Latent structure of a text

./english/41.txt:26:On Saturday morning, I ran from one seminar to the other: At the seminar “From Marx by way of Poulantzas to Rosa Luxemburg”, there was, although apart from me also Michael Krätke had obtained no radio, and despite our clearly expressed wish, no consecutive translation from the Greek, so that first Krätke and then I had to leave. The seminar on G-8 took its expected course: Scots reported on their protests last year, Boris Kagarlitsky invited activists to Russia, Hugo Braun and Pedram Shayar (Attac) presented the campaign planned for next year on occasion of the G-8 meeting in Heiligendamm. Then to finish off, I still listened in on a seminar on the future of Europe with Elisabeth Gauthier (also from Transform!) who later on the way to the demonstration told me that a speaker from Turkey there had really been involved in acts of violence (following the Charta of Porto Alegre, activists advocating and practising violence are actually not allowed to speak at Social Forums).

./english/41.txt:72:Le samedi matin, je courus d’un séminaire à l’autre : Au séminaire « De Marx par Poulantzas à Rosa Luxemburg », il n’y avait pas, bien que Michael Krätke aussi à part moi n’avait pas obtenu de radio, et en dépit de notre demande clairement exprimée, pas d’interprétation consécutive du Grec, si bien que d’abord Krätke et puis moi étaient forcés de repartir. Le séminaire sur les G-8 prit son cours attendu : des Scots rapportaient de leurs protestations l’année dernière, Boris Kagarlitsky invita des activistes à venir en Russie, Hugo Braun et Pedram Shayar (Attac) présentèrent la campagne envisagée pour l’année prochaine en occasion de la rencontre des G-8 à Heiligendamm, puis à la fin, je écoutai encore un petit bout d’un séminaire sur l’avenir de l’Europe avec Élisabeth Gauthier (aussi de Transform !) qui après, en route à la manifestation, me raconta que l’un des orateurs de ce séminaire, de Turquie, avait réellement été impliqué dans des actes de violence (suivent la Charte de Porto Alegre, des activistes prêchant et pratiquant la violence n’ont à vrai dire pas la permission de parler à des Forums Sociaux).

./english/42.txt:14:1. As many of you know the Migrant Network discussed already some months ago an intervention at the Aliens Police in Athens. The plan was to protest in front of the station. Since the Aliens Police changed its headquarter and moreover declared that they would close the whole department during the ESF days it was decided to visit another police station.

./english/42.txt:16:The Repression Network considered this as an opportunity to strengthen the cooperation with the Migrants Network and to show our practical solidarity with the migrants as one of the most oppressed parts of the population. We also decided to go into the station to express our protest there.

./english/42.txt:20:A commission of the ones inside of the station went to the chief of the station to protest against the mistreatment of the migrants but decided not to talk any further, when the Special Intervention Forces entered the police station. These young men were very angry, threatened us and beat some of us (without badly injuring anybody). They tried to push us out of the police station but stopped this when other policemen urged them to calm down and stay where they are.

./english/42.txt:34:That means that we have seen with our own eyes exactly what we were protesting against. The press reported about it the next day.

./english/42.txt:84:Because of this, activists of the network against repression and activists of the migration network together, protested in a Greek police station, protested against how the Greek police humiliates migrants.

./english/44.txt:118:Because of this, activists of the Network Against Repression and of the Migration Network protested in an Athens police station against the humiliation of migrants by the Greek police.

./english/44.txt:248:When San Salvador Atenco’s citizens protested against violence, police brutality went beyond limits. A 14-year old boy was killed, a 30-year old man now lies clinically dead and there are 110 injured people and 213 have been arrested. Most of them are members of the FPDT (Frente por la defensa de la tierra) which had signed the Sixth Declaration of the Lacandona jungle and participates in the “Other Campaign”.

./english/46.txt:6:While we are facing increasing political intervention by churches and religious fundamentalisms are on the rise in Europe, leading to a dramatic undermining of women's rights and, in spite of the warnings from feminist organizations, such as the World March of Women, towards the organizing committee of the European Social Forum, some of the workshops gave the floor to organizations or speakers who support values contrary to the Porto Alegre Charter and to women's rights. The Women's Assembly of the 4th ESF which met in Athens protests vividly against this situation.

./english/47.txt:47:• Set up a large unitary mobilisation protesting against violence against women at a

./english/62.txt:90:2. In fact, researchers are employees, employers and/or something in between. Most of those researchers dealing with social movements also are activists and/or activist researchers. Therefore the boundaries make no sense if to construct some kind of teacher-pupil relationship regarding research and social movements. Social movements, protest and other kinds of demanding a better world from below are crossing the academic/public education sector since ever. This means that we all must remind that the political struggle also takes place in the academic area. Researchers can not exclude themselfes from their "objects" social movements believing that they are not part of the problem. Spoken for the german case this means too, that doing social movement research in times of privatization and neoliberal restructuring of the academic sector somehow should mean too that we must struggle that social movements and their causes remain on the academic agenda. I think young researchers should be aware about their own precarity, we should be more critical towards our place. Universities and the academic institutions get more and more places for the production of elites, they get more and more a mixture of bureaucratic nightmares, neoliberal thinking and precarious working conditions.

./english/147.txt:109:Over the next few years, hundreds of grassroots organizations from every continent participated in the global days of action called by the PGA, and attended global and regional conferences. The PGA built a communicative structure that linked a wave of direct action protests across the planet. United around their rejection of neo-liberal policy and institutions and their refusal to engage in traditional lobbying, the organizations that participated in PGA appeared to have little else in common. Challenged by their differences in resources, organizational culture, and coalition experience, and yet pressured to act, they resisted the “iron law of oligarchy” to build a model that would remain both egalitarian and cohesive.

./english/150.txt:10:Euromarch has developed into a network of activists who are organised under the auspices of a pan-European secretariat based in Paris with liaison committees operating in countries throughout the continent. Policy is debated and demands are formulated at open »Assizes« which are held at approximately 6 monthly intervals. Regular coordination meetings are held at national and pan-European levels and these have tended to focus on declarations and organisational matters for the protest activities which have surrounded the EU summits in Amsterdam, Luxemburg (November 1997), Cardiff (June 1998), Vienna (December 1998) and in Cologne (June 1999).

./english/150.txt:18:As is the watchword of progressive movements, after the debate is over all actions need to have the unified activity of all participants. However it is the diversity of activities which has come to characterise the struggles of groups which come under the Euromarch umbrella. Action at a European level has also had a catalytic effect on national activities, for example the Amsterdam demonstration provided the impetus for the campaigns of the French unemployed movement in the winter of 1997, and this activity then fed back into the Euromarch organisation which has a strong French presence. The large number of occupations of unemployment offices played a central role in the French campaign and challenged the Labour Minister, Martine Aubry, who ridiculed the movement and claimed that the occupations were the actions of a tiny minority. In Germany there were fewer occupations but more regional and local demonstrations which coincided with the monthly publication of unemployment figures. This served to keep the issue of unemployment a prominent one, especially in the run up to the national elections. In Spain, the unemployed also took to the streets but this time to form blockades to draw attention to their situation and to the increasingly casualised nature of work where 90% of all new contracts are temporary. In Italy the unemployed and other people living in precarious situations, who have become known as the »Invisibles«, have asserted their right to free transport. In the run up to the 1997 demonstration this took the form of an occupation of trains and the successful demand to be taken to Amsterdam. Euromarch has also played a part in linking struggles and this was highlighted at the Cardiff summit where the demonstration was followed by a street party protest organised with the assistance of the »Reclaim the Streets« organisation.

./english/150.txt:19:A significant aspect of the protests has been their cross-national dimension. Activists from across the continent have been present at the nationally based actions and they have been able to draw attention to the commonality of the diverse struggles. Resistance to the introduction of »Workfare« style programmes has received an echo in the actions from across the continent and it is this common resistance that has enabled bridges to built between the various groups and struggles both within and across national boundaries. This bridge building was symbolised by the joint activity of unemployed activists to span the bridge at Strasbourg in May 1998. [2]

./english/161.txt:4:were met with counter-summits, protests and blockades. The focus of this book

./english/161.txt:9:repetition in a series of protests that has already produced many books? This

./english/161.txt:17:In 1999, the protests against the World Trade Organization in Seattle

./english/161.txt:20:mix of protesters (trade unions and environmentalists, anarchists and commu-

./english/161.txt:25:out in protest tactics, in particular the attitudes towards the window-smashing

./english/161.txt:26:tactics of the ‘black bloc’. A year later, the Prague anti-IMF and World Bank protests

./english/161.txt:28:of the protesters according to their preferred levels of confrontation. This

./english/161.txt:50:geographically dispersed sites of blockades and protests. And, more fundamentally,

./english/161.txt:68:and decrees as illegitimate any protests outside that framework (setting forth a

./english/161.txt:71:escape this trap. Over seven days, a series of protests and events refused the script

./english/161.txt:123:moment of focus for the week of protests, allowing us to channel our energies

./english/161.txt:139:participate in the protests, as well as many of those who did, and making

./english/161.txt:162:protest tactics played a very important role in the Genoa events and much

./english/161.txt:168:of the protesters by moving beyond the dichotomous roles of ‘violent’ and ‘legitimate’

./english/161.txt:169:protester. From another angle they be can understood as part of an attempt,

./english/161.txt:189:representation of the movements and networks protesting against the summit,

./english/161.txt:200:of movements and society at large! The effect of our protests on the G8’s policies

./english/161.txt:204:Us Be! Reflection on the protests is just a point around which we think we can see

./english/161.txt:207:new worlds that felt so possible during the week of protests and generalise them

./english/161.txt:213:summit. Protests took place across central Scotland and the period of counter-mobilisation

./english/162.txt:5:Among the events of recent history, few have been as surprising, as full of enigmas, as the coordinated world demonstrations known as the Global Days of Action. Immediately upon their appearance, they overflowed the organization that had called them into being: the People's Global Action (PGA), founded in Geneva in February of 1998. (1) This transnational network of resistance had adopted a new concept of solidarity advanced by the Zapatistas, who encouraged everyone to take direct action at home, against the system of exploitation and oppression which they described as neoliberalism. As early as the month of May, 1998, the PGA helped spark demonstrations against the WTO whose effectiveness lay both in their simultaneity and in their extreme diversity: street parties in some 30 cities around the world, on May 16; four days of protest and rioting in Geneva, beginning that same day; a 50,000-strong march that reached Brasilia on May 20; protests all over India after a huge demonstration in Hyderabad against the WTO on May 2. The following year, London Reclaim the Streets launched the idea of a "carnival against capital" in financial centers across the world for the day of the G8 summit, June 18: there were actions in over 40 cities, including a ten-thousand-strong "carnival of the oppressed" by Niger Delta peoples against transnational oil companies. In the face of transnational capitalism, a networked resistance was born, local and global, tactical and strategic: a new kind of political dissidence, self-organized and anarchist, diffusely interconnected and operating only from below, yet able to strike at the greatest concentrations of power. What is the strength of such movements? The improbable and serious appeal to a "do-it-yourself geopolitics": a chance for personal involvement in the transformation of the world.

./english/162.txt:13:Two British critics, Anthony Davies and Simon Ford, posed exactly those questions, with direct reference to art. They pointed to the way that artistic practice was tending to integrate with London's financial economy, particularly through the vector of specially designed "culture clubs" where artists sought new forms of sponsorship and distribution, while businessmen looked for clues on how to restructure their hierarchical organizations into cooperative teams of creative, autonomous individuals: "We are witnessing the birth of an alliance culture that collapses the distinctions between companies, nation states, governments, private individuals – even the protest movement," the two critics claimed. (3) They perceptively drew a link between contemporary artistic experiments – those dealing with the use and appropriation of complex signs and tools, or with the catalysis of interactions between free individuals – and the politicized street parties of the late 1990s. But their analysis opposed these new movements, not to transnational capitalism, but to the outdated world of pyramid-shaped hierarchical organizations. Thus their image of the June 18 carnival: "On the one hand you have a networked coalition of semi-autonomous groups and on the other, the hierarchical command and control structure of the City of London police force. Informal networks are also replacing older political groups based on formal rules and fixed organizational structures and chains of command. The emergence of a decentralized transnational network-based protest movement represents a significant threat to those sectors that are slow in shifting from local and centralized hierarchical bureaucracies to flat, networked organizations."

./english/162.txt:17:Conceived at the outset of the year 2000, this alliance theory was mainly concerned with distinguishing a "new economy" from the old one. It combined a network paradigm of organization, as promoted by Manuel Castells, (4) with a description of the culturalization of the economy, as in British cultural studies. But what it demonstrated was more like an "economization of culture." Everything seemed to be swirling together: "In a networked culture, the topographical metaphor of 'inside' and 'outside' has become increasingly untenable. As all sectors loosen their physical structures, flatten out, form alliances and dispense with tangible centers, the oppositionality that has characterized previous forms of protest and resistance is finished as a useful model."

./english/162.txt:21:These kinds of remarks, which came from many quarters, were already confusing for the movements. But they took on an even more troubling light when the Al Qaeda network literally exploded into world consciousness. On the one hand, the unprecedented effectiveness of the S11 action seemed to prove the superiority of the networked paradigm over the command hierarchies associated with the Pentagon and the Twin Towers. But at the same time, if any position could be called "oppositional," it was now that of the Islamic fundamentalists. Their successful attack appeared to validate both the theory of a decisive transformation in organizational structures, and Samuel Huntington's theory of the "clash of civilizations." Suddenly the protest movement could identify neither with the revolutionary form of the network, nor with the oppositional refusal of the capitalist system. Loud voices from the right immediately seized the opportunity to assimilate the movement to terrorism. And to make matters worse, the financial collapse that the movement had predicted effectively happened, from the summer of 2000 onwards, casting suspicion over everything associated with the dot-com bubble – including all the progress in democratic communication. At the same time, the secret services of the most powerful countries, and especially the US, declared themselves ready to meet the challenge of the networks, by giving themselves new capacities for autonomy, horizontality, interlinkage. (5) The difficulty of situating a networked resistance to capitalism within a broader spectrum of social forces thus became enormous – as it still is today.

./english/162.txt:42:This situation of suspended crisis appears likely to spread, leaving open, at least for a time, the possibility of very different responses. The illusions of the 1990s, however, are definitely over. The collapse of the stock markets, and the economic slowdown that has followed, brings a threat of deflation, unemployment and exclusion to bear on most of the world's populations. Under current political conditions, the only possible response seems to be a strengthening of the barriers that separate the privileged classes from all the others – and this, even within the richest countries. The new military posture of the United States, while directly motivated by the September 11 attacks, also represents an attempt to restructure society, and to institute a new form of discipline in the face of the void that has been left by the collapse of the speculative bubble. It is in this way that the ideological version of economic flexibility meets its own limits. This shift toward heightened military and police control takes away much of the legitimacy that flexible modes of management were able to confer on capitalist society. Still the opportunistic model of the flexible personality will probably continue to orient the behavior of privileged individuals for years yet to come, even as it subjects them to strong contradictions. Under such conditions, the various forms of resistance to capitalism will clearly intensify, not least because they find a vital energy in the feeling of absolute necessity brought on by the crisis. Now I want to deal specifically with one such form of resistance: the resistance to the privatization of knowledge, the fourth "fictive commodity" whose importance Polanyi had not yet measured. It is through the cooperative production of immaterial knowledge that we will rejoin the enigma of the networked protests.

./english/162.txt:52:The notion of the commons refers back to the same pre-capitalist history that Polanyi had invoked; and it does so in the context of what some are calling the "second enclosure movement," resulting in the extension of intellectual property rights, or the privatization of information. Benkler stresses that the word "commons" denotes "the absence of exclusion as the organizing feature of this new mode of production." To be sure, the examples he uses to prove the existence of voluntarily organized large-scale cultural production are strictly electronic projects like the Wikipedia encyclopedia, the Slashdot technews site, the Kuro5hin site, and so on. These are essentially situations where publicly available text plus creativity produces more publicly available text. They are also politically neutral examples, appropriate for an argumentation that aims, among other things, to influence the American legislature on the subject of copyright laws. Yet one could apply exactly the same ideas to the growing phenomenon of networked political protests. It is clear that mass access to email and the possibility to create personal web pages – both of which have been quite necessary to the world expansion of liberal capitalism – almost immediately made possible, not only a greater awareness of globalization and its effects, but also the self-organization of dissenting movements on a world scale. And the scope of the projects that have been realized in this sense has been tremendous.

./english/162.txt:64:Pink & Silver march, Prague, September 26, 2000: a deliberate and wildly successful attempt to change the style and meaning of street protest. Image: www.indymedia.org

./english/162.txt:66:There is no nostalgia for a primitive life in the fact of quoting Mauss, nor any facile admiration for the "revolutionary fête." Things are much more complex. On the one hand, the contemporary quest for "direct action," for "direct democracy," finds an initial realization in the collective, cooperative production of these public events, which bring together all the rigorously separated aspects of modern social life. Indeed, the very aim of such events is to criticize certain fundamental separations, like the one that amputates any basic concern for life from the laws of monetary accumulation. But that doesn't mean that the event, the ecstatic convergence, is a total solution: instead it is a departure point for a fresh questioning of the social tie, at times when its deadly aspects become visible, as they are today. The protestors' claim, not just to the occupation but to the creation of public space, with all the conflicts it brings in its wake, offers society an occasion to theatricalize the real, in order to replay the meaning of abstractions that are no longer adequate to the needs and possibilities of life. The "total social fact" of the contemporary demonstration is, at its best, a chance to relearn and recreate a language for political debate, which isn't just about money, and doesn't only have "¥ € $" in its vocabulary. And the networked protests we are speaking of, including those of the peace movement in 2003, have produced the first chances to do this at the scale of the globalized economy and of global governance.

./english/162.txt:80:"The proposal is to encourage as many movements and groups as possible to organize their own autonomous protests or actions, on the same day (June 18th), in the same geographical locations (financial/ corporate/ banking/ business districts) around the world. Events could take place at relevant sites, e.g. multinational company offices, local banks, stock exchanges. Each event would be organized autonomously and coordinated in each city or financial district by a variety of movements and groups. It is hoped that a whole range of different groups will take part, including workers, peasants, indigenous peoples, women, students, the landless, environmentalists, unwaged/unemployed and others....everyone who recognizes that the global capitalist system, based on the exploitation of people and the planet for the profit of a few, is at the root of our social and ecological troubles." (27)

./english/162.txt:84:J18 in London was the most exquisitely planned and spontaneously realized artistic performance in which I have taken part, an awakening to new possibilities of political struggle that would be echoed throughout the world. Thousands converged in the morning at the Liverpool tube station in the City, receiving carnival masks in four different colors that encouraged the crowd to split into groups, outwitting the police by following different paths through the medieval street plan of Europe's largest financial district, then coming together again in front of the LIFFE building, the London International Financial Futures and Options Exchange, which was the symbolic and real target of this protest against the global domination of speculative exchange. The choice of site was essential. Long years of effort by far-flung organizers and intellectuals had been required to understand and describe the ways in which capital had escaped its former national bounds, in order to redeploy itself transnationally in new oppressive systems; yet until the late 1990s, that knowledge remained largely abstract, floating in a deterritorialized space like the financial sphere itself. Here it was translated into tangible forms of embodied expression: transgressive dancing, defiant music, a verbal and visual poetics of resistance. For once, individual pleasure once did not appear as the negation, but rather as the accentuation of collective struggle, confronting financial abstractions which could be understood by the participants through the immediate experience of the stone-and-glass architecture, while the significance of each of their acts was multiplied by the knowledge that other, similar events were occurring all over the planet. Spontaneous invitations for passing traders to come join the party were combined with sudden attacks on private property, generating an unexpected, threatening, sympathetic and immensely confident image of revolt – a way to finally start answering the decades-old pleas for help from oppressed peoples in the South, while also responding to the unbearable social divisions that transnational capitalism imposes on countries like Britain. Of course this carnivalesque outburst was just one moment in a longer process of struggle, prepared by untold numbers of people under far harsher conditions. But the language of protest that emerged here nonetheless marked a turning point. It was the immediate inspiration for the larger and more complex confrontation in Seattle, six months later, which finally forced the messages of the global resistance movements through the frosty screens of the traditional media, opening the political crisis of global capitalism's legitimacy. A crisis which has not ceased to morph and mutate into the increasingly violent forms that it is taking today.

