The Politics of Space in the Bolivarian Alliance for the Peoples of Our America - Peoples’ Trade Agreement (ALBA-TCP): Transnationalism, the Organised Society, and Counter-hegemonic Governance

This article shows that counter to the common representation of the Bolivarian
Alliance for the Peoples of Our America–Peoples’ Trade Agreement (ALBA–TCP) as simply a bloc of nation-states, the initiative in fact constitutes a counter-hegemonic globalization project that operates through inter- and transnational processes across a range of (spatial) scales, from the local to the global. I draw on John Agnew’s notion of the ‘territorial trap’ and theories of regionalism and globalization to analyse the transnational and pluri-scalar construction of the ALBA–TCP in Nicaragua (2004–2007) and El Salvador (2004–2010), to argue that the mobilization and empowerment gains associated with these processes are an
important element in the construction of what is referred to as the ‘organized society’. As a politics of space and scale, the ALBA–TCP governance regime is sketched out, in which an emergent transnationally organized society integrates via the ALBA–TCP Council of Social Movements in the quest for progressive regional and global transformation.