Introduction: The Challenges of Democracy, Development and Popular Movements

The peoples’ movement was a movement to deepen citizenship and democracy by demanding actual participation in representative politics. It was a non-violent democratic movement based on independence from political parties, collective informal leadership and multi-level horizontal networking and coordination. It was strengthened by the activists from the student movement, trade unions and working-class parties. It foregrounded issues related to debt and development, Global North–South dynamics, narrowing of representative politics and the role of democratic social movements. The peoples’ movement, ‘Aragalaya’, illustrated that solidarity, cultivated across multiple cultural, economic and political differences, while engaging locally with a global sense, can influence authoritarian militarised governments. In effect, the struggle for democracy and citizenship aimed at transforming representative politics also accompanied alternative notions of well-being and pleasures involving ‘living well together with others’ in harmony with nature.