./english/162.txt:89:Still the tensions have increased dramatically in all these domains, under the advancing pressure of systemic crisis. As the techniques of mass-mediated control ratchet up toward overt fascism, in the wake both of September 11 and of the stock market failures, the improbable meeting of teamsters and turtles in Seattle and the naked life dancing in front of the LIFFE building in London might seem to recede into some distant past. It is certain that the power of surprise was soon lost, as every international summit became an overwhelming protest, and the ruling oligarchies found new courage to ignore the democratic expressions of the citizens. Broader and deeper revolts must now be invented. But these were among the early experiments in a rearticulation of struggles, whose destiny is to cross all the borders. For the artists of another world, wherever they live and however they understand themselves, let these moments be counted among the seeds of the future.

./english/176.txt:38:Westminster Papers in Communication and Culture 2(1) 76which they interpret social reality), structural-connection (connecting potential activists with an opportunity to participate) and decision-shaping functions (helping individuals to assess the costs and benefits of their potential participation through contact with the actions of other participants) (Passy 2003, 24-25). Given its emphasis on relations, ties and interactions, one would expect that communication and media would be a central element of the networks approach to social movements. This is however not the case. For instance, while social networks are considered as key predictors of movement participation, little attention has been paid to the communicative aspects of an individual’s direct or indirect ties to a movement and to the communication media through which these relationships are constituted. In other words, the fact of whether participants in a movement communicate mainly over the telephone or over the internet may have an impact on the capacity of their social networks to act as agents of mobilization. In addition, the transmission of ideas and cognitive schemata taking place through networks also implies a process of communication whose characteristics and mechanisms remain under-researched. Yet, there are a few studies which ‘have focused on the flows of communication and the links between different territorial areas’ (Diani 2004, 351), showing that the levels of collective action in one place affect collective action in nearby geographical areas. However, these studies examined uprisings of the late 19th century which took place in a completely different communicative and media context, and as such cannot account for the role of current communication media in the diffusion of protest. Thus, the role of communication media, means and techniques remains an under-researched subject within social movement study. Even though all of the aforementioned strands of social movement theory recognize the crucial role of communication and interaction in processes of mobilization and participation, they have nonetheless failed to incorporate these considerations into their theoretical framework or research design. When the role of the media is taken into account, the focus rests on the mass media, disregarding the functions of more personal communication. This perpetuates a seemingly unintentional but nonetheless false perception of mediated communication as indirect or impersonal as opposed to ‘direct’ face-to-face communication. This preoccupation with the mass media tends to focus attention on the ‘external’ communication of a movement and not on its internal modes of communication and their impact on the movement’s identity, structure and ideology. It also maintains a perception of social movements as entities with specific and given characteristics and ways of communicating. This deprives us of Kavada, Exploring the role of the internet… 77all the valuable observations that a

./english/176.txt:42: The ‘movement for alternative globalization’ or ‘global social justice movement’ is an exception to this rule. This is because its characteristics are thought to be so inextricably linked with the use of new communication technologies that any study of the movement had to include from very early on a reflection on the role and impact of the internet. In the analysis that follows, I will briefly outline these claims and engage in a wider discussion about the possible effects of the internet in social movement activity. This analysis will provide the basis upon which the survey results will be assessed and interpreted. The ‘movement for alternative globalization’1 burst into the public consciousness in Seattle in late 1999 and since then has been the centre of much attention and controversy. Drawing on the broad and flexible frame of ‘alternative globalization’, this movement has managed to unite diverse and often disparate groups and organizations, from leftist political parties and charity organizations to anarchist groups of the Black Bloc. These groups seem to operate as a ‘network of networks’ constituting a prime example of ‘leaderless resistance’, as they manage to co-ordinate protests and events without a specific leader, a common programme or a centre of command (Castells 2001, 142). With its seemingly loose and flexible structure, global scale, and multi-issue politics, the ‘alter-globalization’ movement seems to represent a new type of social movements which is as much a product of the globalized world of late modernity as the problems that it tries to address.

./english/176.txt:44:Westminster Papers in Communication and Culture 2(1) 78internet-based, electronic network. In this sense, the internet is thought to be affecting not only the way the movement communicates its goals or protests in support of its ideas, but also its scale, organizing structure and collective identity. These claims place communication in a much more central position than the one it has hitherto assumed in social movement theory, instigating a more systematic reflection on the role of the media in social movement activity. In this vein of inquiry, current research tends to consider the Internet not only as a new form of communication, but also as an organizational process in itself that is affecting the internal structure of the movement (Tarrow 2002, 15). This is because the internet seems “to constitute a social network (which is) remarkably similar to the reticular structure of social movements”, so that “it is only a short step to regarding the Internet itself as a form of organization” (Ibid). In that respect, the internet is thought to drive the ‘alter-globalization’ movement towards looser and less hierarchical modes of organization, which imitate its own loose and non-hierarchical structure. For instance, according to Klein “[w]hat emerged on the streets of Seattle and Washington was an activist model that mirrors the organic, decentralized, interlinked pathways of the Internet” (Klein 2002, 17). Contrary to the more conventional means of communication which are relatively expensive and tend ‘to foster just a few centres of communication (and often related to this, of power and decision making)’, the internet does not ‘demonstrate an inherent tendency to be concentrated and controlled in the hands of a few movement entrepreneurs’ (van de Donk et al. 2004, 9). Thus, by intensifying communication among all parts of the organization, the internet has the potential to contest the prevailing model of top-down communication (Ibid, 19). What is more, the internet seems to also affect the scale and scope of the ‘alter-globalization movement’ both in terms of organizing and in terms of the development and negotiation of a collective identity. Serving as a connecting mechanism between participants in different countries, the internet can facilitate an international division of labour both prior to and during protests (Walgrave and van Aelst 2004, 101). It can further act as ‘a channel for the geographical dispersion of the intimacy of interpersonal networks’ (Burnett and Marshall 2003, 37), expanding the geographical scale at which a collective identity, as well as interpersonal relationships of trust and solidarity can be developed. This poses a challenge to previous notions of intimacy and community as bounded within the confines of a specific locality or as associated with some kind of face-to-face communication. This scale shift in the personal connections among activists also contributes to the establishment of open and extended activist networks, whose unity does not necessarily depend upon a common ideology. Instead, the internet seems to Kavada, Exploring the role of the internet… 79encourage connections among

./english/176.txt:133:1 Emerging as a direct reaction against the process of neoliberal globalization, this movement was initially dubbed as the ‘anti-globalization movement’. However, this label seemed to spur too much confusion and misunderstanding, as the movement was identified with its most extreme anti-capitalist part. Thus, evolving from its initial outburst in Seattle in 1999 the movement came to define and call itself the ‘altermondialiste movement’ (in French), translated in English as the ‘alter-globalization movement’ or the ‘movement for alternative globalization’. The name ‘global social justice movement’ is also used, particularly by its trade justice/development part. This ‘alter-globalization’ label indicates more clearly that anti-globalization protesters are not opposed to globalization per se, but to the way it is shaped by neoliberal concerns, disregarding human rights and environmental issues (Walgrave and van Aelst 2004, 99). The change of name also points to the constant negotiations and re-negotiations of the movement’s identity, in its effort to accommodate and unite disparate groups and organizations.

./english/176.txt:134:Westminster Papers in Communication and Culture 2(1) 942 The statistical significance of these relationships was measured using the Chi-Square and the strength of the relationship was assessed using the Phi Coefficient, a measure suitable for establishing associations between nominal (and particularly dichotomous) variables. If the value of the Phi Coefficient was below 0.3 then the variables were considered independent. Values between 0.3 and 0.7 were indicative of a weak association between the two variables, while if Phi was above 0.7 then the association was considered strong. All of the reported associations were statistically significant with p<0.05, while in many cases p was 0.000. 3 The significance of the association was measured using again the Chi-Square, while the strength of the relationship was assessed using the Gamma measure in the case of an association between a nominal and an ordinal variable. The association between nominal and dichotomous variables was measured using Cramer’s V and the Phi Coefficient. References Baym, N.K., Y.B. Zhang and M.Lin. (2004) ‘Social interactions across media: Interpersonal communication on the internet, telephone and face-to-face’, New Media & Society 6(3): 299-318. Bennett, W.L. (2004) ‘Communicating global activism: strengths and vulnerabilities of networked politics’, in W. van de Donk, B.D. Loader, P.G. Nixon and D. Rucht (eds.) Cyberprotest: New media, citizens and social movements, London and New York: Routledge, pp. 123-146. Bennett, W.L., T.E. Givens and L.Willnat. (2004) ‘Crossing Political Divides: Internet Use and Political Identifications in Transnational Anti-War and Social Justice Activists in Eight Nations’. Paper for the European Consortium for Political Research Workshop. Uppsala, Sweden, April 14-18, 2004. Breiger, R.L. (2004) ‘The Analysis of Social Networks’, in M. Hardy and A. Bryman (eds.) Handbook of Data Analysis, London: Sage Publications, pp. 505-526. Burnett, R. and P.D. Marshall. (2003) Web Theory: An introduction, London and New York: Routledge. Castells, M. (2001) The Internet galaxy: reflections on the Internet, business, and society, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Clemens, E.S. and D.C. Minkoff. (2004) ‘Beyond the Iron Law: Rethinking the Place of Organizations in Social Movement Research’, in D.A. Snow, S.A. Soule and H. Kriesi (eds.) The Blackwell Companion to Social Movements, Oxford: Blackwell, pp. 155-169. Diani, M. (1992) ‘The concept of social movement’, The Sociological Review 40(1): 1-25. Kavada, Exploring the role of the internet… 95___. (2004) ‘Networks and Participation’,

./english/176.txt:143: van de Donk, W., B.D. Loader, P.G. Nixon and D. Rucht. (2004) ‘Introduction: Social Movements and ICTs’, in W. van de Donk, B.D. Loader, P.G. Nixon and D. Rucht (eds.) Cyberprotest: New media, citizens and social movements, London and New York: Routledge, pp. 1-25.

./english/176.txt:144: Walgrave, S. and P. van Aelst. (2004) ‘New media, new movements? The role of the internet in shaping the ‘anti-globalization’ movement’, in W. van de Donk, B.D. Loader, P.G. Nixon and D. Rucht (eds.) Cyberprotest: New media, citizens and social movements, London and New York: Routledge, pp. 97-122.

./english/192.txt:19:-> London also displayed the same interplay of mobilization and debate that has been the driving force of all the great social forums: the ESF culminated in a demonstration in central London of around 100,000, before which the Assembly of the Social Movements launched a call for international protests against neo-liberalism and war on the weekend of 19-20 March 2005.

./english/192.txt:46:The unwelcome presence of the IFTU at the ESF was thus a consequence of building a Forum that reached deep into the mainstream of the labour movement. The foolish decision by a handful of protestors (in this case mainly members of British and Middle Eastern far left sects) to shout down a platform mainly composed of the convenor of the Stop the War Coalition and Iraqis opposed to the occupation was thus a refusal to engage with this mainstream. It represented exactly the kind of sterile sectarian politics from which the rest of us are trying to escape.

./english/193.txt:89:7. Although the situation is getting better under President Kirchner, the protests have been criminalized, piquetes are forbidden. But while the right to work, to get food, housing etc. is a higher value than the public order protesters think their piquetes are legitimate.

./english/197.txt:29:One of the most effective actions in decades was the worldwide protest on 15 February 2003 against the American war in Iraq. Possibly because we weren't actually able to stop the war (no one could have done that), people may have classed the day as a `failure' and not reflected enough on its huge significance-15 February was in fact a historic first. During the Vietnam War, thanks to arduous months of planning and expensive transatlantic phone calls, it was occasionally possible to stage simultaneous demos in Europe and the US, but never anything on the scale of 15 February. In 2003 it wasn't just Europeans and North Americans, but Latin Americans, Africans, Asians, Australians, citizens of many Muslim countries-every continent was involved, including Antarctica, where a scientific mission took part. This unified, organised outpouring of protest caused a reluctant New York Times to refer to the peace movement as `the second superpower', even if that statement (like much else of what one can read in the New York Times) turned out to be not quite true. We must now try to mobilise the same kind of strength and unity in the name of global justice and put them on the front page.

./english/200.txt:5:Under these conditions, a sectarian culture takes root. Inhabitants of the political ghetto are condemned to infighting instead of getting on with more significant matters. However, the situation is changing. Demonstrations on the streets of London against the war in Iraq with thousands of protesters, widespread dissatisfaction with government policy and irritation at neo-liberal reforms have shown that there are a lot of people willing to listen to the left's arguments even if the speakers are not endowed with the magical status of an MP.

./english/201.txt:41:There is no doubt that the SWP and the GLA worked hard to ensure that the focus of the event, from the themes chosen for discussion to the people selected to speak and chair meetings, was in their hands as much as possible. The consequence was that many activists refused even to come – holding an “alternative ESF” elsewhere in London – and many who did were disappointed. So much so that 300 people invaded a speaker meeting on the Saturday night at which Ken Livingstone had been due to speak to protest about the “undemocratic” nature of the forum.

./english/201.txt:69:First, it's always worth reiterating an obvious but overlooked point: it is a wonder that events like this happen at all. The social forum movement began life at Porto Alegre just four years ago. It was a single, tentative event. Nobody knew what would come of it. What has come of it is a mass explosion of forums, all over the world, from international to city level and everything in-between. Every event is – or at least is supposed to be – a positive, forward-looking occasion. Social forums are not about protest – they are about change and how to achieve it. In less than five years, they have become a global phenomenon, and one which testifies better than anything else to a real and growing appetite for significant change amongst many of the world's people.

./english/203.txt:9:At the first ESF in Florence two years ago, the unprecedented support of the Italian leftist trade union federation Cgil and, more widely, of the European confederation of trade unions (ETUC) gave the movement a decisive impact on public opinion. It strengthened the protests against the imminent attack on Iraq and contributed much to the debate on the alternatives to neo-liberalism and imperialism. In London , three of the main British labour organisations (Unison, GMB, RMT) played the same fundamental role in managing and sponsoring the event. But the ESF came just a few days after New Labour's party conference, where the unions ended up backing Tony Blair's party and general policy, even if officially opposing his alliance with the US and the occupation of Iraq .

./english/203.txt:17:But the strongest contrasts emerged on the issues of the war in Iraq, and the relationship between trade unions and the US-appointed Iraqi interim government. During a key Iraq debate in Alexandra Palace a few delegates – many of them Iraqis – interrupted (and ended) the meeting protesting against the decision to invite Sobhi Al-Mashadani, the general secretary of the Iraq federation of trade unions (IFTU), the only one recognised by the Iraqi interim government and also by the international and European confederations of trade unions. Mr Mashadani was denounced as a collaborator of the US, belonging to the Communist Party of Iraq, one of the forces represented in the Allawi government. The TUC and UNISON immediately condemned the action and, repeating their support for the IFTU, said “These attacks are unfair and must stop. The people who harassed Mr Mashadani and prevented the meeting from taking place have no interest in genuine debate or the peaceful, democratic future of the people of Iraq.” Ex-Labour MP George Galloway attacked the decision to invite the Iraqi unionist even if he said he didn't approve the method of protest: “There was a place for registering in a demonstrative way the disapproval of such a person representing a ‘puppet' regime, but no protest which actually stops a democratic meeting taking place should go that far.”

./english/203.txt:19:The dissent on Iraqi armed resistance (simple ‘terrorism' for some) seems to be another current matter of division. At the 70,000-strong anti-war demonstration in Rome two weeks after the Forum, some parts of the peace movement, like community centres and the direct action group ‘Disobedienti' did not take part because they don't agree with the criticisms that many make of Iraqi armed resistance, while they only want protests to oppose foreign military invasion. “We are facing a lack of positive, reciprocal contamination on basic social matters” observed Gianfranco Benzi, who is responsible for Cgil's relations with social movements. “We have to start a new dialogue” he added, “Otherwise without some concrete projects we risk losing the common ground of action and the achievements we have made so far.”

./english/205.txt:38:It's unnecessary to remark how bad a precedent the use of the police by the organization of the ESF against participants is; but an evaluation that concentrated on that too much would end up forgetting the most important thing about these two days: that the autonomous spaces were above all extremely productive. Be it the discussions around how to develop an ‘activist research' and a ‘research activism', at the Radical Theory Forum and elsewhere; the excellent debates on precariousness and migration at Beyond the ESF; the exploration of the idea of ‘the commons' at Life Despite Capitalism; the creative and joyous search for new ways of protesting at the Laboratory of Insurrectionary Imagination; the debates on media and knowledge and the No Vox night at Camden Centre – there was a tangible feeling of convergence and creation of subjectivities; it was a ‘less ideological' opposition not because it had no ideas or alternatives to propose, but because it shunned facile binaries – the simplistic ‘us and them', ‘inside and outside' – and favoured the least reactive, most productive aspects of the new European movements.

./english/205.txt:44:On the one hand, there are the groups that remain attached to the identity formed in that period: the heroic times of the Global Days of Action, the massive street protests against international institutions, brought to an impasse with the threat of violence that has hung in the air since Genoa. These groups live the tension between the closing down of the public sphere and a progressive criminalization that pushes them into a dead end, between the difficulty to open up some kind of dialogue with society and the dangers of an escalation of violence. If that period was of enormous importance for the creation of a new political subjectivity, a new political generation, the transformations in the political context and the move towards a period of permanent global war poses questions that have to be answered – the risk of not doing it being isolation, fragmentation, becoming a subculture. The condition of survival of the subjectivity of those days is finding ways to overcome it.

./english/219.txt:17:In February 2005 we will join the actions of protest against the NATO summit in Nice. We oppose the G8's self-assumed task of global government and neo-liberal policies, and therefore we pledge to mobilise massively on the occasion of the G8 summit in Scotland in July 2005.

./english/221.txt:15:We will employ all methods of direct action and subvertising at our disposal to support strikes, pickets, stoppages, boycotts, blockades, sabotages, protests all over Europe .

./english/221.txt:21:We will gather in Berlin in early 2005 to decide a common protest action against the sanctuaries of EU power, in order to launch euromaydays and the supporting structured network of labor radicalism and media activism tentatively called NEU, Networkers of Europe United.

./english/241.txt:53:The Guide has an explicit political commitment to the present cycles of protests and the ESF and it surroundings. It was born from the consciousness of this process of resistance and reaction rather than from a perspective that is merely communicative or contemplative. It is not intended to ‘give’ voice to the excluded populations, considered other from us, but to establish cooperation among ourselves, with the acknowledgement of our own exclusion from the outset. It is not constituted through a separated consciousness, but it makes the research one more tool in the process of confronting the system that excludes us.

./english/243.txt:29:A woman at the workshop in New York hit the point, when she said: “That's what popular education is about. We do not do it in order to get as many people as possible on a protest. Popular education is about real social change. And real social change goes together with personal transformation. Popular education is another piece of the puzzle.”

./english/251.txt:64:The problems the EPA has faced in using consensus decision-making procedures are not new problems and are quite common to consensus in any group as large and diverse as the EPA. Ideally with such a large group based across such vast geographical distances, a spokes council system could be put in place where small groups meet in a decentralised fashion all over Europe to discuss the set agenda and then people selected by each smaller group to temporarily represent them go to the larger meeting. This would create a process which could include more than only those among us who are able to travel and who are brave enough to speak in a large room on a microphone. The small meeting size and the locality make it psychologically and physically more accessible to everyone. This structure has worked for much larger groups than the EPA, including the organising of the successful WTO protests in Seattle in 1999.

./english/266.txt:170:Use a search engine as your last step not as a starting point. Try a search engine like Northern Light or a web information directory like the Open Directory Project. For best results, check the search tips first. Focus your search by including descriptive words with the company name, for example: "general electric" nuclear protest

./english/275.txt:56:As Eyerman and Jamison have observed,23 such movements tend to generate their own counter-expertise precisely out of the clash between their own experience, needs and concerns and officially sanctioned ‘knowledge’. The knowledge thus generated runs all the way from criticism of the risks involved in new technologies24 via techniques of protest for opposing ecologically damaging developments25 to complete alternative theories of society and nature.26

./english/275.txt:151:The situation of public confrontation with the state plays a key role here, as a site in which the movement recognizes itself as a single (if diverse) movement and is seen by other participants as such. The imminent threat of destruction, whether in a single protest or via the long process of criminalization, poses a very practical problem to the movement, which highlights the need to preserve and extend cooperation and communication within the movement. As different groups find themselves arriving at the same point, the need to bring ourselves up to speed with each other also grows.

./english/275.txt:171:Barker, Colin and Cox, Laurence 2002 ‘What have the Romans ever done for us? Activist and academic forms of movement theorising’ in Eighth international conference on alternative futures and popular protest, edited by Colin Barker and Mike Tyldesley. Manchester: Manchester Metropolitan University.

