Marianne Maeckelbergh is Professor of Global Sociology at the Institute for Cultural Anthropology and Development Sociology at Leiden University. Her research explores alternative practices and theories of democracy, responses to economic crises, global social movements, digital citizenship, and independent media infrastructures. Her early work raises questions about how democratic values change when practiced on a global scale through network structures instead of nation-states by taking seriously prefigurative politics as a strategy of social change within the alterglobalisation movement. Since the start of the economic crisis, her work has focussed on the growing distrust of representative democracy and capitalism that is being expressed transnationally. She explores the shared history and practices of multiple struggles across geographic distance (e.g. Egypt, Greece, Spain, Turkey, the UK and the US), as well as how each location's particular history shapes the movements' trajectories. The research has been disseminated through written publications and through the online film series www.GlobalUprisings.org. From fall 2018 onwards, she will lead an ERC-funded research project on eviction and the impact of property regimes (moral discourses, market mechanisms and policy regulations of real landed property) on lived experiences of democratic citizenship across five countries (Greece, the Netherlands, Spain, the UK, and the US).

Publications Selection:

Maeckelbergh, M. (2009) The Will of the Many: How the Alterglobalisation Movement is Changing the Face of Democracy (London: Pluto Press). Part of the prestigious Anthropology, Culture and Society series.

Maeckelbergh, M. (2011) “Doing is Believing: Prefiguration as Strategic Practice in the Alterglobalization Movement” Social Movement Studies 10(1): 1-20.

Maeckelbergh, M. (2012) “Horizontal Democracy Now: From Alterglobalization to Occupation” Interface: the journal of and for social movements 4(1): 207–234.

Maeckelbergh, M. (2013) “Learning from Conflict: Innovative Approaches to Democratic Decision-Making in the Alterglobalization Movement” Transforming Anthropology 21(1): 27-40.

Maeckelbergh, M. (2016) “Politics after Democracy” in Nick Long, Joanna Cook and Henrietta Moore (eds) The State We're In. Oxford: Berghahn Press.

Maeckelbergh, M. (2016) “Whose Ethics?: Negotiating Ethics and Responsibility in the Field” in Othon

Alexandrakis (ed.) Impulse to Act: A New Anthropology of Resistance and Social Justice. Indiana University Press.

Maeckelbergh, M. (2016) The Prefigurative Turn: The Time and Place of Social Movement Practice’ In AC Dinerstein (ed.) Social Sciences for An-Other politics: Women theorising without parachutes,Palgrave Macmillan: London-New York  (pp. 121-135) 


Maeckelbergh, M. (2017) “Social Movements as Process” in Simon Coleman, Ann Kingsolver and Susan Hyatt (eds) Routledge Companion to Contemporary Anthropology. London: Routledge.