together and look at all anti-Adani protests through a similar lens – that is, as a struggle against a corporation backed by a populist government. This has helped people connect to each other’s concerns and forge a transnational relationship. Thus, the civil rights network, the National Alliance of People’s Movement (NAPM), extending its support to YAStA, noted that: ‘YAStA made it possible to hear voices that are central to the ground resistance against Adani’s excesses: people from Godda (Jharkhand), Kattupalli (Tamil Nadu), Goa, Mundra (Gujarat), Vizhinjam (Kerala), Kavalappara (Kerala), from the Farmers’ Protests (Delhi), and Juru Country (Queensland, Australia), united by their struggle against corporate oppression.’Footnote 127
The solidarity emerging from these protests has crafted a relationship based on common terms, even if the immediate demands of protestors differed across locations. First, by making central the struggle against a specific instance of the state-corporation nexus and its varied forms of adverse effects (ranging from environment degradation, indigenous peoples’ rights, democratic deficit and lack of transparency and state violence). Second, by contesting existing material relations that shape that specific instance. The examples of various demonstrations across the world against Adani projects, demanding that investors not fund Adani projects, or asking governments to re-examine Adani projects (such as, recently, in Bangladesh)Footnote 128 shows how solidarity has emerged through the consistency of the challenge to the particular forms of material relations that benefit Adani and particular populist political leaders.
Slowing down these stories of resistance against Adani’s activities allows us to focus on ‘the generative, transformative character of solidarity and how solidaristic practices can shape new relations, new linkages, new connections’ by contrast to ‘accounts where the practices and identities through which solidarities are enacted are seen as primarily “given”’.Footnote 129 This introduces us to the idea of solidarity as a creative practice, rather than one based on similarities or dissimilarities of those expressing it. The relationship between anti-mining protesters in Australia, Adivasis and grassroots activists in India or environmentalists in Germany and elsewhere did not predate the struggle. The solidarity among anti-Adani protests has produced a new kind of relationship that did not previously exist or, rather, hasn’t existed in this form – against the activities of one ‘public–private partnership’ or global conglomerate and its state partners. Indeed, this relationship is significantly shaped by and benefitted from the current form of organizing through social media.Footnote 130
The new relations, linkages and connections forged through this solidarity also express non-state forms of relations. The solidarities emerging from the anti-Adani protests show that activists did not tie the identity of the participants with the state from which they come. The mere fact Adani is an Indian company and enjoys proximity with the state institutions in India has not stopped activists in Australia and elsewhere from showing solidarity with the people and groups in India which have suffered at the hands of Adani. These protests reflect transnational solidarity with the indigenous people suffering at the hands of Adani and the state.
The solidarity expressed symbolically challenges a unitary idea of the state, which treats the state as a single unified entity and as representing all identities and groups living within it. Thus, the solidarity of anti-Adani protests in India is based on the realization of plural forms of interests and relations operating within a territory and the tensions underlying them. The solidarity movement does not craft a transnational relationship based on a shared identity, but a shared opposition and concerns emerging from the state–corporation nexus.
These shared concerns allow people in different parts of the world to relate to plural forms of social and cultural practices. For instance, Adani Watch in Australia, in a June 2022 report on the protest by the tribal people against Adani’s Godda (Jharkhand) coal-power station, described how the protest gathering began with a prayer. It described that: ‘[t]he gathering started with a prayer to Marang Buru, the first all-powerful ancestor, by whose grace the Santhal Adivasis of the area believe all life exists’.Footnote 131 By paying attention to the social and cultural practices of the oppressed groups, solidarities emanating from anti-Adani protests forged a relationship between them. A documentary by the Stop Adani movement on the Godda power plant shows how the tribal people (Santhal) opposing it were targeted by police officials. The documentary shows a retired teacher affected by the Adani project, stating that ‘land is essential to the Santhal people. It is an intrinsic part of their culture’.Footnote 132 This resonates with the situation in Australia, where the Queensland government extinguished native title over 1 385 hectares of Wangan and Jagalingou country for the Adani project.Footnote 133 The Guardian newspaper reported that this was done without any public announcement of the decision and that the police forcibly removed protesters from their traditional lands.Footnote 134 By displacing indigenous people from their land in Queensland, Godda and elsewhere, the Adani projects attack the heart of their respective cultures. The solidarity between anti-Adani protesters brings very different people together by fashioning common linkages, political struggles and knowledges. By paying attention to stories such as these from Godda and Queensland, we can see that the solidarity movement has crafted non-state forms of relationship standing in opposition to common, conjoined, oppressors – the (populist) state and corporation.
9.5.3 Power Relations Crafted through Solidarity
The relation forged through the solidarity between anti-Adani protesters could also be seen as generating a form of political power against corporate oppression and state collusion. This form of power questions the idea of the state as the primary site of political power. It crafts an alternative form of solidaristic–political power that stands outside the state and challenges its actions. This form of power is shaped by the knowledge that the state is not a monolithic-unitary entity which equally furthers the interests of all classes living within it. The close association between Adani and the Modi government in particular shows, in very practical terms, how the state prioritizes the interests of the corporate class over marginalized and oppressed groups within the same state.
And so, the movement doesn’t produce the state–corporation nexus as merely an abstract argument. Instead, it pays attention to the craft, techniques and idioms through which the state–corporation relationship is brought into operation. It exposes the institutional façade and ‘legal’ regulations that hide the intimacies between ruling power and corporate bosses. The knowledge about the state–corporation nexus crafted the anti-Adani solidarity movement as not being shaped by state-centric visions. It showcased the Indian state, headed by a populist leader, as an adversary of marginalized peoples rather than an ally.