./english/275.txt:179:Cox, Laurence 1998 ‘Gramsci, movements and method: the politics of activist research’ in Fourth international conference on alternative futures and popular protest, edited by Colin Barker and Mike Tyldesley. Manchester: Manchester Metropolitan University.

./english/275.txt:183:1999b ‘Structure, routine and transformation: movements from below at the turn of the century’ in Fifth international conference on alternative futures and popular protest, edited by Colin Barker and Mike Tyldesley. Manchester: Manchester Metropolitan University.

./english/277.txt:54:Thirdly, social movements are not identified with any one kind of social phenomenon. They are neither specific features of a political subsystem, for example, nor particular forms of unconventional organisation. Or rather, they may at times be expressed in these ways, but they may equally be found in the normal movements of capital, the everyday organisation of needs and desires, the thoroughly institutionalised relationships of corporatism. A good example of this openness of form, I think, can be found in the juxtaposition of papers from a session at the 1997 Alternative Futures and Popular Protest conference. Colin Barker’s (1997) discussion of “moments of collective effervescence” examined those powerful moments during which social movements from below are capable of mobilising vast masses of people in dramatic challenges to the status quo. Mike Waite’s (1997) analysis of “flecks and carriers” included among other things a discussion of how movement ideas and experiences survive even in the worst periods of drought and on the stoniest ground. My own paper (Cox 1997) discussed relatively stable “movement milieux” in a time of active, but limited, social movements. From the perspective of the movement as a totality, all of these are important “moments” of a given history. Thus this perspective historicises movement activity over the lifetime of any given movement; it also historicises it, however, over the longer term, as against analyses of supposed “cycles” of movement activity (Brand 1982) or inherent “logics”, for example of institutionalisation (Scott 1990), which attempt to insulate the categories of movement activity from longer processes of historical change. Social movements, then, are not static forms, but change in both short and long historical movements in interaction with their opponents.

./english/277.txt:166:Since writing the first version of this paper in 1998, much has changed. In the space between submitting and defending my PhD, which argued that developing networks between social movements was not only a real possibility, but also a logical development for those movements, the “Battle of Seattle” took place, and the current phase of what has become called a “movement of movements” opened. Following Irish participation in the Prague (2000) and Genoa (2001) summit protests, an Irish wing of these movements developed, and quite a number of activist / academics have been involved in one form or another.

./english/281.txt:25:2. What’s their ‘relevant community’?, and 3. Who plays the part? They believe that ‘traditional intellectuals’ tend to produce a system of knowledge, which is more static and explanatory so that it can be validated by academia. In contrast, ‘organic intellectuals’ develop a more situated and dynamic analysis related to the possibility of action, which then has to be debated and accepted by militants. I find this distinction interesting despite the authors’ romantic vision of activists9, and also despite their more expansive definition of activism (they include trade union stewards and leftist party apparatchiks as activists). Nevertheless, I believe this situation is not specific to Social Movement studies. It emerged from an ethical position within academia (Biglia, 2000). The problem occurs if we set out to explain and justify the SM point of view instead of using its theoretical tools to subvert mainstream knowledge. We, as activist-academics, have to ensure this by introducing the Radical Social Movement’s (RSM) ideas into academia. Some of us have already attempted to do that with feminism10, researching and producing knowledge in all areas (and not just women’s issues) using an ‘autonomous’ feminist perspective. We need to tread carefully otherwise activist theories become ‘rapidly recolonized’ and may even become ‘a source of new, sexy courses and research subjects whose purpose is to attract students, funding and status’ (Barker and Cox, 2001-02, 9). When the Radical Social Movement (RSM) was powerful and involved large sectors of society, the interaction between the two kinds of intellectuals was particularly strong. For example, the Italian anti-psychiatric movement of the 1970s, was firmly connected to street protests. It was characterised by an intense interaction between ‘professionals’ and ‘non professionals’. There was no separation between theorists and activists- theories were constructed collectively and shared practices played a big part in the process. In this context we could locate the Calate di Reggio Emilia11, characterised for the interaction between some psi-

./english/281.txt:29:professionals and other intellectual anti-psychiatry sympathisers with marginalized individuals suffering psychiatric abuse (Antonucci, 1993). Unfortunately the situation is enormously different nowadays since most large demonstrations are often depoliticised. The spontaneous reaction against oppression (globalisation, war, etc.) are supported and frequently manipulated by the institutional left in a desperate attempt to recover some credibility within right-drifting European governments.12 Contemporary institutional powers reconvert the potentiality of protests to their own advantage. A clear example was the Barcelona Summit (2002) where the institutional powers declared, from the outset, their desire to be sympathetic to the marchers’ wishes. Thereby urban space was both militarised and at the same time some local space was conceded by the regional authorities for protest meetings. These zones were protected spaces where NGO and union bureaucrats could express their reformist point of view in collaboration with the manipulative wing of the movement. In this farcical game intellectuals acquired a prominent role, giving papers in the University to show to the rest of us that ‘another word is possible’. The ‘threat’ of an imagined ‘riotous violence’ was then used to justify the burdensome military presence that was deployed to ‘protect’ the city and its peoples (for a debate on that see Miguel Amoroso, 2002). At the same time we find ex-radicals are using the situation to gain recognition as future official negotiators with institutional power. Maybe they are bored of having a marginalized paper and no influence on unfolding events; they use their position to increase their kudos in exchange for future ‘quotas of formal power’ (cotas de poder formal). To this end, most of them deviously call for the ‘democratisation of the protest’ and claim that any form of direct action is violent and will inevitably undermine the subversiveness of Radical Social Movements. As I will describe below, constitutional powers systematically use the strategy of ‘divide and rule’ to create false dichotomies (e.g., the dichotomy between peaceful and violent protestors). They are aided in their efforts by the media who designate ‘responsible’ individuals as the

./english/281.txt:33:spokespersons of the movement and dismiss the rest as ‘too radical’. I don't think it is necessary here to analyse the effects of these dynamics on the movement. Although it is important to note that declarations from alleged progressive intellectuals is intended to divide the movement and undermine alternative groupings. All this raises considerable doubts in me regarding the possible contributions of disciplines such as critical psychology (especially in English speaking countries), that are becoming academically acceptable. Moreover, we have to recognise that many intellectuals and academics jump on the radical bandwagon and try to take advantage of it, especially since there are so few specialists in this field. As an Italian militant involved with academia reports,13 Spring 1998 [...] explosion of the squatting phenomenon [...] many university barons show a sudden interest in ‘understanding’ squatters and I am called as a possible advisor [...] If I put myself forward as a squatting expert I will surely enhance my career prospects. Intellectual contribution to division and reabsorption In analysing the achievements and failures of Radical Social Movements we have to consider the tools, which the System employs to undermine the subversive power of activities and imagination. In my opinion two of the more successful strategies adopted by the System are reabsorption and splitting; in both, the part played by intellectuals and more specifically, academics, is determinant. Here I wish to examine these processes in more detail. When struggles gain public support the System puts into practice various strategies to re-colonize some of the more explicit demands. They take the demand, turn it upside down, empty it of meaning and use it as a slogan to shut up ‘popular protest’. Even some of the ‘human resources’ of the Movement, that is some of the activists, are reabsorbed into the body politic. This probably occurs for different reasons: some militants enter the movement not because they are completely disenchanted with formal politics but because they are not able

./english/281.txt:50:in dialogue with others of a similar disposition and intellectual bent; if they have to watch their back (p 19). It is significant that even the Temporary Autonomous Zones (TAZ) which Hakim Bey (1985) wishes to see transformed into Permanent Autonomous Zones (PAZ) are generally characterised by two or three individuals in charge of hefty ideological decisions. So dialogues that Ussher wants to see develop become closed dialogues where it is advantageous to conform to the critical ‘party line’. The biggest problem is that, within supposedly horizontal groups, which are not explicitly authoritarian, it is difficult to recognise leadership and subject it to criticism. This is a strange process in which we are all ‘free to think’ as our unacknowledged leaders, otherwise we are out. Moreover, such groups tend to become endogamous in order to avoid contamination from other critical sources and frequently end up not co-operating with each other because they all believe they possess the deeper and more radical critique of the status quo. Theoretically there may not exist a separation between knowledge-theories and activism. We are critical academics so we must be on the same side as activists. We organize horizontally and we don’t want to manipulate the movement. But we celebrate our arrival to a meeting with half an hour of theoretical chat not understood by non-specialists. I want to mention two experiences in this regard, one from my activist space and the other from my academic milieu. The first experience comes from an assembly of activists I was involved with around ten years ago in Italy. In theory it was a closed group (just for militants with similar politics), organized horizontally as a response to an upcoming protest. The group consisted of about 30 people. Most of us, between 18 and 24 years old, learned about the meeting just a few days in advance. The meeting started with a 90-minute talk by two academic-activists who read from a written paper. After their talk they ask if there was any disagreement with their analysis. I felt as if they were mocking us. Obviously for me, as for most of my friends, it was impossible to understand let alone provide an impromptu critique of a highly complex analysis. Faced with this interrogation all we could do was to try to decide whether we should remain in the group or leave. Another example comes from a few years ago in Spain, during a meeting between critical teachers and students who wanted to change academia. All

./english/282.txt:139:Coming as it did after the protests in Seattle, the book has attracted widespread attention (much of it critical) in academia and the media, but also among activists. Its curiosity from an activist point of view, however, is the explicitly 'hands-off' role it assigns to activists: 'the multitude', according to Hardt and Negri, will take care of matters, despite their purported inability to communicate with one another or build solidarity (see Cox 2001 for a more detailed critique). In other words, the analysis of structure is in some ways radical - in line with the traditions of Italian autonomy - but as a guide to practical action the book is almost empty. (16)

./english/282.txt:206:The technical dimension of the civil rights movement's cognitive praxis consists of the specific objects of opposition and, even more importantly, the tactics, the techniques of protest, by which those objects were opposed. (123)

./english/293.txt:33:We saw that many of these jobs in the margins: the invisible, unregulated, unmoored jobs were in no way interrupted or altered by a strike of this type, and that the precarization of the labor market had extended to such an extent that the majority of working people were not even effected by the new reforms against which the strike was directed. Therefore we tried to think of new forms of living this day of struggle by approaching and confronting these new realities. We decided to transform the classic shut-down picket into a survey-picket. Frankly, we didn’t feel up to upbraiding a precarious worker contracted by the hour in a supermarket or to closing down the little convenience store run by an immigrant because, in the end, despite the many reasons to shut down and protest, who had called this strike? Who were they thinking of? Was there even a minimal interest on the part of the unions for the situation of precarious workers, immigrants, housewives? Did the shut-down stop the productive process of domestic workers, translators, designers, programmers, all those autonomous workers for whom stopping this day would do nothing but duplicate their work the next day? It seemed more interesting to us, considering the gap between the experience of work and the practice of struggle, to open a space of exchange between some of the women who were working or consuming during that day and with those who were moving in the streets. This small, discreet sketch of an investigation was the starting point for what became the project of the ‘drifts’.

./english/293.txt:69:Second, the studies done on immaterial work, whose homogenization we resist, look at other modes of organizing work which feed upon the very characteristics of the activities which they lump together in the category of the ‘immaterial’; specifically the strategies of neoliberal restructuring, which consist basically in cutting costs in rights and salaries and increasing the strength of command over an ever more fragmented and mobile labor force which presently works under conditions all too well known to women: by commission, with flexible and unpredictable hours, with long days then periods of inactivity without income, by hour, without contract, without rights, freelance, at home, etc. Thus the development of this category has to do with key questions to which we will return later, such as the reordering of time, space, contracts, income and conditions. The consequences of these modalities are known to all (women): isolation and incapacity to organize life “as it should be”, stress, exhaustion, social control, impossibility of developing a self-determined social life, of protesting, of “coming out” and of expressing oneself freely in all sorts of questions.

./english/293.txt:429:As much in the course of the drifts as afterwards in the two workshops of Globalized Care, we have only just begun to go over some of the memorable recent experiences of struggle: the janitor’s strike in Ramón y Cajal Hospital, the struggle of the Qualytel telephone operators, and other gestures, bursts, protests and budding processes of uprising. For some the encounter with the janitors in our brief visit to the hospital was strange, alien: alien to us because we saw them in a localized conflict, still influenced by unions like CCOO[37] (with which the workers of the Eurolimp-Ferrovial contract in Ramon y Cajal had had such confrontations in order to maintain their autonomy and their grassroots structure), in a conflict in which the question of precariousness resides basically in the increasing loss of rights, in the disappearance of the workers’ functions in order to intensify their activity, and in the absolute repression of any and all burst of protest.[38] But we immediately recognized the intimacy of the relationship they sought with the patients and their families and with other social groups outside of the realm of the unions, and we identified with their discourse about care as something related to citizenship and their criticism of the privatization of health care.

./english/298.txt:102:TT: Yes, the Protestant spirit is, at many levels, well and alive in managerial discourse. And maybe you have a point when you say that, from capital’s viewpoint, it is simply a matter of building an informational reserve army of workers. On the other hand, we also need to ask what social needs and desires and what processes of subjectivation does this reserve army express – what values it is capable of creating.

./english/299.txt:129:It must be said that these trips with Hetaira took place in an especially difficult moment due to recent neighborhood protests and the general securitarian attitude of politicians and the police, as well as the sensationalism ≠ sex, mafias, foreigners: what more could they ask for? ≠ of the press.[23] The accounts of the trips show the complexity of street prostitution as well as our own confusions and fantasies ≠ too morbid and exotic, too ingenuous and voluntaristic, too correct and useless ≠ tinted, in any case, with an imaginary of pleasure and danger.

./english/300.txt:25:As stated in the quote above, it was at this intense moment of protest that the tradition of the new Geographical Expedition came about under the initial guidance of William Bunge. The Expedition projects came to be an extremely interesting experiment at uniting both community concerns and mobilization with academic expertise and research. In fact, during the first several years of the development of radical geography, simultaneous to a period when high levels of social mobilization were maintained, the pages of Antipode often reported the experiences of the expeditions, the complexities around ‘advocacy geography’ and community involvement, and even an entire issue was dedicated to ‘radical methodologies’ with several of the articles addressing similar questions. During this initial period of the critical tradition, the idea of constructing those bridges between activism and the academy were in the forefront along with developing more general critiques of either society or the discipline itself. We will now proceed to a brief ‘exploration’ of these experiences, focusing on the ‘expedition’.

./english/302.txt:55:So what are we calling for? How do we begin to construct this agency? First of all we would like to invite you to think about how to get this space working in order to give free rein to the ³instinct²: its pieces, its relationship with other organizational tools and knowledge, its imagination, its relationship with other networks and alliances, its material means, its communicative capacityŠ We part from the idea that we are all Œexperts¹ in our own existence, that we have all already developed precarious resources to confront conflicts and to get by, one way or the other, in daily life: shared care-work, sporadic labor protests, health advice, information, legal juggling acts, etc. Some of you, moreover, know well the ins and outs of this or that specific field: the legal system, the health care system, social work, nursing, communication, pleasureŠ Many of you know these fields and feel dissatisfied because they are embedded within institutional logics which domesticate them and impede criticism and contamination. So this is an invitation to produce an estrangement, to think about how to do things in a different way, with different premises and, above all, for other ends. Consider yourselves invited to this first phase, which will consist of a few encounters, first to present the project and then to share ideas and to get the structure of the agency working. Many of you are very busy but we think the gamble is worth it. There is not just one rhythm of participation, together we can invent different forms of participation. The space, the Eskalera Karakola (www.sindominio.net/karakola) in its new location at Embajadores 52 will soon be ready. If you can¹t come to the center we invite you to share your proposals and your concerns through our email: precariasaladeriva@sindominio.net

./english/303.txt:12:Militant ethnography breaks down the distinction between observer/intellectual and activist/practitioner. By organizing protests and gatherings, facilitating meetings, participating in strategic and tactical debates, and putting one’s body on the line during mass direct actions, militant ethnographers can better understand complex movement dynamics, while remaining active political subjects. Rather than generate sweeping political directives, collaboratively produced ethnographic knowledge aims to facilitate ongoing activist (self-) reflection about movement goals, tactics, strategies, and organizational forms. At the same time, there is often a marked contradiction between the moment of research and the moment of academic writing, publishing, and distribution, which involve vastly different systems of rewards and incentives. Indeed, the horizontal networking logic associated with anti-corporate globalization movements represents a serious challenge to the institutional logic of academia itself. Militant ethnographers must constantly negotiate such dilemmas, while moving back and forth among different sites of writing, teaching, and research.

./english/303.txt:33:We spent our first few days sleeping in a squatted social center nestled in the hills on the outskirts of town, where we met up with many PGA-inspired activists. Ricardo, a well-known solidarity activist and squatter from Germany had been among the first internationals to arrive, and was frustrated about how difficult it had been to coordinate with the Genoa Social Forum, the main body planning the protests in Genoa. He was extremely eager to fill us in an elicit some more support for building a strong radical “international:” contingent.

./english/303.txt:37:Over the next week I became deeply embroiled in the complex discussions, debates, and negotiations that ultimately led to the creation of the Pink and Pink & Silver contingents during the main days of action, building on our previous experiences in Prague. Not only did we have to generate consensus regarding the wisdom of joining the more militant squatters, whether self-defense constituted an acceptable response to police provocation, or the specific protest route to follow, we also had to negotiate with the GSF and other international networks in order to carve out sufficient space for our action within an increasingly crowded urban terrain involving diverse tactical forms, such as white overalls, black block, festive pink block, and traditional Ghandian civil disobedience.

./english/303.txt:41:At the same time, the overwhelming campaign of low-level state terror unleashed by the Italian state also points to some of the potential limitations of the “diversity of tactics” logic. If rather than dividing and conquering, the state pursues and indiscriminate strategy of physical repression it becomes impossible to safely divide up the urban terrain. In particular contexts, such as the upcoming RNC protests in New York, for example, it might make sense to actively dissuade other activists from using militant black block styles and tactics. However, blanked condemnations of protests “violence,” including the widely circulated statements by Susan George after Gothenburg and Genoa, are not likely to produce the desired effect largely because they violate the basic networking logic at the heart of contemporary anti-corporate globalization movements. Rather, it I sonly through dialogue and immanent critique based on solidarity and respect that such contentious issues can be resolved. At its best, militant ethnography can thus provide a mechanism for shedding light on contemporary networking logics and politics, while also making effective interventions into ongoing activist debates.

./english/316.txt:9:The World Social Forum (WSF) is probably most identified with the recent international wave of protest known as the ‘anti-globalisation movement’. Whilst intimately interrelated with the latter, however, the WSF is just one emanation of this much more general phenomenon and process. How can these and their inter-relationship be best understood?

./english/316.txt:15:As for the ‘Global Justice and Solidarity Movement’ (GJ&SM), this is actually a name proposed by the Call, for the general wave of protest against corporate-dominated globalisation, against US-sponsored neo-liberalism/neo-conservatism and war, one name for the new wave of radical-democratic protest and counter-proposition. This ‘movement of movements’ is marked by its network form and communicational activity, a matter recognised by friends and enemies alike (Arquilla and Ronfeldt 2001, Cleaver 1998, Escobar 2003, Klein 2001). Morever, ‘it’ seems to change size, shape, reach, scale, target and aims according to events. So, at one moment it might be focussed against neo-liberal economic globalisation, at another against the US-led war on Iraq. This makes it even more challenging to analyse than to name.

./english/316.txt:21:It is not a reincarnation of the international protest wave following 1968, though Che Guevara icons are still popular, and it includes other clear echoes of the 1960s-70s.

./english/316.txt:43:Many identify the new protest movement with the turn of the century, with the North (Seattle 1999, Prague 2000, Genoa 2001, Gothenburg 2001, Barcelona 2002, Evian 2003). They also associate it with the middle-classes, students and youth – who have indeed been prominent within it. But so have women, forming around 50 percent at the World Social Forums, though this is little commented on.

