Abstract
How can one explain the striking discrepancy between the globalisation - during the eighties on a planetary scale - of practices formerly identified with new social movements in the West and the `pessimism' of the theories which usually do not even include in their field these new movements? This discrepancy is due to the application to the movements of the eighties of a conceptual framework worked out for the movements of the seventies. Hence the necessity of a new conceptual framework, which is developed here through the analysis of the contemporary peace movement and applied to the various other movements which have emerged recently around international issues. The paper proposes, first, to analyse the peace movement as a problem-centred, three-dimensional movement which is aimed at the conflictualisation of the security issue and engenders a double process of citizen empowerment and alternative problem-solving. Through this analysis it brings to light, secondly, the new pattern of social movement and the new mechanisms of social change, in order to develop, finally, a new definition of contemporary society as self-creative society, characterised by its auto-creativity: by its new capacity to invent and realise, and therefore to choose, its own futures in an autonomous manner. The central argument concerns this new paradigm and the question `what is at stake' in self-creative society. Through this new definition, the paper seeks to offer a genuinely new manner in which to address the problem concerning the centrality of new social conflicts and the unity of social movements in our self-creative global society.
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