This transnational form of power relations is not just shaped by the knowledge about the close nexus between the Indian state and Adani. It is also a reaction to the globalization of the corporation. The more Adani has globalized its corporate power, the more resistance to it has trans-nationalized. The activists from various places have been able to draw the connections between Adani’s activities in different parts of the world and show how its operations raise similar concerns everywhere, ranging from damage to the environment to encroaching on lands of indigenous and poor people. Adani’s operation in Myanmar reveals that the group had business arrangements with the Myanmar military – ‘the Tatmadaw’. It has been reported that Adani’s port project on the Yangon River in Myanmar involved an agreement with Myanmar Economic Cooperation (MEC), a company owned and controlled by the Myanmar military. Adani Watch notes that the project ‘has drawn vehement criticism from human-rights groups and experts. The criticism arises from the Myanmar military’s genocidal persecution of the Rohingya people, the illegal coup of February 2021, and the subsequent killing of hundreds of civilian protesters’.Footnote 135 The political relation generated through the solidarity with anti-Adani protest is crucial in bringing together these stories from different parts of the world and exposing how a state-centric form of political power has benefitted a corporation.
Understanding the close nexus between state and corporation also means that the political power generated through the solidarity movement strives to find solutions to local and global problems through non-state-centric forms of association. The creation of this new power relation opposing the activities of Adani and the states has tried to find the solution to environmental concerns and indigenous peoples’ rights through various means and practices. Thus, during the United Nations Climate Conference in Glasgow, ‘mass rallies, disruptive protests, media capturing stunts, and powerful stories told in locations across the world from the Pacific Islands, the British Isles, throughout Asia, and North America’ were planned.Footnote 136 They were ‘all united with a mission to push the global investment sector to defund the fossil fuel industry’.Footnote 137 Australia’s Stop Adani campaign described it as a way to push investors to stop investing in Adani’s project.Footnote 138 These activities demonstrate the challenge to states and corporations as the primary actors in making and influencing laws. The solidarity forged through anti-Adani protests gives us a glimpse of how law-making can be influenced from below without attaching oneself to the state-form (irrespective of the success such solidarity practices may engender). The power relations generated through anti-Adani protests offers a potential model of resistance, based on the practices of progressive civil society groups and activists, on varied concerns emerging from the state–corporation intimacy.
9.6 Conclusion: Political Trajectories
We have used this chapter to explore some of the political possibilities for transnational solidarity today, and in particular as a site of action for left responses to right-wing populism. We have tried to sketch an example of the corporate–state nexus in the global political economy that produces the dislocations that populism feeds on. And we hope that the example highlights answers to the questions we posed about ‘solidarity from below’, and the possibilities for trans-national (and non-national) forms of solidaristic action that can accommodate many different peoples and the different roles they play, into its capacious forms of action against those economic dislocations.Footnote 139
For us, the promise of such forms exemplified by the solidarity forged through anti-Adani protests is the lack of dependence on inter-state relations. To us they seem to disrupt, or at least avoid rehearsing the boundaries created by states. National identities do not dictate the organization of the solidarity movement. A fitting example with which to close is perhaps the way coalitions of actors have organized around the activities of Adani that have endangered the indigenous rights of people ‘within’ different states. #Stop Adani notes that:
Adani’s coal project will violate the rights of Indigenous people along the entire chain of production. Adani are ripping the heart out of Wangan and Jagalingou country to build their coal mine. Adani’s coal trains would run through Juru, Jaanga and Birri country – threatening sacred sites. Finally, Adani’s coal would be burned in Godda, Jharkhand, where Adani are brutally displacing thousands of Indigenous Adivasi people to build a new coal station and burn Australian coal.Footnote 140
Recognizing these common patterns of corporate–state violence against indigenous people in Australia and India helps us understand that a significant part of the battles for a more equal world are over rival claims to authority. The power to make and remake worlds takes place not through the exercise of raw ‘power’ but through practices of authorization. The #Stop Adani quote asserts that one form of authority is being asserted over rival laws and forms of authority, and that rivals are forcibly displaced.Footnote 141 The solidarity movement more broadly has brought into focus the practices and techniques through which a blended state–corporate authority is being asserted and exercised over other forms of law. In so doing, it has also created awareness about the continuing existence of those rival laws and distinct ways of relating to nature and the environment. One member of the tribal community in Chhattisgarh (India) forcefully described this link: ‘“Mining will be our death,” he said. “It is going to devastate everything nature has given us. One-time compensation for the land is not enough – we need much more than money to survive. We need nature to be with us”’.Footnote 142
The solidarity generated through anti-Adani protests has not only recognized rival worlds and laws but in so doing constructs a rival form of association not dictated by state-centrism. This form of association and the practices involved are built on the concern of various groups affected by Adani projects and help to reveal a way of undoing the hegemony of the current political and economic order without falling back on the state and the figure of the citizen which are integral parts of that order. It suggests that the concerns relating to environmental degradation, indigenous rights, democratic deficit and institutional transparency, which are not exclusive to right-wing populist politics but are intensified by it, do not have to be, and probably will not, be solved only through the medium of state power. In a way, these practices of solidarity perform a warning against conflating state power with people’s power in the course of trying to articulate a left response to right-wing populism. They show that, while the political formations of citizen and state may remain important (including as sites of solidaristic practice), they should not be understood as the sole or primary formations from which to address the transnational challenges posed or intensified by right-wing populism. But this one example does not prescribe a blueprint for action. Instead, and most usefully, it shows how solidaristic practices forge new power relations, engage different conceptions of authority and law and prefigure, imagine and enact new worlds.
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