./english/316.txt:45:But the movement cannot be limited to major protest events, nor to what has occurred since 1999. It must be traced both back and down, at least to the ‘food riots’, provoked by the International Monetary Fund in the South of the 1980s, when there were urban uprisings against the externally-imposed end of food subsidies. Widespread protests against gigantic and ecologically-damaging dam projects, promoted by the World Bank and developmentalist local elites, go back to the 1980s and earlier. There were major demonstrations/riots against the poll tax in Britain in 1990. Through the 1990s, there were myriad protests across the South against the euphemistically-named Structural Adjustment Policies (SAPs) in particular, and neo-liberal policies more generally. And the appearance of the often-corporatist, sometimes-chauvinist and commonly-quiescent US American Federation of Labour-Congress of Industrial Organisations (AFL-CIO) on the anti-WTO demonstration in Seattle, was welcomed - somewhat prematurely - by the slogan ‘Teamsters and Turtles: Together at Last!’. (Aguiton 2003, Walton and Seddon 1994, Yuen, Katsiaficas and Rose 2001)

./english/316.txt:47:One major manifestation of US-initiated neo-liberalism has been the North American Free Trade Agreement, which provoked widespread protest in both Canada and Mexico. In the case of Canada, it turned an initial national-protectionist campaign into one of international solidarity, first with Mexico, then with Latin America more generally, leading to the Hemispheric Social Alliance, which included US movements. In the case of Mexico, the launching date of the NAFTA, January 1, 1994, was used for the launching also of the Zapatista movement in the severely globalised, marginalised and exploited state of Chiapas, in the South of Mexico. (Alianza Social Continental website, Zapatista Index website).

./english/316.txt:51:Other major sources of, or contributors to, the new movement must be mentioned. One was the rising wave of protest against unemployment, privatisation and cuts in social services, which gathered steam throughout the 1990s, markedly in Europe. Another was the increasing development of ‘counter-expertise’, concentrated in inter/national non-governmental organisations which had been honed at a series of United Nations (UN) conferences and summits through the 1990s, notably those on the environment in Rio, 1992, and on women in Beijing, 1995. Yet another was the rise of irreverent, often anarchist-tinted, direct action movements, of customarily internationalist appeal, such as Reclaim the Streets in the UK. This supported the courageous, but eventually defeated, Liverpool Dockers’ protest against corporate attack, state legislation - and union passivity in the face of such. A significant international libertarian initiative, related to this kind of national activity, was that of PGA, which held meetings in Geneva, Bangalore and Cochabamba. (Abramsky 2001, PGA website, Reclaim the Streets website, Sweeney 1997).

./english/316.txt:57:It is clear, from yet another appellation - the ‘anti-capitalist movement’ - that this ‘movement of movements’ is as much an aspiration as an actuality, as much a becoming as a being. It has, however, passed one major test. When the terrorist attack on New York and Washington occurred, September 11, 2001, this was a stalemate to a growing movement in North America (Seattle, 1999; Washington, 2001; Quebec, 2001). Yet, with the US-led wars against Afghanistan, 2002 and Iraq, 2003, a movement often considered to be primarily ‘anti-corporate’ morphed into the biggest international anti-war protest in history. A New York Times columnist stated, February 18, 2003, ‘there may still be in our planet, two super-powers: the United States and world public opinion’. A 300-strong anti-war demonstration took place even in Lima, Peru. This is a country profoundly traumatised and isolated by decades of neo-liberalism, counter/insurgency and authoritarian rule, and which had – unlike neighbouring Brazil, Ecuador and Bolivia - previously revealed only marginal awareness of the new international/ist wave. (Ashman 2003, Boyd 2003, Callinicos 2003, Starr 2000).

./english/316.txt:59:The language of the new radical-democratic protest movements is increasingly infecting some of the 50-100-year-old international trade union organisations, such as the recently-renamed Global Union Federations (GUFs). And the trade unions, which have 150-200 million members worldwide, are increasingly attracted by the World Social Forum. (Aguiton 2003, Buckley 2003, International Transportworkers Federation 2002, Waterman and Wills 2001).

./english/316.txt:61:The WSF has been held in Porto Alegre, Brazil, 2001-3, and is scheduled for Mumbai, India, in 2004. If the earlier-mentioned protest events were frequently marked more by opposition than proposition, the Forums have not only been devoted to counter-proposition over a remarkably wide range of social issues (with a wide range of significant collective actors). They have also demonstrated that what is shaping up is much more than a Northern, or even a Western-hemispheric, internationalism. The Forum process, moreover, has now reached take-off, with national, regional and thematic forums taking place all over the world. Some of these may be unknown to the WSF itself. The WSF has also become both the subject and the site of intense reflection concerning its own significance, nature and future. (Fisher and Ponniah 2002, Transnational Alternatives 2002, Sen 2003, Santos 2003, Whitaker 2002).

./english/316.txt:84:If we compare the last major wave of worldwide protest, symbolised by 1968, we have to recognise that the movements of that period were parallel rather than linked. Despite all the similarities, there appears to have been little direct contact or movement communication between Paris and Prague, between the European protests/uprisings and those of Dakar, Tokyo or Mexico City. Neither participant accounts nor contemporary ones really claim such. (Ali and Watkins 1998, Carr 1998, Erickson 2002, Halliday 1969, Koning 1988:192).

./english/316.txt:92:What was needed, for a meaningfully alternative internationalism to take shape was the revolution within capitalism caused by the combination of globalisation and informatisation. The nature of this alternative may be at least suggested by the world’s biggest and most widespread (if unsuccessful) protest demonstration, the anti-war protest of February 15-16, 2003. This had been called for at the European Social Forum of 2002 and echoed at WSF 2003. The provocation here was clearly the new kind of global war, launched by the most conservative powers in the North. But the coordination of the protest was now largely dependent on dozens of ‘alternative’ websites and lists. It may have been further supported by traditional anti-war and anti-imperialist elements within the movement, but it would surely have been impossible without the web. (Ashman 2003, Boyd 2003, Castells 1996-8).

./english/316.txt:98:Their has been a dramatic wave of varied social protest across South Africa in the last few years. This is largely popular (meaning non-white as well as poor) in composition. However, it has also been cross-class and multi-ethnic, as in the effective AIDS campaign, directed against local and international hegemons. These movements can be seen, or presented, as local, and/or national, and/or regional (Southern African), and/or global. In much of the commentary, this kind of cross-scale referencing is quite spontaneous. To what extent such awareness exists amongst participants (or what significance a more-than-national/ist consciousness might have amongst them) remains to be investigated. But the very existence of such a multi-scale awareness amongst organisers and commentators suggests a ‘world of difference’ from that of 1968, or, of course, 1917. Its importance is, indeed, also witnessed in the South African case by those ‘left’ politicians in power, and/or profoundly compromised with the neo-liberal regime, who appeal to old internationalisms against the new global movements! (Bond 2003, Cock 2003, Desai 2002, Kingsnorth 2003, Ngwane 2003, Nzimande 2003, Weekes 2002)!

./english/316.txt:100:India has seen similar or even greater waves of such protest over the last decade. But these are traceable back a half century or more. They include worker, rural, urban, regional, adivasi (indigenous) and dalit (untouchable) movements, religious and ethnic protest (often sectarian or communalist), ecological and women’s movements. Over the past two decades there has been an increase in dramatic, often massive, protest demonstrations and marches, explicitly aimed against neo-liberalisation and globalisation/imperialism. With the possible exception of the ecological and women’s movements, and projects for regional civil society linkages, however, these have shown little consciousness of, or significant linkage with, movements elsewhere. That this has continued till recently may be due not simply to the relative size, poverty or isolation of India but to the framing of such protest within the protest discourses of the 19th-20th century, such as socialism (of a decreasingly international/ist nature), of nationalism and populism. The recently rising consciousness of, and connection with, the GJ&SM, is symbolised by the holding of the first Asian Social Forum (Hyderabad 2002), and the hosting of the first WSF outside Brazil, in 2004. Exceptionally, in India, this initiative has been taken (in hand?) by the old Left. Whether, at Mumbai, the clearest note will be struck by the old traditions of national subaltern protest, or the new ones of global counter-assertion – or how these will be mutually articulated – may be significant for the future of not only the WSF but for the GJ&SM in general. (Desh Bachao 2003, Dietrich and Nayak 2001, Featherstone 2002, Muricken 1999, Omvedt 1993, Sen 2003, Waterman 1982)

./english/316.txt:112:Given their low-level of institutionalisation, and of the conventional quest for political power, both the WSF and the GJ&SM have to be considered in cultural/ communicational terms. But, whereas the movement’s protest events have been dramatically networked, and concerned with mass-media and alternative-media address, those of proposition, such as the WSF, have been rather less so, relying on such traditional (new) left forms as the panel and the demonstration. A path-breaking exception here has been, however, the anti-fundamentalist and anti-war masks, videos, posters and hoardings of the feminist Marcosur group at WSF 2 and 3 (Articulación Feminista Marcosur website).

./english/320.txt:126:The recent cycle of protests against the summit meetings of the transnational capitalist class and the transnational state – Seattle, Quebec, Prague, Gothenburg, Genoa – and the creation of spaces and networks of communication between the many movements that animate these protests – the WSF and its regional progenies, People’s Global Action, Via Campesina – has signalled to the world that neoliberalism will not proceed uncontested. A

./english/320.txt:130:Whereas the transnational capitalist class was able to implement and consolidate neoliberal restructuring as a hegemonic project of global reach from the late 1970s to the 1990s, this does not mean that subaltern social groups merely acquiesced to this process. Throughout much of the postcolonial world, structural adjustment programmes were met by protests since their very inception in the mid-1970s: During the decade or so from the mid-1970s to the late 1980s, a veritable wave of more-or- less spontaneous popular protests engulfed those countries, mainly in the Second and Third Worlds, in which austerity measures had been adopted as part of structural adjustment and economic reform programmes – often under pressure from the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank – which forced rapid economic liberalisation and the dismantling of many forms of state control, state intervention and state subsidy. The characteristic form of protest was the ‘bread riot’, although this combined in many instances with other forms of protest and struggle (Seddon and Dwyer 2002: 1).

./english/325.txt:12:Two years ago in an article about the Dutch conference ‘Feminism and Multiculturalism’, I criticized the restricted meaning multiculturalism and feminism most of the time has in western countries (Poldervaart 2002). In dominant western debates multiculturalism is limited to the integration of non-white and Islamic people into the dominant male, white, heterosexual and middle class culture, as if multiculturalism isn’t more than differences in colour and religion. In this way the cultures of gay/queer and of protest groups criticizing dominant culture, disappear from the picture of multiculturalism. Feminism was defined by the conference-organisation as ‘striving for recognition of equality, of equal opportunities and equal rights’. This is, however, a very limited definition: most feminists want more! Moreover, such ‘equal-rights’-feminism stimulate in practice the idea that only non-white people have to struggle for feminism because ‘we, women in the west’ have equal rights already. Both restricted meanings (of feminism and multiculturalism) strengthen the difference between ‘we’ (white, supposed to be progressive) people against the ‘other’ (coloured or Islamic), make affiliation-politics between both groups very difficult, forget all other diversities between people and don’t criticize the dominance of neo-liberal politics.

./english/325.txt:14:In this paper I will elaborate the contemporary connections between different protest movements that criticize dominant western culture. I want to show that, just because these movements are influenced by postmodern notions (like rejecting uniformity and essentialistic identities and taking ‘responsibility for “otherness”’(White 1991))i, their members really try to bring multiculturalism into practice. Multiculturalism means simply: different cultures within a society. Physical characteristics or nationality have nothing to do with it (Nottelman 1996: 3). Every society has to be considered as multicultural, because within all societies there are different cultures (between classes, hetero-homo’s, rural and urban cultures, different –interpretations of- religions etc.). Also without coloured people a discussion about multiculturalism is important.ii Because this conference is about ‘new social movements and sexuality’, I restrict myself to three contemporary movements that criticize dominant culture: the squatters, queers and alterglobalists. I will start with the squatters’ movement, because for a part this movement is the oldest one.

./english/325.txt:27:In his research about ‘the’ contemporary (squatters) scene in the Netherlands, Van Ree sees many similarities between this scene and the radical gay scene of the 1970’s in the U.S, described by Patrick Moore (2003). Moore shows the role of pleasure in the rising homosexual culture in New York and San Francisco in these days. Similarities with the contemporary squatters scene are, according to Van Ree, the pleasure to do things together (listening to music, cooking, dancing and drinking) and the use of old buildings and dark, scarcely lightened places. Van Ree states that with these, both movements protest against the normalising culture and cleaned surroundings. With this critiques on dominant culture, I consider both movements as parts of the multicultural discussion.

./english/325.txt:37:Yet, nowadays a big international queer movement exists (just as the feminist movement hasn’t died when it criticized the fixed female identity). However, it took years before the gay and lesbian movement could accept transsexuals, transgenders and drag queens etc. in their movement; they were largely treated as embarrassments in their “legitimate” fight for tolerance, acceptance and equal rights. Aaron Devor and Nicholas Matte (2004) give a clear description of this struggle in the United States from the 1970s till the 2000s. In particular in the lesbian and feminist movement hotly contested battles have taken place over the question of whether or not male-to-female (MTF) transsexuals are women for the purposes of inclusion in women-only organizations. ‘Transgendered and transsexed people have posed the greatest challenges to gender definitions at a historical moment when women in general, and lesbians in particular, have begun only recently to feel that they exist as political players in their own right’ (Devor/Matte, 2004: 181). Many lesbian-feminist organizations insisted on a definition of womanhood that leaves no room for women who were born male. For example at the Michigan Womyn’s Music Festival, a five-day women-only event run every year since 1976, from 1991 on till 2003 trans-women tried to be allowed into the festival and set up an informational and protest ‘Camp Trans’ outside the gates of the festival. Eventually the organizers of the festival bowed to the pressure and said that anyone self-defined as a ‘womyn-born-womyn’ would be allowed into the festival.

./english/325.txt:76:Besides these more formal social movement organizations, all kinds of more informal groups became active. They started actions against the commercialising of practically every aspect of life in 1984, when in Canada and the United States adbusters (culture jamming) protested against the billboards in public spaces, and in 1995, when in England the ‘Reclaim the Street’-activists were demanding the streets back as public places. The rise of the Zapatistas has been an inspiration to the whole movement. This Mexican group sent their manifest against the NAFTA (North American Free Trade Agreement) into the world (via the internet) on 1 January 1994 and in the summer of that year (and again in 1996) invited ‘leftist activists, youngsters, women, gays and lesbians, people of colour, immigrants, workers, farmers around the world’ to discuss new ways of thinking about power, resistance and globalisation with them (Klein 2002: 177-188). The meeting of 1996 resulted in the foundation of the People Global Action (PGA) and many visitors of this meeting played a key role in Seattle in 1999.

./english/325.txt:79:The Do-it-Yourself-activists try to realize their ideals in the here-and-now. Although the concept DiY is invented in the North, it appears that many poor groups of the South use the same strategy. The Zapatista activist Esteva has formulated this: ‘People has been disillusioned with the ballot box for a long time, here and all around the world. And yet they are disillusioned too with rebels who come with guns and say: “give us the state, we will do it better”. So what are we seeing in Chiapas? It is an alternative to both – a new notion of doing politics. You could call it radical democracy. People take their own destinies into their own hands’ (in: Kingsnorth 2003: 42-43). Nowadays the Zapatista’s ideas about ‘taking your own destinies in your own hands’ have influenced many other groups around the world. An activist from the town Durban (South Africa) told to Kingsnorth: ‘We feel it’s time for new approaches. As a movement we need doing things ourselves, you know, Zapatista-style. Taking it back: communities doing it themselves, instead of always reacting to whatever shit the government gives them’ (ibid: 102). And a women of the Brazil Landless Movement (MST) states: ‘People have to work for their own transformation, making their own answers’ (ibid: 257). In the North the DiY-activists emphasise the importance of ‘free places’: public spaces, not belonging to the commercial trade and industry (Klein 2002: 204). All these activists have in common that they create their own alternatives, protesting against the commodification of everything.

./english/325.txt:95:-Their emphasis on fun and the ‘struggle against the theft of the public by the private. (Kingsnorth 2003: 319). The importance of fun you can recognize in their language, their cloths (during actions mostly pink and silver, see Evans 2003) and their music playing. Tactival frivolity is considered by them as an important strategy. The importance of the public sphere you can already see in the actions of the adbusters who protested against the pollution of the public places by billboards and in those of the ‘Reclaim-the-Street’-activists who want to show that the street can be used for all kinds of activities. You can describe the alterglobalization movement as ‘a struggle to reclaim space’ (Kingsnorth, 2002: 319).-- In this way the alterglobalists plea for the same as Hekma (2004) does for the sexual culture: a public sexual culture would be pleasant and good for the safety of the citizens and for the integration of different groups.--

./english/331.txt:76:Europe has mature and stable economies built on a long history of social democracy. Hutton argues that beneath European political values lies a conception of religion and morality that is crucially different to the evangelical, personalised Protestant morality of US conservatism: it is reconciled with the twin forces of reason and science to underpin an ‘infrastructure of justice’ (2002:45). In Europe, morality in the public sphere is about fairness and cannot be reduced merely to a function of personal choice.

./english/331.txt:87:Every week high profile left-wing writers (George Monbiot, Noam Chomsky, Mark Thomas, John Pilger to name a few) comment on the activities of corporate bullies and their partners in crime, corrupt politicians. Landmark publications have fuelled the anti-capitalist fire: Naomi Klein's No Logo was the book that united frustrated protestors into a global movement. Websites such as CorpWatch, Globalise Resistance and IndyMedia disseminate information and propaganda, and mobilise support - not just from rich kids in rich countries, but increasingly diverse groups from developing countries too. Each and every recent meeting of the World Economic Forum, WTO, IMF, World Bank, G8, in Davos, Seattle, Prague, Genoa, New York; environmental summits in Rio and Johannesburg, has had a contingent of protestors challenging the neo-liberal status quo. The left is still there, and it rejects both the conservative and the Third Way’s claim to the moral high ground. To the secular left, morality is compassion and justice on a global, humanitarian scale that transcends religious, ethnic or geo-political boundaries:

./english/331.txt:95:The difficulty with the anti-capitalist protest movement is bound up with the necessity to unite factions under one banner. Some protestors are so over-zealous in their condemnation of unethical corporate behaviour that they feel justified in using violent means of protest. Clearly violence against another human is immoral. However, where can you draw the line when peaceful protest spills over into the expression of frustration against the property of such corporations? If the police are authorised to use deadly force, as they did when Carlo Giuliani was martyred to the protest movement in Genoa in July 2002, who do we blame?

./english/331.txt:203:4 Are the protestors right?

./english/331.txt:239:My awareness of political and ethical issues in economic globalisation is much more balanced: rather than an emotive prejudice against all things ‘capitalist’ based on the propaganda of the protest movement, I now have a solid base of theory and evidence to support this aversion!

./english/343.txt:334:Union of Coordination protest Committees

./english/344.txt:15:At a conference in Vienna, early November, 2006, there will take place the unification of most of the major international and of certain national trade unions in a new organisation. Unlike previous such launchings, however, this is occurring without any general global upsurge of union protest or expressions of labour self-confidence, and without public knowledge. Although the parties involved talk about the creation of a new union international, the word ‘merger’ seems rather more appropriate. This for two reasons.

./english/344.txt:35:I would have considered taking the two-hour train journey >from The Hague to try to solve this puzzle. But I was apparently fortunate in being thousands of air miles from Brussels, base of both major centres involved, whilst writing this piece. For it is in Latin America that there has been most interest in the merger – at least at regional level. This may be because of a recent rise in labour and other social protest in Latin America. Or because it is here that the WCL has a certain presence. It is in the sub-continent, in any case, that there has been expressed most concern about the political content of the merger, the autonomy it will allow at regional level and its implications at the national one. This I found in a slim collection produced by a regional consultative labour council (Consejo Consultivo Laboral Andino 2005) and published by the Peruvian labour NGO, PLADES. It consists of 13 short contributions, from union leaders and specialists, national, regional and international, and from a wide range of tendencies, including the Communist. It is available in both print and digital form, and provides a model which regrettably does not exist at the international level or in languages other than Spanish.

./english/344.txt:43:One should not, finally, discount the influence in Latin America of the World Social Forum and its regional spin-offs, most of which have taken place in the sub-continent. The WSF has provided not only a site at which some of the (closed-door) union negotiations have taken place, but have also suggested more holistic alternatives to globalisation than have been traditionally offered by the major union internationals. Involvement in general social protest may have itself stimulated Latin American union concern about the content or ideology of a unification that is likely to continue a model forged in Western Europe during the years of both the Welfare State and the Cold War - both of which have pretty much disappeared.

./english/363.txt:13:All of this connects us to the rest of the world. In terms of our own history, perhaps, only the quiet revolution in community politics, along with the "indifference and unease" (Mills 1970) of the new suburbia, mark any kind of qualitative shift. In other areas, popular action is not doing so well: it's hard to imagine who or what today could mobilise the kinds of numbers that participated in the protests around Wood Quay, Carnsore or CND for a single event (1). But these local shifts exist within a global context which has thrown up something very remarkable: the "new movement" marked by the Zapatistas, Seattle and Porto Alegre, a remarkable development which is not easy to understand or explain. What's going on? Where do we fit into it? And what can we do to help?

./english/363.txt:112:What it does make for, and what the Anglo world often lacks, is long memories and a sense of what theory is for. Not for nothing was it the German Green Party, with its organisers' roots in the New Left, that galvanised attempts at organisation across Europe in the early 80s; similarly, the Italian contingent seems to have made crucial contributions to the ultimate success of the World Social Forum at Porto Alegre, while playing an important role on the Zapatista march and making effective connections between the "noglobal" protests in Naples, the local alternative scene and the peripheral poor of what is still in some ways a post-colonial city.

./english/363.txt:136:One reason for this difficulty in making connections at present is the relationship of "community" to nationalism - not so much the (potentially) radical nationalism of the "unfinished revolution" as the conservative nationalism of the actually-existing independent state. Here the issue may not be so much the limits of what was achieved as its extent: to bring about the remaking of Ireland which occurred in the century that includes emancipation and independence, a massive level of popular mobilisation was involved (Eagleton 1994). In a sense, Irish people learned to organise then, and that repertoire, not just of forms of protest (Tarrow 1998) but also of institutional structures, has remained dominant since then, despite (or more likely because of) its tendency to reproduce the kind of thing we already have.

./english/363.txt:145:The second is what is becoming called "the movement society" (eg della Porta 2000). Where movements are legitimate actors in the eyes of state and media, the process which happened with NGOs a long time ago - of organisations existing because they have an interlocutory role - can become dominant. This can happen even where those organisations engage in acts of stylised protest (consider the IFA!) As Peillon (1998) has documented, low-level but widespread protest is a fairly general feature of Irish society, and can as easily be used against immigrants as against incinerators. If populism fetishises "concrete results", the movement society runs the risk of fetishising "stepping out" in the most ritualised forms (the Mind-Body-Spirit festival at the RDS is hardly going to have the cardinals shaking in their boots, let alone the TDs?.)

./english/363.txt:199:This is possible because of the selective and uneven nature of hegemony. Selective, because only a part (usually a limited, and limiting, part) of ordinary people's needs are met by church attendance, racist protests, the micro-politics of whose kids go to which school, late-night talk shows, and all the rest of it: hegemony consists of organising one possible expression of people's needs and practices. Uneven, because some groups do rather better out of the current situation than others, so that levels of commitment are more or less tenuous; people have more or less solid connections to the traditional intellectuals who seek to keep them in their place.

./english/363.txt:223:A second need is communication (see Gillan 2001). There is much concern about "media perception" of the current protests, as if any revolutionary movement had ever had the mainstream media on its side. And yet, despite state control of the broadcast media in May 1968 in Paris, or 1989 in Eastern Europe, people manage, time and time again, to make their choices and take action nevertheless. Again, the alternative and underground media were small prior to the events (see e.g. ID-Archiv 1991, Dagron 2001), but their existence made it relatively easy to "get the word out" - through flyers, posters, small magazines, pirate radios and the like - when the situation changed. A movement which does not develop autonomous means of communication is a movement which expects never to challenge the status quo except in marginal ways (see Cox 1997 for more on this).

./english/363.txt:246:One definition of a revolutionary moment (see especially Barker n.d. and Barker and Mooers 1997) is as one when the ruling class is no longer capable of governing and the people are no longer willing to be governed. Arguably, this situation is starting to develop across the globe, as the "leaders of the free world" can no longer meet in public in any city in that free world and the range of interests represented in the protests grows. The pensée unique of neo-liberalism is not what you might call a wonderful tool for organising hegemony; historically, it has usually depended on a populist authoritarianism or the support of religion to develop mass support. In this respect at least Ireland is not particularly unique, as both elements appear significantly less well-grounded in everyday practice than even two decades ago.

./english/363.txt:248:The extent to which the people are no longer willing to be governed is another matter, though. It is a great step forward that the protests against capitalist globalisation can enable the development of new connections in Ireland, within the traditional (and traditionally sectarian) left, between "social" and "ecological" interests, and so on. At the same time, these connections are still weak and largely ad hoc; although they are giving rise to new thought processes among activists, they are not yet giving rise to new realignments. Nor are they very broad in scope: in particular, little effort has been made to connect with community activists, with feminists, or with ethnic minorities.

./english/364.txt:53:Providing protection for the WEF 2001 had forced the government to mount its largest security operation since the Second World War, and this had provoked cries of protest from within Switzerland.

./english/364.txt:63:The anti-establishment forces gather in Porto Alegre after a tumultuous year. Perhaps the apogee of the anti-globalization movement came during Group of Eight Meeting in Genoa in the third week of July, when some 300,000 people marched in the face of police tear-gas attacks. Shortly after the Genoa clashes, in which one protester was killed by police, there was speculation in the world press that elite gatherings in non-authoritarian countries might no longer be possible in the future.

./english/364.txt:69:Unnerved by the prospect of a week of massive protests that were expected to draw some 50,000 people, the Bretton Woods twins took advantage of the September 11 shock to cancel their meeting. Without a target and sensitive to the sea change in the national mood in the US, organizers cancelled the protest and held a march for peace instead.

./english/365.txt:7:Many observers doubt the capacity of digital media to change the political game. The rise of a transnational activism that is aimed beyond states and directly at corporations, trade and development regimes offers a fruitful area for understanding how communication practices can help create a new politics. The Internet is implicated in the new global activism far beyond merely reducing the costs of communication, or transcending the geographical and temporal barriers associated with other communication media. Various uses of the Internet and digital media facilitate the loosely structured networks, the weak identity ties, and the patterns of issue and demonstration organizing that define a new global protest politics. Analysis of various cases shows how digital network configurations can facilitate: permanent campaigns, the growth of broad networks despite relatively weak social identity and ideology ties, transformation of individual member organizations and whole networks, and the capacity to communicate messages from desktops to television screens. The same qualities that make these communication-based politics durable also make them vulnerable to problems of control, decision-making and collective identity.

./english/365.txt:12:Networks of activists demanding greater voice in global economic, social, and environmental policies raise interesting questions about organizing political action across geographical, cultural, ideological, and issue boundaries. Protests against world development and trade policies are nothing new. For example, Rucht (1999) has documented such action in Germany dating from the 1980s. However, social justice activism in the recent period seems to me different in its global scale, networked complexity, openness to diverse political identities, and capacity to sacrifice ideological integration for pragmatic political gain (Bennett, 2003a). This vast web of global protest is also impressive in its capacity to continuously refigure itself around shifting issues, protest events, and political adversaries.

./english/365.txt:13:The “Battle in Seattle,” referring to the demonstrations against the 1999 World Trade Organization ministerial meeting, has become recognized as a punctuating moment in the evolution of global activism (Levi and Olson, 2000). Seattle, like most subsequent demonstrations, primarily attracted local and regional activists. However, there is growing evidence that a movement of global scope is emerging through the proliferation of related protest activities (Lichbach and Almeida, 2001). Observers note, for example,

./english/365.txt:22:It is easy to see how conceptual confusion surrounds the political impact of the Internet and other digital media. When political networks are viewed at the level of constituent organizations, the implications of Internet communications can vary widely. Political organizations that are older, larger, resource-rich, and strategically linked to party and government politics may rely on Internet-based communications mostly to amplify and reduce the costs of pre-existing communication routines. On the other hand, newer, resource-poor organizations that tend to reject conventional politics may be defined in important ways by their Internet presence (Graber, Bimber, Bennett, Davis & Norris, forthcoming). In this analysis, I contend that the importance of the Internet in networks of global protest includes --but also goes well beyond – gains that can be documented for particular resource-poor organizations. For example, effects at the network level include the formation of large and flexible coalitions exhibiting the “strength of thin ties” that make those networks more adaptive and resistant to attack than

./english/365.txt:32:Bennett Communicating Global Activism 8 patterns of network organization. Indeed, one of the classic accounts of such movement network organization is the SPIN model developed by Gerlach and Hine (1970). SPIN stands for Segmented, Polycephalous, Integrated, Networks. However, when Gerlach (2001) applied the SPIN model to contemporary global protest networks, he made two interesting conceptual adjustments which he passed over without the fanfare that I believe they deserve. First, he replaced the idea of polycephalous organization with polycentric order, indicating that, like earlier SPIN movements, global activist networks have many centers or hubs, but unlike their predecessors, those hubs are less likely to be defined around prominent leaders. In addition, he noted that the primary basis of movement integration and growth has shifted from ideology to more personal and fluid forms of association. In my view, these changes in the SPIN model reflect the identity processes of fragmented social systems that make electronically managed affinity networks such essential forms of political organization.

./english/365.txt:39:The emergence of a politics that is shifting away from organizational conventions such as leadership, ideology, and government processes invites a fresh theoretical perspective. The goal of this analysis is to begin explaining how webs of contentious transnational politics operate on such a large scale, particularly among groups and individuals joined by little binding leadership or ideology, and whose protests cover such diverse political issues.

./english/365.txt:40:Rethinking the Organization of Protest Networks

./english/365.txt:41:The features of global activism outlined above raise interesting challenges for thinking about movements and protest politics. One of the best known models of contentious politics refers to the diffusion of protest networks and the accompanying transformation of collective identities as “scale shift” (McAdam, Tarrow, & Tilly, 2001; Tarrow, 2002a). According to this view, scale shift depends on the existence of several mechanisms of human agency: brokerage (creating social links among disconnected sites of protest), diffusion (transfer of information across those links), and attribution of similarity (mutual identification) (McAdam, Tarrow & Tilly, 2001, pp. 331-339). As I understand it, this process generally involves face-to-face agency (brokerage) in the recruitment of protesters and in the negotiation of new identity frames to accommodate the expanding coalitions of groups. A now classic formulation of the identity framing process at the core of this theory of scale shift is Snow and Bensford’s (1992) account of

./english/365.txt:47:This analysis is based on observations of various protest activities aimed at trade and development organizations and corporations. Materials developed by the research teams in these projects can be found at the Global Citizen Project (www.globalcitizenproject.org), and in the civic engagement, issue campaigns, culture jamming, and digital media sections of the Center for Communication and Civic Engagement, http://www.engagedcitizen.org). These studies support a number of generalizations about the Internet and activist politics, four of which are reported here. The intriguing feature of each generalization is that communication practices are hard to separate from organizational and political capabilities, suggesting personal digital communication is a foundation of this identity- driven subpolitics. The patterns of communication that both reflect and reproduce global activism are briefly summarized here and elaborated in the remainder of the article.

./english/365.txt:48:• Permanent campaigns. Global activism is characterized by long- running communication campaigns to organize protests and publicize issues. Campaigns in activist politics are not new, but the campaigns of the current generation are more protracted. They are less likely to be run by central command and coordinating organizations such as unions or

./english/365.txt:63:Bennett Communicating Global Activism 17 example, Lichbach and Almeida (2001) note that on the dates of the Battle in Seattle, simultaneous protests were held in at least 82 other cities around the world, including 27 locations in the United States, 40 in other “northern” locations including Seoul, London, Paris, Prague, Brisbane, and Tel Aviv, and 15 in “southern” locations such as New Delhi, Manila, and Mexico City. Not only were these other protests not organized centrally by the Seattle campaign coalition, but information about timing and tactics was transmitted almost entirely through activist networks on the Internet. In addition to extending the global reach of single protest events, Internet campaigns also enable activists to create and update rich calendars of planned demonstrations. Lichbach and Almeida (2001) discovered wide Internet postings and network sites for no fewer than 39 scheduled protests between 1994 and 2001. This suggests that Seattle was just one of many events in a permanent protest campaign organized by different organizations in the global activist network.

./english/365.txt:64:The point here is that sustained issue and protest campaigns on a global scale cannot be explained by leadership commitments from centralized organizations with large resource bases or memberships. Coordination through polycentric (distributed) communication networks marks a second distinctive feature of global activism. In keeping with our “strengths and vulnerabilities” analysis, the next section suggests that, while networked communication may help sustain the campaigns that organize global activism, these leaderless networks may undermine the thematic coherence of the ideas that are communicated through them.

./english/365.txt:80:Another interesting case is the vast network of Jubilee debt relief campaigns. If one follows the origins of these organizations back into the 1990s, they began largely as religious networks proclaiming debt relief a moral and religious issue. For example, one of the largest contingents at the Seattle WTO protests were churches operating under the Jubilee banner. This coalition led the first large march on the evening of November 29, 1999, drawing 10,000 - 15,000 activists, and setting the stage for the even larger labor-led actions the next day. Although Jubilee chapters with religious agendas continued to

./english/365.txt:90:In contrast to the diversity of the A16 organization, the organizing site for the demonstration against the Free Trade Area of the Americas (FTAA) meeting in Montreal in April of 2001 had a much more focused agenda aimed at mobilizing people in localities and training them in direct action and street theater tactics before they arrived in Montreal (NAFTANet - International Day of Action - Stop the FTAA.htm). The site listed a different and much smaller set of lead organizations that those involved in the IMF protests above. The Ruckus Society featured prominently in the training and local mobilizing, and the Montreal Anti-Capitalist Convergence was identified as the lead organization at the protest site. A tighter focus on specific protest themes, training, and

./english/365.txt:92:Despite these differences in the communication interfaces created to organize the two demonstrations, both web sites offered user features that kept them alive and networked with broader communities of activists beyond those attending the specific demonstrations. For example, the FTAA protest site referred to the A16 site (which was still running), and contained its own extensive calendar of past and future demonstrations. In addition, the Montreal organization prominently featured links on its front page to several current issue campaigns against corporations (e.g., Nike and Monsanto) that needed support. Also posted were news reports from activists who had attended the recently concluded first World Social Forum (WSF) in Porto Alegre, Brazil. These user interfaces extend particular protest events forward in time, and give them broad connection to diverse protest communities in cyberspace. Embedding otherwise dated organization sites in these broader structures of time and space helps their successor organizations form with new networking patterns of their own.

./english/365.txt:96:Thinking about how digital networks can transform the political capacities of both nodes and collectivities raises some interesting questions about measurement. Some combination of ethnographic observation, member narratives of organizational roles, and network link mapping seems appropriate. It is clear, for example, that link maps alone are often difficult to interpret. A study of Web sites linked to by other organization sites at the time of the Seattle protests showed the official WTO site was the link leader (2129 links), followed by several protest hubs with impressive links: One World (348); Institute for Global Communications (111), Seattlewto.org, the sponsored site of the NGO coalition (92); and Corporate Watch (74), among others (Smith & Smyth, 2000). Various accounts of the Seattle protests (www.wtohistory.org; Levi & Olson, 2000) suggest that one could not easily derive the key mobilizing coalition players from these link patterns.

./english/365.txt:97:Bennett Communicating Global Activism 28 A promising approach is Van Aelst and Walgrave’s (forthcoming) analysis of organizations that received news coverage surrounding the 2001 protests against the Free Trade Area of the Americas in Montreal. They found that the top 17 organizations mentioned in the news also maintained substantial cross communication channels on the Internet, and that most of them maintained on-line calendars for the FTAA and other protest activities. By these measures, there was a mutually engaged political action network that operated with a high degree of coordination through digital channels. What is interesting is that the underlying coherence in the digital channels linking these organizations was also reflected in mass media attention to the individual members of the networks. This suggests that digital networks have found paths to jump their communication from relatively personalized digital channels to the mass media. It is important to begin understanding these crossover communication effects of digital networks as well.

./english/365.txt:104:Another flow from micro to mass media has occurred in the vast global network of anti-Microsoft protest (Bennett, 2003c; Manheim, 2001). Numerous derogatory images have traveled through Internet chats, networked campaign sites, and webzines, and surfaced in mainstream news accounts indicating that the company was trying to “crush competition,” that it was known by opponents as “the Seattle Slasher,” or that Bill Gates was the latter day incarnation of Robber Baron icon, John D. Rockefeller. The difficulty of anticipating the rise of such images -- much less, using standard public relations techniques to combat them -- has given activists new levers of media power in global subpolitics. This media activism has forced many companies to weigh the advantages of highly profitable business models against the damage inflicted upon precious brand images. Canadian media consultant Doug Miller was quoted in The Financial Times as saying “I visit 75 boardrooms a year and I can tell you the members of the boards are living in fear of getting their corporate reputations blown away in two months on the Internet.” (Mackin, 2001)

./english/365.txt:105:While many activist issue campaigns have secured remarkably favorable media coverage, disruptive public demonstrations -- the other major power lever of protest politics -- have generally received fairly negative coverage. The interesting exception is the Battle in Seattle, which produced fairly extensive coverage of activist messages about globalization (Rojecki, 2001). The relatively more favorable coverage of Seattle was due, in my estimation, to a combination of factors: its size and consequence took journalists by surprise, President Clinton made a public statement admitting the protesters had some

./english/365.txt:106:Bennett Communicating Global Activism 31 valid concerns, and there was a strong presence of labor and church organizations which provided credible media sources. Since Seattle, it seems that a more familiar press pattern has emerged in both U.S. and European media coverage of demonstrations: protesters have generally been cast as violent and anarchistic, and even equated with soccer hooligans in some European accounts. (My preliminary impressions will surely be tested and refined by the great volume of research in progress by scholars around the world).

./english/365.txt:107:Beyond the characterizations of the activists, the predominant news framing of the overall protest movement is also negative, as in “anti-globalization.” This is clearly a news construction that is at odds with how many of the activists think of their common cause. If movement media framing could be put to a vote among activists, I suspect that “democratic globalization” would win over “anti-globalization” by a wide margin. For example, here is how American labor John Sweeney put it: “It's clear that globalization is here to stay. We have to accept that and work on having a seat at the table when the rules are written about how globalization works." (Greenhouse, 2002) In another account, Susan George (one of the founding members of the French global social justice organization ATTAC) rejects the “anti-globalization” framing as an insultingly poor account of global activism. In explaining the inadequacies of the “anti-globalization” frame, she also reveals why better accounts are unlikely to be written by news organizations bent on producing simple narratives: “The movement itself is, however, multi-focus and inclusive. It is concerned with the world: omnipresence of corporate rule, the rampages of financial markets, ecological destruction, maldistribution of wealth and power, international institutions constantly overstepping their mandates and lack of international democracy.” (George, 2001).

./english/365.txt:109:Why has a movement that has learned to secure good publicity for particular issue campaigns and organizations not developed more effective media communication strategies for mass demonstrations? I think that the answer here returns us to the opening discussion of the social and personal context in which this activism takes place. Not only are many activists in these broadly distributed protest networks opposed to central leadership and simple collective identity frames, but they may accurately perceive that the interdependence of global politics defies the degree of simplification demanded by most mass media discourse. While issue campaign networks tend to focus on dramatic charges against familiar targets, most of the demonstration organizing networks celebrate the diversity of the movement and resist strategic communication based on core issues or identity frames. For example, Van Aelst and Walgrave (forthcoming) found at least 11 political themes that were shared by substantial portions of the network involved in the FTAA demonstrations in 2001. Thus, demonstrations may be staged mainly as reminders of the human scale, seriousness, and disruptive capacity of this movement, while issue

./english/365.txt:113:It is clear that personal relations remain important in the glue of this movement, giving particular meaning to the now trite slogan that the global is local. Interviews with Seattle WTO protesters make clear that personal contacts were essential to organizing such an effective large scale demonstration (see on line interview transcriptions at www.wtohistory.org). At the same time, the creation of digital information and planning networks eased personal frictions and strengthened fragile relations. More generally, the growing technical capacity of activists to report on their own actions has created

./english/365.txt:117:Bennett Communicating Global Activism 35 campaigns, protests, and virtual communities with few ideological or partisan divisions. In this vision, the current organizational weaknesses of Internet mobilization may become a core resource for the growth of new global publics.

./english/366.txt:10:But if Seattle was the birth of this new kind of organizing, last February 15's global peace demonstration marked its coming of age. That day, some 400,000 people turned out onto the streets of New York to protest Bush's impending war on Iraq, and close to 10 million more turned out in cities across the globe. It was arguably the single largest day of protest in world history; the New York Times dubbed its participants "the other superpower."

./english/366.txt:14:Given this deepening embrace of the net by movement culture, it is fitting that the website of United for Peace and Justice (UFPJ), the national coalition at the heart of the February 15 protest, not only anchored the massive mobilization but preceded the existence of the organization and helped it to coalesce. In December, UFPJ did not have an office or a paid staff. The website, however, was already a one-stop shop for the many disparate strands of the peace movement. Launched the previous October, it was getting hundreds of thousands of hits a day.

./english/366.txt:18:Providing one place for UFPJ's hundreds of member organizations to list their actions and report their activities, the website quickly became an antiwar hub. Organizers put campaign materials and action kits online, and 15,000 copies of the February 15 flier were downloaded. People could easily find and plug into local peace activities in their towns or states, and time local events to coordinate with broader efforts. In the end, 793 protests happened around the world on that day, including more than 200 across the United States and Canada, with paid organizers put to work only on the biggest, in New York. All the others were self-organized by UFPJ affiliates--local church, labor and peace groups who used the website to facilitate their own coordination.

./english/366.txt:28:The global vigils were but one of a string of Internet-enabled antiwar actions facilitated by UFPJ and MoveOn. MoveOn itself was founded well before the war, or even Bush's presidency, as an effort during Bill Clinton's impeachment to push Congress to censure the President and "move on." The petition went viral, gathering half a million signatures in a few weeks. After that, the group used its list to raise money for progressive Democrats, and by the time Bush was threatening war, MoveOn had become a well-oiled machine. The group raised millions of dollars online to run national TV spots and print ads, delivered a petition of 1 million signatures to the UN Security Council and got 200,000 people to call Washington on a single day. MoveOn facilitated leafleting efforts in cities and small towns across the country and coordinated volunteer-led accountability sessions with almost every member of Congress. None of this stopped the war, but it did help put antiwar sentiment squarely on the political map--and made the case for how powerful the net can be in mobilizing social protest.

./english/366.txt:48:Returning to the MoveOn website a couple of days after the global vigil, I was able to browse through photographs and personal commentaries from vigils all over the world--Kazakhstan, Korea and Kenya, as well as the one I attended in Park Slope. All in all, some 10,000 photographs were uploaded that week. Through the Internet we had found our way into the streets, and the streets had then found their way right back onto the Internet. Our local protest was immediately reflected back to us as part of a larger story of national and global resistance.

./english/366.txt:76:In the first month after MoveOn installed its meeting tool on the Dean campaign website, supporters self-organized more than a thousand local events--testament, perhaps, to the stirrings of a democratic revival, in which large swaths of disaffected Americans are finding forms of political participation that feel fulfilling, effective and connected. MoveOn's Zack Exley asks us to imagine a political landscape, five years from now, with fifty MoveOns, each tapping different political currents, with a whole new ability to mobilize grassroots power. In June, United for Peace and Justice announced plans for a protest during the Republican National Convention in August 2004. But unlike the Philadelphia demonstrations in 2000, this protest will go global. Such plans are a sign of activists' growing confidence, post-February 15, in the potentially explosive convergence of common global concerns and the wide reach of the Net.

./english/367.txt:65:The degree of insularity is best understood by looking at the early stages of the anti-globalization struggles. At the time of Seattle, there were very few public demonstrations on the day in India. During the Prague events in 2000, in Calcutta, Protest Initiative, a left regroupment effort involving the Inquilabi Communist Sangathan (West Bengal State Committee) (the ICS is the Indian Section of the Fourth International), the Majdoor Mukti Committee, the Nari Nirjatan Pratirodh Mancha (Forum Against Oppression of Women), the Sramajeevi Mahila Samity (Women Workers’ Association), the Indian Rationalist Association, and others organized a daylong program. But the mainstream left did not mobilize; nor did the CPI(ML) Liberation, which claims to be the real pole for an alternative left but which in fact is shifting simply to occupy the left reformist spot vacated by the CPI(M) as it becomes a servant of capitalist neoliberalism.

./english/367.txt:67:Two events have since then served to turn the bulk of the left around. One is the Asian Social Forum, held in Hyderabad in 2002, and the other is the global protest against the war in Iraq. Even the most insular of forces could not but be impressed by the depth of worldwide antiwar, anti-imperialist sentiments expressed in February–March 2003. However, the CPI(M) moved swiftly once it realized the potential, only in order to kill it off. Cashing in on the feelings of unity and nonpartisan mobilization, it organized a central program which had only slogans on the U.S.-British intervention in Iraq, and which in the name of unity did not allow others to have their own slogans, their own posters, analyses, etc.

./english/367.txt:71:So the imposition of this artificial unity had the effect of stifling voices of protest. Many trade unions accepted this, because their leaders, themselves often CPI or CPI(M) activists, argued that imperialism is the principal contradiction, so all other issues should be subordinated to the anti-imperialist struggle.

./english/367.txt:95:A militant protest movement against the depredations of international capital came to the fore at the December 1999 Seattle conference of the World Trade Organization, and raged for one and a half years thereafter.

./english/368.txt:86:At first, the most pressing issues concerned the shooting war. Mass mobilization to stop the state's military repression and force a withdrawal of the Mexican army was organized on the basis of outrage generated by detailed reports on the bloody character of that repression. Information was downloaded from The Net, gathered from other sources and transformed into flyers, pamphlets, newsletters, articles and eventually books detailing the torture, rapes, summary executions, and other violence being perpetrated by the military, the various police forces and the private "white guards" --hired goons of the big ranchers. Such material fueled the organization of mass marches in Mexico City, San Francisco, New York and other cities around the world. They fired passions that led people to candle-light vigils, letter writing and fax campaigns, Mexican consulate takeovers and other forms of protest. Stories of these actions (often ignored by the media) were then uploaded to The Net and as the reports multiplied they encouraged local militants who could see their own efforts as part of a larger movement. Taken all together, this explosive movement of solidarity certainly forced the government to back off its military solution and to negotiate with the Zapatistas. This was true in January and February of 1994 and a year later in February and March of 1995 after the Zedillo government unilaterally ruptured negotiations with the EZLN and again resorted to military violence.

./english/368.txt:128:A more documented case has involved the Canadian Security and Intelligence Service interviewing members of the Mexico Solidarity Network (MSN) supposedly as part of an investigation of interference of Mexican Diplomats in Canadian affairs. MSN organizations, however, think that the interviews were the product of collaboration between Canadian and Mexican intelligence agencies and their real purpose was to intimidate Canadian activists and visiting Mexicans reporting on events in their country. The result of such doubts about the covert intentions of the Mexican and Canadian governments have been protests and a call for a commission of inquiry.(58)

./english/371.txt:60:In Porto Alegre I met a few participants from Egypt and other Arab countries. Most came from Europe and the US. However the Palestinian flag dominated the demonstrations, and the protesters against the war in Iraq were visible, though all the other flags were drowned in the red of the flags carried by the Brazilian peasants and workers. The forum in its totality condemned American unilateralism, militarism and lack of global responsibility in spite of its claims as a global superpower. Power without responsibility is a political disease inherited from the patriarchal class system that was born with slavery. This is one of the dichotomies forced on us by religion and philosophy. We must resist this idea of an irrevocable split between a good, divine power and the devil’s responsibility for evil. We must un-mask and strip away the language of George W. Bush the father, son, and holy ghost, and his axis of evil.

./english/375.txt:203:Harman-Hardt debate/rough transcript 22who refused to move munitions for the war. This is a very important development among workers in Britain. And why did they take this action. They did so because of the massive protest movement in Britain against the war. Without that protest movement, workers would not have had the confidence to stop those trains. It is not the working class or the movements, but both. The movements can give the working class that confidence, that inspiration it needs to attack the ideology of the ruling class.

./english/378.txt:37:The growth of the movement is in fact being accompanied by a decline in its effectiveness. Seattle and Prague were real victories for the movement, as even its opponents were forced to admit. A new round of talks on the liberalization of world trade was postponed for several years because of the huge protests in Seattle. Politicians and business people began trying to excuse and justify themselves. However, the other side is learning too.

./english/378.txt:39:The authorities are reacting less and less to the protests. In the very heat of the forum, the United Nations Security Council unanimously supported the American resolution on Iraq. Not only Russia, but even Syria sided with the US. For the peace movement this was unquestionably a huge defeat - if, of course, we take seriously the statements to the effect that we do not merely want to criticise the war, but also to stop it. This development, however, simply went unnoticed at the forum, and did not darken the mood of the pacifists at all.

./english/378.txt:41:The speeches were full of ambiguities. If we are right in asserting that the leaders of the US are irresponsible adventurists, that they are indifferent to people's fates and to democratic values, then we can hardly expect that protest marches will be able to stop the war. Even enormous protest marches. The antiwar movement has accumulated a considerable arsenal of methods of civil disobedience (including the closure of roads, blockades of military bases, and so forth).

./english/378.txt:51:In fact, mass street protests can play a decisive role only when the authorities are already wavering. This seemed to be happening in Europe when German Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder publicly criticized the Bush administration. And the mutiny within British Prime Minister Tony Blair's Labour Party showed that Schroeder's position enjoyed support outside Germany. But Schroeder's anti-war rhetoric was little more than a way to get the voters' attention.

./english/379.txt:100:One of the more instructive examples of the use of the internet to foster global struggles against the excesses of corporate capitalism occurred in the protests in Seattle and throughout the world against the World Trade Organization (WTO) meeting in December 1999, and the subsequent emergence of a worldwide anti-globalization movement in 2000-2001. Behind these actions was a global protest movement using the internet to organize resistance to the institutions of capitalist globalization, while championing democratization. In the build-up to the 1999 Seattle demonstrations, many websites generated anti-WTO material and numerous mailing lists used the internet to distribute critical material and to organize the protest. The result was the mobilization of caravans from throughout the United States to take protestors to Seattle, as well as contingents of activists throughout the world. Many of the protestors had never met and were recruited through the internet. For the first time ever, labour, environmentalist, feminist, anticapitalist, animal rights, anarchist and other groups organized to protest aspects of globalization and to form new alliances and solidarities for future struggles. In addition, demonstrations took place throughout the world, and a proliferation of anti-WTO material against the extremely secret group spread throughout the internet.[9]

./english/379.txt:104:Furthermore, the internet provided critical coverage of the event, documentation of the various groupsπ protests, and debate over the WTO and globalization. Whereas the mainstream media presented the protests as åanti-tradeπ, featured the incidents of anarchist violence against property, and minimized police brutality against demonstrators, the internet provided pictures, eyewitness accounts and reports of police viciousness and the generally peaceful and nonviolent nature of the protests. While the mainstream media framed the Seattle anti-WTO activities negatively and privileged suspect spokespeople like Patrick Buchanan as critics of globalization, the internet provided multiple representations of the demonstrations, advanced reflective discussion of the WTO and globalization, and presented a diversity of critical perspectives.

./english/379.txt:108:The Seattle protests had some immediate consequences. The day after the demonstrators made good on their promise to shut down the WTO negotiations, Bill Clinton gave a speech endorsing the concept of labour rights enforceable by trade sanctions, thus effectively making impossible any agreement during the Seattle meetings. In addition, at the World Economic Forum in Davos a month later there was much discussion of how concessions were necessary on labour and the environment if consensus over globalization and free trade were to be possible. Importantly, the issues of overcoming divisions between the information-rich and the information-poor, and improving the lot of the disenfranchised and oppressed, bringing these groups the benefits of globalization, were also seriously discussed at the meeting and in the media.

./english/379.txt:112:More important, many activists were energized by the new alliances, solidarities and militancy, and continued to cultivate an anti-globalization movement. The Seattle demonstrations were followed by April 2000 struggles in Washington, D.C., to protest the World Bank and IMF, and later in the year against capitalist globalization in Prague and Melbourne; in April 2001, an extremely large and militant protest erupted against the Free Trade Area of the Americas summit in Quebec City. It was apparent that a new worldwide movement was in the making capable of uniting diverse opponents of capitalist globalization throughout the world. The anticorporate globalization movement favoured globalization from below, which would protect the environment, labour rights, national cultures, democratization and other goods from the ravages of an uncontrolled capitalist globalization (see Falk 1999 and Brecher, Costello and Smith 2000).

./english/379.txt:116:The movement against capitalist globalization used the internet to organize mass demonstrations and to disseminate information to the world concerning the policies of the institutions of capitalist globalization. The events made clear that the protestors were not against globalization per se, but were against neoliberal globalization, opposing specific policies and institutions that produce intensified exploitation of labour, environmental devastation, growing divisions among social classes and the undermining of democracy. The emerging anti-globalization from above movements are locating these problems in the context of opposition to a restructuring of a neoliberal market capitalism on a worldwide basis for maximum profit with zero accountability. The anti-capitalist movements, by contrast, have made clear the need for democratization, regulation, rules and globalization in the interests of people and not profit.

./english/379.txt:188:[9] As a 1 December 1999 abcnews.com story titled åNetworked Protestsπ put it:

./english/379.txt:190:disparate groups from the Direct Action Network to the AFL-CIO to various environmental and human rights groups have organized rallies and protests online, allowing for a global reach that would have been unthinkable just five years ago.

./english/379.txt:192:As early as March, activists were hitting the news groups and list-serves -- strings of e-mail messages people use as a kind of long-term chat -- to organize protests and rallies.

./english/379.txt:194:In addition, while the organizers demanded that the protesters agree not to engage in violent action, there was one web site that urged WTO protesters to help tie up the WTO's web servers, and another group produced an anti-WTO website that replicated the look of the official site (see RTMark's website, http://gatt.org/; the same group had produced a replica of George W. Bush's site with satirical and critical material, winning the wrath of the Bush campaign). For compelling accounts of the anti-WTO demonstrations in Seattle and an acute analysis of the issues involved, see the documents collected in Danaher and Burbach 2000 and Cockburn, St. Clair and Sekula 2000. See Smith and Smythe 2001 for detailed analysis of the use of the internet in the anti-WTO demonstrations; they located 4089 websites with material specific to the Seattle WTO meetings and selected 513 to examine and classify.

./english/380.txt:149: Against capitalist globalization from above, there have been a significant eruption of forces and subcultures of resistance that have attempted to preserve specific forms of culture and society against globalization and homogenization, and to create alternative forces of society and culture, thus exhibiting resistance and globalization from below. Most dramatically, peasant and guerrilla movements in Latin America, labor unions, students, and environmentalists throughout the world, and a variety of other groups and movements have resisted capitalist globalization and attacks on previous rights and benefits.[8] Several dozen people's organizations from around the world have protested World Trade Organization policies and a backlash against globalization is visible everywhere. Politicians who once championed trade agreements like GATT and NAFTA are now often quiet about these arrangements and at the 1996 annual Davos World Economic Forum its founder and managing director published a warning entitled: "Start Taking the Backlash Against Globalization Seriously." Reports surfaced that major representatives of the capitalist system expressed fear that capitalism was getting too mean and predatory, that it needs a kinder and gentler state to ensure order and harmony, and that the welfare state may make a come-back (see the article in New York Times, February 7, 1996: A15).[9] One should take such reports with the proverbial grain of salt, but they express fissures and openings in the system for critical discourse and intervention.

./english/380.txt:173: For instance, the Internet can be used to promote capitalist globalization or struggles against it. One of the more instructive examples of the use of the Internet to foster movements against the excesses of corporate capitalism occurred in the protests in Seattle and throughout the world against the World Trade Organization (WTO) meeting in December 1999. Behind these actions was a global protest movement using the Internet to organize resistance to the WTO and capitalist globalization, while championing democratization. Many web sites contained anti-WTO material and numerous mailing lists used the Internet to distribute critical material and to organize the protest. The result was the mobilization of caravans from throughout the United States to take protestors to Seattle, many of whom had never met and were recruited through the Internet. There were also significant numbers of international participants in Seattle which exhibited labor, environmentalist, feminist, anti-capitalist, animal rights, anarchist, and other groups organized to protest aspects of globalization and form new alliances and solidarities for future struggles. In addition, protests occurred throughout the world, and a proliferation of anti-WTO material against the extremely secret group spread throughout the Internet.[11]

./english/380.txt:177: Furthermore, the Internet provided critical coverage of the event, documentation of the various groups' protests, and debate over the WTO and globalization. Whereas the mainstream media presented the protests as "anti-trade," featured the incidents of anarchist violence against property, while minimizing police violence against demonstrators, the Internet provided pictures, eyewitness accounts, and reports of police brutality and the generally peaceful and non-violent nature of the protests. While the mainstream media framed the protests negatively and privileged suspect spokespeople like Patrick Buchanan as critics of globalization, the Internet provided multiple representations of the demonstrations, advanced reflective discussion of the WTO and globalization, and presented a diversity of critical perspectives.

./english/380.txt:181: The Seattle protests had some immediate consequences. The day after the demonstrators made good on their promise to shut down the WTO negotiations, Bill Clinton gave a speech endorsing the concept of labor rights enforceable by trade sanctions, thus effectively making impossible any agreement and consensus during the Seattle meetings. In addition, at the World Economic Forum in Davos a month later there was much discussion of how concessions were necessary on labor and the environment if consensus over globalization and free trade were to be possible. Importantly, the issue of overcoming divisions between the information rich and poor, and improving the lot of the disenfranchised and oppressed, bringing these groups the benefits of globalization, were also seriously discussed at the meeting and in the media.

./english/380.txt:185: More importantly, many activists were energized by the new alliances, solidarities, and militancy, and continued to cultivate an anti-globalization movement. The Seattle demonstrations were followed by April 2000 struggles in Washington, D.C., to protest the World Bank and IMF, and later in the year against capitalist globalization in Prague and Melbourne; in April 2001, an extremely large and militant protest erupted against the Free Trade Area of the Americas summit in Quebec City and in summer 2001 a large demonstration took place in Genoa.

./english/380.txt:197: In particular, the movement against capitalist globalization used the Internet to organize mass demonstrations and to disseminate information to the world concerning the policies of the institutions of capitalist globalization. The events made clear that protestors were not against globalization per se, but were against neo-liberal and capitalist globalization, opposing specific policies and institutions that produce intensified exploitation of labor, environmental devastation, growing divisions among the social classes, and the undermining of democracy. The emerging anti-globalization-from-above movements are contextualizing these problems in the framework of a restructuring of capitalism on a worldwide basis for maximum profit with zero accountability and have made clear the need for democratization, regulation, rules, and globalization in the interests of people and not profit.

./english/383.txt:100:example of road building protests in the UK to articulate an ‘ethics of place’ and a radical

./english/385.txt:4:"I was at the jail where a lot of protesters were being held and a big crowd of people was chanting 'This Is What Democracy Looks Like!' At first it sounded kind of nice. But then I thought: is this really what democracy looks like? Nobody here looks like me."

./english/385.txt:15:Many activist youth groups of color came from California, especially the Bay Area, where they have been working on such issues as Free Mumia, affirmative action, ethnic studies, and rightwing laws like the current Proposition 21 "youth crime" initiative. Seattle-based forces of color that participated actively included the Filipino Community Center and the international People's Assembly, which led a march on Tuesday despite being the only one denied a permit. The predominantly white Direct Action Network (DAN), a huge coalition, brought thousands to the protest. But Jia Ching Chen of the Bay Area's Third Eye Movement was the only young person of color involved in DAN's central planning.

./english/385.txt:21:Yet several experienced activists of color in the Bay Area who had even been offered full scholarships chose not to go. A major reason for not participating, and the reason given by many others, was lack of knowledge about the WTO. As one Filipina said, "I didn't see the political significance of it how the protest would be anti-imperialist. We didn't know anything about the WTO except that lots of people were going to the meeting." One of the few groups that did feel informed, and did participate, was the hip-hop group Company of Prophets. According to African American member Rashidi Omari of Oakland, this happened as a result of their attending teach-ins by predominantly white groups like Art and Revolution. Company of Prophets, rapping from a big white van, was in the front ranks of the 6 a.m. march that closed down the WTO on November 30.

./english/385.txt:25:Limited knowledge meant a failure to see how the WTO affected the daily lives of U.S. communities of color. "Activists of color felt they had more immediate issues," said Rashidi. "Also, when we returned people told me of being worried that family and peers would say they were neglecting their own communities, if they went to Seattle. They would be asked, 'Why are you going? You should stay here and help your people.'" Along with such concerns about linkage came the assumption that the protest would be overwhelmingly white as it was. Coumba Toure, a Bay Area activist originally from Mali, West Africa, said she had originally thought, "the whites will take care of the WTO, I don't need to go." Others were more openly apprehensive. For example, Carlos ("Los" for short) Windham of Company of Prophets told me, "I think even Bay Area activists of color who understood the linkage didn't want to go to a protest dominated by 50,000 white hippies."

./english/385.txt:27:People of color had reason to expect the protest to be white-dominated. Roberto Maestas, director of Seattle's Centro de la Raza, told me that in the massive local press coverage before the WTO meeting, not a single person of color appeared as a spokesperson for the opposition. "Day after day, you saw only white faces in the news. The publicity was a real deterrent to people of color. I think some of the unions or church groups should have had representatives of color, to encourage people of color to participate."

./english/385.txt:29:Four protesters of color from different Bay Area organizations talked about the "culture shock" they experienced when they first visited the "Convergence," the protest center set up by the Direct Action Network, a coalition of many organizations. Said one, "When we walked in, the room was filled with young whites calling themselves anarchists. There was a pungent smell, many had not showered. We just couldn't relate to the scene so our whole group left right away." "Another told me, "They sounded dogmatic and paranoid." "I just freaked and left," said another. "It wasn't just race, it was also culture, although race was key."

./english/385.txt:33:Reflecting the more positive evaluation of white protesters in general, Richard Moore, coordinator of the Southwest Network for Environmental and Economic Justice, told me "the white activists were very disciplined." "We sat down with whites, we didn't take the attitude that 'we can't work with white folks'", concluded Rashidi. "It was a liberating experience."

./english/385.txt:41:Jia Ching Chen recalled that once during the week of protest, in a jail holding cell, he was one of only two people of color among many Anglos. He tried to discuss with some of them the need to involve more activists of color and the importance of white support in this. "Some would say, 'We want to diversify', but didn't understand the dynamics of this." In other words, they didn't understand the kinds of problems described by Coumba Toure. "Other personal conversations were more productive," he said, "and some white people started to recognize why people of color could view the process of developing working relations with whites as oppressive."

./english/385.txt:51:With mass protests planned for April 16-17 in Washington, D.C. at the meeting of the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund (IMF), the opportunity to build on the WTO victory shines brightly. More than ever, we need to work on our ignorance about global issues with study groups, youth workshops, conferences. We need to draw specific links between WTO and our close-to-home struggles in communities of color, as has been emphasized by Raj Jayadev and Lisa Juachon in The Silicon Valley Reader:

./english/385.txt:55:Many examples of how WTO has hurt poor people in third world countries were given during the protest. For example, a Pakistani told one panel how, for years, South Africans grew medicinal herbs to treat AIDS at very little cost. The WTO ruled that this was "unfair" competition with pharmaceutical companies seeking to sell their expensive AIDS medications. "People are dying because they cannot afford those products ," he said. A Filipino reported on indigenous farmers being compelled to use fertilizers containing poisonous chemicals in order to compete with cheap, imported potatoes. Ruined, they often left the land seeking survival elsewhere.

./english/386.txt:107:As the sense of insecurity among the people grows, alongside persisting poverty, unemployment and increasing injustice and discrimination, it pushes the poor and the unemployed into a culture of protest, anger and desperation.

./english/386.txt:129:The new policy will not only lead to the indiscriminate destruction of marine eco-system and erode livelihood of traditional fishing communities but will have serious ecological consequences of intensive mechanised fishing. National Fish Workers Forum (NFF) was in the forefront of the agitation taking on issues of survival of traditional fisherfolk, preservation of marine ecology for utilising it in a sustainable manner, banning of fish trawling during the monsoon months of breeding season. Opening up of waters of the Indian Exclusive Zone (EEZ) to joint venture to exploit the wealth in a indiscriminate way forced the fishworkers to launch major struggle on these issues nation-wide. Protests, blockades, demonstration and hunger strikes forced the central and state government to concede some of the demands. Notable among the gains were the cancellation of permits to foreign vessels under joint venture, denial of extension of existing licences and adopting of measures to preserve marine eco-system.

./english/387.txt:60:Likewise, in Brazil in Para, 18 landless peasants peacefully blocking highways were butchered by the military police under orders from the governor. A photographer videotaped the event. A national outcry ensued. Massive demonstrations took place in Sao Paulo, Rio, and other cities. Public opinion polls demonstrated overwhelming support for the MST. They organized a march on the capital and were joined by over 100,000 people, including trade unionists and urban slum dwellers. President Cardoso, who denounced the MST as an “anachronistic movement” fighting outdated battles (like land reform), faced with the mass protests, invited one of the leaders to the Presidential Palace to discuss the best way to implement the reforms. The 15 member national leadership showed up to demonstrate that there is no single leader and refused Cardoso’s offer to sign an agreement suspending land occupations in exchange for settling 49,000 families camped on contested terrain. As Joao Pedro Stedile, an MST leader, said later, “It is necessary to negotiate but never at the price of demobilizing the movement. Otherwise you have nothing to negotiate in the future.”

./english/390.txt:69:Only a few days ago in Washington, a quarter of a million people marched against the war on Iraq. Each month, the protest is gathering momentum.

./english/395.txt:120:terrorists but also aimed at protestors of state politics and market operations. And the self-styled

./english/395.txt:634:“Although many have observed that the recent mass protests would have been impossible without

./english/398.txt:22:The issue of recurring incidents of violence at various anti-globalization protests such as at Seattle and Genoa also came in for animated discussion. Several delegates in the audience asked why the big NGOs, who were part of the movement, objected so strongly to the use of violent methods by anarchists and other small groups, when all they were doing was 'to counter the violence perpetrated by states pushing neo-liberal policies onto a helpless population'.

./english/398.txt:24:In reply, Vittorio Agnelotto, of the Genoa Social Forum from Italy said that the kind of violence carried out by the anarchists of the 'Black Bloc' at the G-8 Genoa meet last year was counterproductive and harmful to the entire movement. Such acts of violence he alleged gave an opportunity to the police and even neo-fascist groups to infiltrate the anti-globalization protests with dubious agendas of their own.

./english/399.txt:103:The students involved became known as 'LES ENRAGES' because of their theatrical nature and the violence of their demonstrations (the name originally comes from an 18th Century revolutionary group led by Jacques Roux, who ended up being guillotined by the Revolutionary Tribunal). To support their reforms they began disrupting lectures, breaking down all communication between lecturers and students: then escalating the ensuing disorder by spreading rumours that plain-clothes police had infiltrated the campus to compile a black-list of trouble-makers. The SU protested. The situation was developing.

./english/399.txt:117:Les Enrages continued to build on this emotional reaction to the authorities repression, until 3 anti-Vietnam War bombings took place in Paris. 5 members of 'The National Committee For Vietnam' were arrested. On March 22nd, as a protest against the arrests, a group of Les Enrages and some anti-Vietnam war demonstrators occupied the administration offices at Nanterre and decided to get a real Movement going. "THE MOVEMENT OF MARCH 22nd" was to have no organization as such, no hierarchy and no hard and fast programme. Obviously it was political, but it did'nt follow one political doctrine. There were anarchists, Marxists, Leninists, Trotskyists, all manner of -ists, and of course, a bit of Situationist in there somewhere.

./english/399.txt:123:Anyway, at Nanterre the threat of The March 22nd Movement and what the Dean described as "a real war psychosis", led to the University being closed down and Red Danny and some others being summoned before a disciplinary tribunal. On May 3rd hundreds of left wing students gathered at the Sorbonne, the originally overcrowded University in Paris, to protest. The Rector of the University became worried, especially when he heard that a group of right-wing students were gathering nearby. He rang the Minister of Education and together they decided to bring in the police, despite what happened at Nanterre.

./english/400.txt:31:Arquilla and Ronfeldt (1998b) have argued that the characteristic strategic approach of information warfare, enabled by information-intensive networked organisation, is that of 'swarming' in which small, dispersed and mobile forces come together rapidly to engage with an adversary before rapidly dissolving. The ability to continue swarming attacks by repeatedly dispersing and coalescing as a series of 'sustainable pulses' becomes the key feature of 'swarm networks'. Swarming in social conflict has a long history - Arquilla and Ronfeldt (1989b) illustrate this with the example of Marx's description of workers and peasants confrontation with state authorities on the streets of Paris in 1848 (Marx 1850; 1959: pp. 281-307). More recent reminders of the continuing significance of physical swarming in social conflict can be found in the case of protests against the World Bank and IMF in Seattle (Financial Times, 1999) and Prague (Anderson, 2000).

./english/400.txt:37:At the information processing level ICTs, and in particular the Internet, provide both weapons and targets in social netwar. ICT systems and infrastructures may be vulnerable to digital and or to physical attack (e.g. Boulanger, 1998; Cobb, 1999). The objective of such an attack may be the basic denial or disruption of service to an adversary, as for example in the case of 'ping' attacks aimed at disabling major internet portal sites early in 2000 (Financial Times, 2000). Alternatively, a digital attack may involve gaining illicit access to an adversary's information system in order to subvert it. Examples of both of these types of attack are apparent in social movement campaigns. Protesters subverted the Nike Web site, redirecting users to a site calling for the disruption of a world economic summit in Australia (Richtel, 2000). Following the breakdown if the Middle East peace process, both Palestinian and Israeli activists and supporters have attempted to disable the other side's Web sites by using widely available software to overload a server by bombarding it with email or 'ping' requests (Whitaker, 2000).

./english/400.txt:38:To date, trade unions have made limited use of the Internet either as a terrain or more directly as a weapon. Perhaps the most extensive use of the Internet to win public support for an industrial dispute has been seen in striking journalists from the Detroit News and the Detroit Free Press, who established an alternative on-line newspaper, the Detroit Journal to help to build community support for their strike (Lee, 1997: 82-84). There have also been examples of using the Internet and other communications media to protest to companies during industrial disputes, as for example in the UK Communications Workers Union with label-printers Critchley (Gibbs, 1999). There is little evidence of unions attempting to disable corporate information systems outright through covert action, and it would appear that these would be unlikely to be adopted widely by unions organised as democratic organisations and hence readily open to legal identification and action. However, sabotage by individual workers has historically featured in industrial disputes and there is little reason to suppose that information systems would be immune. Certainly, computer security analysts have identified hostile individual employees as sources of risk to systems.

./english/400.txt:75:Traditional forms of industrial action were a component of all campaigns. Campaigns A and D both aimed to globalise what were initially local disputes by publicity, protest and solidarity action. Alongside other media events and stunts, both cybercampaigns contributed to publicising the campaigns and offered opportunities for visitors to the Web sites to register protests with the companies involved. Strikes and lock-out were at the centre of both campaigns and in Campaign A, in particular, solidarity demonstrations were reported in plants in six countries included work stoppages during an international 'Week of Outrage' in July 1996.

./english/400.txt:76:Campaign B addressed the wider issue of non-payment of wages in Russia, in particular seeking to raise the profile of the issue outside Russia. Consequently the web site had a much greater informational content. While the cybercampaign was less directly linked to the protests against non-payment, it did not exist in isolation from them. Campaign C was not tied to a specific industrial dispute, although locally-initiated industrial action occurred during the campaign at company-owned facilities, particularly in Australia and Indonesia, and the Web site publicised these. As part of the campaign, an international week of action was held in July 2000 with protest actions reported in a total of eleven countries, including 24 hour strike actions in Australia.

./english/400.txt:79:Campaign A, the first of the cybercampaigns set the general tone for those that followed. The Web pages carried background information about the campaign and contact details for the company and as third parties such as shareholders, investors and high-profile companies stocking or using tyres made by BFS. Where possible, these included email addresses with the invitation to send protest email messages, with graphic file attachments. Perhaps because of the novelty of the cybercampaign technique, the Web site itself became a 'hook' on which several major media outlets hung high-profile pieces covering both the dispute and trade union use of the Internet (e.g. Financial Times 1996; Arsenault, 1996.). The web pages for Campaign C included detailed briefings and background information about the company (including two 'Stakeholder reports' produced for company AGMs), links to relevant sites, and invitations to send messages of protest to the company, associated companies and governments. A second 'Coalition of Rio Tinto Shareholders' web site was established in 2000, co-sponsored by ICEM aimed particularly at winning support for the proposals submitted to the AGM. As with the earlier campaigns. the Campaign D pages allowed supporters to protest electronically to both the subsidiary involved directly in the dispute and to the parent company, this time including 'e-postcard' images. Images available to be sent to the US subsidiary illustrated the extent of global support while those to the German-based parent emphasised the very different approach to industrial relations apparent in the US, in comparison with that in Germany. The cybercampaign also sought to politicise the campaign by highlighting possible links between German politicians and the parent company, and encouraging email protests to German ministers and the Labor Counsellor at the German Embassy in Washington. This campaign also included more direct contributions from the replaced workers themselves, for example in an audio file containing an introduction to the dispute by the President of the USWA Local involved.

./english/400.txt:82:Campaign A: Bridgestone Firestone Picketing plant. International solidarity through solidarity actions in 8 countries. Campaign newsProtest messages to company, investors, bankers, customers, retailers and suppliers

./english/400.txt:83:Campaign B: Russia Extensive stoppages and demonstrations by affiliated unions in RussiaJoint ICEM/ICFTU case presented to the ILO; Extensive information on ongoing situation;Protest messages international financial and other institutions, Russian national and local government, multinational corporations Solidarity messages to Russian affiliates

./english/400.txt:84:Campaign C: Rio Tinto Industrial disputes (Australia) Publicity campaignShareholder campaign centring on AGM Campaign newsProtest messages to Rio Tinto and related companiesPublicity for shareholder campaign

./english/400.txt:85:Campaign D: Continental Picketing plant. International support rallied through speaking tours.Protests by ICEM affiliates in Germany, South Africa and Australia. Protest message to company, German politicians, German Embassy in USA.

./english/400.txt:87:The Campaign B pages similarly included protest links, this time primarily to email addresses and web sites of the Russian government and intergovernmental financial institutions. The Web pages had a greater informational component than the industrial campaigns. They provided detailed background information and briefings on the developing economic and political situation in Russia, with a strong emphasis on the protests of Russian trade unions (derived both from first-hand reports from affiliates and from international newswires and news databases). As with the other campaigns, the pages invited visitors to send protest messages, this time to national and international institutions involved in or influencing Russian economic policy. Given the emphasis on providing information to an international audience, the pages were predominantly in English though some were also available in Russian. The site attracted substantial interest from academics, business people and labour activists with an interest in Russia. The campaign attained a greater profile on the Internet with prominent links from major sites with an interest in Russia, as well as recommendations and listings in Russian sections of Web directories such as 'Excite' and 'Yahoo!', and the Web sites of conventional media organisations. Numbers of visitors to the campaign pages showed substantial increases during high-profile activities in Russia such as the national Day of Action by Russian trade unions on October 7, 1998 and the campaign pages continued to attract substantial traffic into early 2000.

./english/400.txt:89:For ICEM the cybercampaigns have primarily been 'hearts and minds' operations (primarily addressing structural rather processing informational aspects, in Arqilla & Ronfeldt's terms) seeking to use the web to raise the profile of the various disputes both directly and indirectly. They have gone beyond simply disseminating information, to provide mechanisms for supporters to register support for the campaign. The opportunities to send protest messages were not, however, intended primarily to disrupt adversaries' information systems - rather they aimed to give a way for passive readers of the pages to become more active participants in the campaigns. An internal secretariat report emphasised this as follows: "The interactive nature of the technology lends itself perfectly to changing readers into concerned observers and then into active participants". However, the cybercampaigns do appear to have had an impact on the availability of adversary's service in at least two cases. In the first case (Campaign A), despite claiming that they had received relatively few protest messages, the company were reported as having established a parallel email system as a contingency (Arsenault, 1996). In Campaign D, internal mailing lists, the addresses of which had been known to ICEM were either removed, or had access controlled, shortly after their publication on the campaign Web sites.

./english/400.txt:99:These cybercampaigns have been conducted as adjuncts to other forms of campaigning: in two cases as a part of moves to globalise more 'traditional' industrial disputes in the US tyre industry; and in the case of the Rio Tinto campaign , the cybercampaign has formed a part of a wider corporate campaign including the initiation of shareholder action and building links with other social movement or civil society activists. The campaigns have not sought primarily to degrade the service of adversaries, though in two cases this appears to have led to minor disruption of service as a by-product of the cybercampaigns. However, the largely symbolic identification of routes in to the company via email addresses and Web sites is one way of taking advantage of companies' growing use of the Web to strengthen links with communities of customers. Each point of openness - request for feedback, contact address or link to related company - provides a possible entry point for protesters.

./english/400.txt:101:The cybercampaigns examined here have all sought to broaden the campaigns, in two ways. Firstly, they have sought to globalise the disputes. One particular feature of the two tyre-industry cybercampaigns was their highlighting of differences in the treatment of workers in foreign subsidiaries and in the 'home' countries of the parent multinationals (Japan and Germany in these cases) - a tactic to which the Internet, as an increasingly global medium may be particularly well suited. Secondly, and in common with many corporate campaigns, they have identified actors in the immediate adversary's networks as being legitimate targets for protest.

./english/400.txt:108:Anderson, R. (2000) , Protesters besiege IMF meeting, Financial Times 26 September 2000

./english/400.txt:129:Financial Times (1996) Tyremaker braced for first online protest by pickets, July 10

./english/400.txt:130:Financial Times (1999) Protesters throw WTO meeting into disarray: Opening ceremony is cancelled as clashes paralyse Seattle city centre, Dec 1

./english/400.txt:165:Richtel, M. (2000) Nike Web Site is Taken Over By Protesters, New York Times, 22 June

./english/400.txt:171:Scott, A. & Street, J. (2000) From Media Politics to E-protest, Information, Communication and Society 3(2) pp. 215-240

./english/402.txt:52:For the rest, I am inspired by: energetic and innovative social protest, and original analyses of the local-national-global dialectic in Argentina; by the belated appearance in Peru of a network, Raiz/Root, which clearly has some feeling that the WSF is more than an NGO jamboree; by the Kidz in the Kamp who were discussing under a tree, and with informal translation, how to ensure that the emancipatory and critical forces had more impact on the Forum process; by the struggle, against all odds, of the US Znet people to mount ‘Life after Capitalism’, an event of post-capitalist propuesta within the Forum; by the increasing number of compañer@s, of various ages, identities, movements and sexual orientations, who believe that, in the construction of a meaningfully civil global society, transparency is not only the best policy but the right one.

./english/403.txt:25:Beyond such subterranean channels, social movements have often relied on corporate and state media as a means of communicating with other sections of society, with all the attendant risks that this reliance brings. Such ‘guerrilla tactics’ (Fiske 1989: 19) were again demonstrated as recently as the Melbourne S11 blockade of the World Economic Forum in 2000: for example, with the mock adoption of a John Farnham song as the protest anthem, and the media furore that this provoked. At the same time, this attempt to detourn corporate media also indicates a fundamental weakness of the movement itself:

./english/403.txt:37:It is with projects such as the Indymedia network (www.indymedia.org), however, that it becomes possible to talk of the emergence of a distinctly social movement electronic communications forum. The first Indymedia site was established as part of the Seattle days of protest, where they proved effective in relaying images, audio recordings and written accounts of the mass blockade (Weingartner 2001). Since then, Indymedia sites have been formed across Western Europe, the Americas, and Australasia (Shumway 2001) — and most ecently, in the Middle East. Powered by ‘open publishing’ software that allows users both to upload materials and to offer commentaries on the stories, opinions and images provided by others, Indymedia can be seen as part of a broader Internet phenomenon of sites fuelled by ‘the creativity of their users, not [by] professional producers as was the tradition with earlier electronic media’ (Arnison 2002). At the same time, Arnison has argued, one of the issues presently being debated within the Indymedia network of web sites is precisely ‘what to do when they are not covering a major event’. One response to this dilemma has been to mentor new ventures into ‘real world media’. In Melbourne, for example, there is The Paper, a fortnightly publication that began around the S11 protests, and has since carved out its own identity independently of the local Indymedia collective.

./english/403.txt:71:Not surprisingly, then, few studies to date have attempted to ascertain what, if anything, social movements might usefully learn from knowledge management as a discipline. One such attempt, by Karen Nowé (2001), argues that knowledge management itself has too often concentrated on technological fixes when trying to think through information flows within organisations. Noting that social movement organisations are typically poor in terms of finances and physical resources, she adds that they face the additional problem of peaks and troughs in membership and activity as a consequence of the very ebbs and flows of cycles of protest:

./english/403.txt:161:Lacey, A. (2001) Networks of Protest, Communities of Resistance: Autonomous Activism in Contemporary Britain. Ph.D thesis, Centre for European Studies, Monash University, currently submitted for examination.

./english/408.txt:24:Before endorsing this judgement we should consider what results the Assembly has produced. At the first ESF in Florence in November 2002 it issued the call for a day of protest against the war in Iraq on 15 February 2003. At Porto Alegre the following January the anti-war and activists assemblies turned that into a global call. We know the outcome: the biggest day of international protest ever, which led even the New York Times to acknowledge the emergence of a second superpower. Here in Britain the shock waves from the anti-war protests last spring are still sweeping through the official political system, but 15 February has broader implications than that.

./english/409.txt:10:Many people said that they felt history being made in that room. What I felt was something more intangible: the end of The End of History. And fittingly, "Another World Is Possible" was the events official slogan. After a year and a half of protests against the World Trade Organization, the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund, the World Social Forum was billed as an opportunity for this emerging movement to stop screaming about what it is against and start articulating what it is for.

./english/409.txt:14:The particular site was chosen because Brazils Workers Party (Partido dos Trabalhadores, the PT) is in power in the city of Porto Alegre, as well as in the state of Rio Grande do Sul. The conference was organized by a network of Brazilian unions and NGOs, but the PT provided state-of-the-art conference facilities at the Catholic University of Porto Alegre and paid the bill for a star-studded roster of speakers. Having a progressive government sponsor was a departure for a group of people accustomed to being met with clouds of pepper spray, border strip searches and no-protest zones. In Porto Alegre, activists were welcomed by friendly police officers and greeters with official banners from the tourism department.

./english/409.txt:33:One thing that wasnt so big at the World Social Forum was the United States. There were daily protests against Plan Colombia, the "wall of death" between the United States and Mexico, as well as George W. Bushs announcement that the new administration will suspend foreign aid to groups that provide information on abortion. In the workshops and lectures there was much talk of American imperialism, of the tyranny of the English language. Actual US citizens, though, were notably scarce. The AFL-CIO barely had a presence (John Sweeney was at Davos), and there was no one there from the National Organization for Women. Even Noam Chomsky, who said the forum "offers opportunities of unparalleled importance to bring together popular forces," sent only his regrets. Public Citizen had two people in Porto Alegre, but their star, Lori Wallach, was in Davos.

./english/409.txt:34:"Where are the Americans?" people asked, waiting in coffee lines and around Internet linkups. There were many theories. Some blamed the media: The American press wasnt covering the event. Of 1,500 journalists registered, maybe ten were American, and more than half of those were from Independent Media Centers. Some blamed Bush. The forum was held a week after his inauguration, which meant that most US activists were too busy protesting the theft of the election to even think about going to Brazil. Others blamed the French. Many groups didnt know about the event at all, in part because international outreach was done mainly by ATTAC, which, Christophe Aguiton acknowledged, needs "better links with the Anglo-Saxon world."

./english/409.txt:61:By the third day, frustrated delegates began to do what they do best: Protest. There were marches and manifestoes--a half-dozen at least. Beleaguered forum organizers found themselves charged with everything from reformism to racism. The Anti-Capitalist Youth contingent accused them of ignoring the important role direct action played in building the movement. Their manifesto condemned the conference as "a ruse" using the mushy language of democracy to avoid a more divisive discussion of class. The PSTU, a breakaway faction of the Workers Party, began interrupting speeches about the possibility of another world with loud chants of: "Another world is not possible, unless you smash capitalism and bring in socialism!" (It sounded much better in Portuguese.)

./english/409.txt:63:Some of this criticism was unfair. The forum accommodated an extraordinary range of views, and it was precisely this diversity that made conflicts inevitable. By bringing together groups with such different ideas about power--unions, political parties, NGOs, anarchist street protesters and agrarian reformers--the World Social Forum only made visible the tensions that are always just under the surface of these fragile coalitions.

./english/409.txt:65:But other questions were legitimate and have implications that reach far beyond a one-week conference. How are decisions made in this movement of movements? Who, for instance, decides which "civil society representatives" go behind the barbed wire at Davos--while protesters are held back with water cannons outside? If Porto Alegre was the anti-Davos, why were some of the most visible faces of opposition "dialoguing" in Davos?

./english/410.txt:1:A Fiesta of Protest at Porto Alegre

./english/410.txt:10:A large number of events, in one way or another, related to Latin American Socialist parties. Some – usually smaller gatherings – bore the remnants of ultra-Marixist rhetoric lashing out against the "capitalist pigs" and calling for a revolution by the world's working classes. But most events were more conciliatory in their approaches, calling for reforms over revolution. For example, the Italian NGOs ROBA dell' Autro Mundo and Mani Tese organized a panel discussion on developing international legal frameworks, which would enforce the multinational corporations' social responsibilities. In fact, a public discussion with IMF and World Bank representatives, which drew some protests, in the end amounted to a fruitful exchange of opinions. Responding to his critics from international NGOs, the World Bank representative, John Garrison, maintained that free trade was the key to achieving dignity and justice at a global level. But he also welcomed pressure from civil society to make governments and corporations deliver on their promises.

./english/417.txt:414:Sea) in Germany. The protest against the G8 meeting can become a strong symbol and con-

./english/417.txt:417:protest

./english/417.txt:418:The plans for the G8 summit protest include so far a mass demonstration on June 2; an alter-

./english/417.txt:419:native summit /congress from June 4 until 7; an international protest camp and a blockade.

./english/418.txt:19:The conference states the scarcity of refugees in Sahara and searches a solution in food supply, health and education. The conference deplores the lack of specialised institutions in the UN to carry out their respective orders in Saharawi refugees’ lands. They are worried about the insufficient humanitarian help received and ask the UN agencies to act in an urgent and effective way in their programmes on behalf of the Saharawi refugees, being an internationally recognized basic right. It protests against the arbitrary decision of giving help only to 90 000, « the weakest ones», out of the 160 000 refugees.

./english/471.txt:8:They came, most evidently, to protest against the failure of neo-liberal globalisation to provide equitable and sustainable development, and to debate alternatives. The forum – in the 1,200-plus public meetings, seminars and workshops organised by movements from India and abroad – had, as its overarching themes, discussion of the forces that disfigure humanity: patriarchy, racism, caste-ism, religious sectarianism, and militarism.

./english/472.txt:29:As they conceived it, the meeting would be a starting point for creating proposals that would go beyond the growing protest actions against the neoliberal model whose promoters met in Davos. They drew on two broad currents of activism: the direct action movement that has mounted massive demonstrations against international summit meetings (notably against the 1999 World Trade Organization meeting in Seattle), and the emergent worldwide civil society, embodied mainly in the nongovernmental organizations that have mushroomed throughout the world since the 1980s. These forces have been dubbed the “antiglobalization movement” by much of the press, but they generally reject the label. They favor a unified world, but one unified around common human values and respect for diversity rather than trade.

./english/472.txt:39:The meetings have grown spectacularly. Attendance has always exceeded expectations, roughly doubling from the first annual meeting to the second, and again from the second to the third. The meetings have evolved in theme as well. At the third WSF, in 2003, the dominant issue was not originally on the agenda: the looming war in Iraq. Vehement opposition to the war became an ever-present theme of the large plenaries, smaller workshops and a massive protest march.

./english/474.txt:4:The debate on whether the World Social Forum (WSF) should remain merely a space for reflection and protest or should move on to proposals for concrete action once again emerged at the sixth edition of the annual global civil society meet, taking place in the Venezuelan capital this week.

./english/474.txt:6:The discussion on moving "from protests to proposals" began last year at the fifth edition of the Forum, in the southern Brazilian city of Porto Alegre, where the WSF was first held in 2001.

./english/474.txt:40:"WSF started as protest; it is now a search for alternatives. The next logical step is action - without losing that space. Whether the WSF itself takes action is a different issue," said Singh.

./english/476.txt:8:There are three moments of origin in this story. The first was the very successful mass protests at the Seattle meeting of the World Trade Organization in November, 1999. A large group of mostly U.S. protestors - an unlikely coalition of AFL-CIO trade-unionists, environmental activists, and anarchists - succeeded in scuttling the meeting. Two months later, in January, 2000 at Davos, a group of some 50 intellectuals from around the world tried a different tactic, organizing an "anti-Davos at Davos," seeking to get anti-neoliberal arguments a world press. And in February, 2000, two Brazilian leaders of popular movements, Chico Whitaker and Oded Grajew, went to Paris to talk to Bernard Cassen, a journalist and the president of the anti-globalization organization called Attac-France. The two Brazilians suggested to Cassen that they join forces and launch a world meeting that would combine mass protest and intellectual analysis. They convened this in Porto Alegre, Brazil, at the same time as the 2001 meeting of the World Economic Forum in Davos. They called this the World Social Forum, and Cassen said the object was to "sink Davos."

./english/477.txt:4:The recent 4th meeting of the World Social Forum (WSF) in Mumbai (India) - Jan. 16-21, 2004 - was a big step forward in the steadily rising strength of the World Social Forum. In five years, it has become a major actor on the world scene. There are three moments of origin in this story. The first was the very successful mass protests at the Seattle meeting of the World Trade Organization in November, 1999. A large group of mostly U.S. protestors - an unlikely coalition of AFL-CIO trade-unionists, environmental activists, and anarchists - succeeded in scuttling the meeting. Two months later, in January, 2000 at Davos, a group of some 50 intellectuals from around the world tried a different tactic, organizing an "anti-Davos at Davos," seeking to get anti-neoliberal arguments a world press. And in February, 2000, two Brazilian leaders of popular movements, Chico Whitaker and Oded Grajew, went to Paris to talk to Bernard Cassen, Director of Le Monde Diplomatique and the president of Attac-France. The two Brazilians suggested to Cassen that they join forces and launch a world meeting that would combine mass protest and intellectual analysis. They convened this in Porto Alegre, Brazil, at the same time as the 2001 meeting of the World Economic Forum in Davos. They called this the World Social Forum, and Cassen said the object was to "sink Davos."

./english/488.txt:4:The author analyses among WSF, global justice and solidary movements and says that the Forum was created in the recent protest waves known as anti-globalization.

./english/489.txt:4:The author analyses among WSF, global justice and solidary movements and says that the Forum was created in the recent protest waves known as anti-globalization.

./english/519.txt:10:Due to the high level of confrontation, the global movement (or alter-globalization), which struc-tured itself as from the Seattle protests, is facing – since mobilizations against the Iraq invasion on February 15th, 2003 – difficulties regarding political initiatives and is aware that international initia-tives, which structure the movement, are dispersed. Mobilizations that are centralized for “counter-summits” such as the ones that occurred parallel to the WTO in Cancun (August, 2003) and Hong Kong (December, 2005) were very limited and had little effect on the events’ dynamics; the same occurred during the 4th Summit of the Americas, in Mar del Plata (November, 2005). The evalua-tion of the protests that took 250 people to the streets against the G8 in Edinburgh is an ambiguous one, but it does not repesent the Seattle-Geneva cycle’s recovery. The result brought by these meet-ings was determined by disputes among governments and groups of governments.

./english/519.txt:16:In Europe, the defeat of the European Constitution proposal in referendums in France and Holland represents an important obstacle for the Maastricht project’s fulfillment, because a political renewal would be given to the neo liberal construction of the European Union as a big market, a problem to which, up to now, there is no solution – with the poor youth protesting in France showing the latent risks contained in the present path. In the United States, in spite of the repressive and defensive con-text, many important social mobilizations have recovered themselves, such as the transportation strike in New York. The same is happening with political struggles, particularly within peaceful movements and movements for the withdrawal in Iraq. However, the predominance of a very con-servative political atmosphere remains within central capitalist countries (including Japan, Australia and Canada) and within the great performers of the global system (Russia, China, and, to a certain extent, India).

./english/519.txt:24:These events deepen the dialogue with the current progressist processes, within a situation in which mobilization and campaigns that have always been part of the global movement are facing difficul-ties and/or are cohabiting with a bigger state protagonism – FTTA, WTO, transgenic, patent medi-cines, Kyoto Protocol, International Criminal Court, protests against the IMF and the G-8, cam-paign against war, etc.

./english/519.txt:42:The WSF has shown itself very efficient in giving impulse to the left wing’s political struggle in the beginning of this century. Innumerous declarations, platforms and calls have been coming out of the process’ events and have been fundamental to organize from the referendum on the FTTA in Brazil to the protests against the invasion of Iraq on February 15th, 2003. In each forum, social movements network meetings agree on an agenda for global mobiliza-tions, which is reference to thousands of movements and organizations. Declarations such as the “World Charter on the Rights to the City” have been produced in many forums. During the Caracas Forum, de declaration “Another integration, urgent, possible and necessary” was made. The “Ba-mako Call”, written in a seminar that took place one day before the Forum, is an important refer-ence to our days, assembling much of what the WSF has produced up to now. Some examples of “conclusions” produced “during the Forums” could be multiplied infinitely, and many would point out its efficiency as an impelling force to the organization of initiatives which are central to the left-ist movement nowadays.

./english/519.txt:55:The fundamental cause for the difficulties we are now dealing with comes from the increasing confrontation in international politics, established by Wash-ington and followed in group by central governments – which is, basically, a problem of correlation of forces (and, therefore, a capacity problem in concentrating forces and initiatives). If we had been able to support the mobilization level achieved in Geneva or in the protests of February 15th, 2003, we wouldn’t be facing the difficulties we are facing now. The central problem to the present global left is not, in this sense, the lack of candidates to direct the mass movements with “fair” public poli-cies - directions that should have more dissemination of their ideas – but the enlargement of self-organization and autonomous protagonism of wide popular sectors.

./english/529.txt:14:Objections have been voiced that many of those seeking a change in the world do not know what they are looking for. Naomi Klein, the author of No Logo who attended the first forum, wrote, "After a year and a half of protests against the World Trade Organisation, the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund, the World Social Forum was billed as an opportunity for this emerging movement to stop screaming about what it is against and start articulating what it is for." President Chavez of Venezuela where the WSF was held in January also expressed the same fear when he appealed for a serious political discussion and the need for direction. I didn’t hear a whole lot of visionary discussion at the Karachi Forum. There were countless NGO’s presenting their efforts, railing against the powers that be, but other than a sense of solidarity, no discussion arose by which the global activist community might grow their movement. I didn’t see any "Big Picture" emerging.

./english/535.txt:16:US and Canadian Haitian solidarity activists, grassroots activists from Haiti, and other WSF participants are also upset that the Brazilian Government, whose president is a leftist, is sending troops to Haiti (through the UN) to maintain order. A demonstration was held at the Brazilian embassy to protest that countries intervention in Haiti’s internal affairs.

./english/544.txt:18:As a result, not all the 500-plus sessions that were announced could be held. The organisers claim that 75 per cent were held but the disappointed prospective audience from Karachi dispute that claim. There were many people who went to attend a seminar and found that it had been cancelled. Bad management. The grounds of the Sports Complex were always brimming with life. The stalls - food and handicraft exhibits for sale - were never short of customers. The protesters and demonstrators made their noisy presence felt in a big way with their slogan chanting, banners and flag waving. The cultural celebrations which add life and colour to such gatherings became a central attraction.

./english/544.txt:30:The experience of the WSF session in Karachi highlights the organisational challenges the PSF faces. The most vital issue that will determine the future course of social change in Pakistan is the capacity of organisations working for change to mobilise at the grassroots level. Owing to the factors listed above and the lack of political will in the mainstream parties it is becoming increasingly difficult for NGOs and political parties to bring people together for a common cause. Small wonder then that it is not possible to draw a decent crowd for a protest demonstration against the American war on Iraq - something for which it would be impossible to find even one supporter in this country.

./english/565.txt:364:protesting against the very same type of multinationals producing these

./english/565.txt:449:through the net, international calls to decentralised protests sometimes

./english/565.txt:506:protests. It was initiated in the midst of Seattle's tear gas in

./english/565.txt:558:knowledge in organising protests with the rest! Looking forward to

./english/565.txt:560:the first street protest for "freedom on the Internet" in France, March

./english/565.txt:666:cracked them in protest, considering that measure an unbearable division

./english/565.txt:730:protests, which particularly escalated since 1999. For a partial listing

./english/569.txt:5:1. The Fifth World Social Forum, which met in Porto Alegre, Brazil, between 26 and 31 January 2005, demonstrated once again the enormous strength of the global movement that became visible in the struggles of Chiapas, Seattle, and Genoa. 200,000 at the opening demonstration, 155,000 participants involved in 2,500 activities, a wealth of cultural events, the concluding Assembly of the Social Movements that took up the call for a global day of protest against the occupation of Iraq on 19 March - all of these are things to celebrate.

./english/569.txt:21:Lula's intervention in Porto Alegre was part of this project to rebuild support for social-liberal governments by repackaging neo-liberalism as the way to help the world's poor. Responding to this Orwellian enterprise by building mass protests demanding a profound global redistribution of resources, starting with the cancellation of all Third World debt, is becoming a major challenge for our movement, particularly in the lead-up to the Gleneagles summit.

./english/571.txt:11:Movement can emerge, occur or take place only in space. The most interesting attempt to create a global space for critical social movements is the World Social Forum (WSF), organized since 2001 annually in Porto Alegre, Brazil, and in January 2004 in Mumbai, India (2). In the coming years, the main events of the forum will take place in a decentralized form (2006) and in Africa (2007), which will imply new challenges for the process, until now associated strongly with the city of Porto Alegre. Even though the event has in the beginning been organised simultaneously with – and also as a protest against – the World Economic Forum (WEF), in each subsequent gathering there have been fewer attempts to interact with the WEF. The process has caused a considerable amount of enthusiasm, as well as various sceptical comments on its possibilities to facilitate social transformations.

./english/571.txt:37:One of the main arguments of many social movements was that preparing for annual world events demands too much organizational energy. At the same time many social movements expressed support for a suggestion that in the years when there would be no centralized WSF, the social movements should make another kind of event to protest against the World Economic Forum. This plan made some of the Brazilian Organizing Committee members change their position during the Passignano meeting. Their reasoning was that if the social movements say that annual forums demand too much of their organizational energies, how come they intend to organize something else instead to fill the vacuum.

./english/576.txt:6:Five years ago, after the late-1999 Seattle protests but before the terrorist attacks on the Twin Towers, thousands of activists first converged on the city to discuss the challenges presented by the likes of Enron and the International Monetary Fund (IMF). With this year's fifth consecutive summit, the idea of holding a large, participatory people's assembly to contrast with the World Economic Forum--the exclusive annual gathering of economic elites in Davos, Switzerland--is no longer novel. The Social Forum has attracted virtually every personality from powerful heads of state to the most unencumbered of wandering counter-culturalists. It is possible that the most naive of the 155,000 who attended this year (according to organizers' counts) were those journalists who came to gape at the much-debated gathering as if it had emerged spontaneously and without precedent from the gaucho lowlands.

./english/576.txt:14:"I am a political militant," said Brazilian President Luiz Inácio "Lula" da Silva, clad in a white jacket, as he addressed a stadium full of people during the first day of workshops. "I belong here." Downplaying the roaring PT loyalists, the press would overstate the impact of a small but energetic section of protesters who chastised Lula for continuing to pay Brazil's foreign debt and for failing to buck the economic policies prescribed by the IMF. It is nevertheless true that the President, a former metalworker and union leader who many viewed as a leftist icon when he took office two years ago, had the record of his administration critically scrutinized by a variety of panels throughout the week. As in the past, Lula also visited Davos this year. He went, he said, on a mission to confront wealthy leaders with the same demand of eradicating poverty that he championed in Porto Alegre and to elaborate a "new geography" of politics in which Southern countries would not submit to being considered inferior.

./english/576.txt:45:Participants who moved closest to formulating shared agendas without urging from above were those who stayed together for tracks of workshops in specific issue areas. Anti-war activists agreed on March 19-20 to hold coordinated international days of action. (Plans for the massive protests of February 15, 2003 were similarly birthed at a social forum). And several observers cited environmentalists' progress in strategizing around climate change as an important joint effort.

./english/576.txt:61:Stanford Professor and free software guru Laurence Lessig wrote on his blog of walking through the Youth Camp with Minister of Culture Gilberto Gil. Gil was alternately protested by angry young people demanding free radio (Gil relished the debate) and asked to perform songs from his pop opus (the whole crowd sang along). "Here's a Minister of the government, face to face with supporters and opponents," Lessig wrote. "There is no 'free speech zone.' No guns, no men in black uniform, no panic, and plenty of press. Just imagine."

./english/576.txt:70:As a positive space, not founded as a mass protest outside a World Trade Organization or IMF meeting, the Forum still provides a unique opportunity for setting an alternative agenda for globalization. Its influence on Davos, where elites are now photographed pondering problems of poverty and AIDS, has been undeniable.

./english/577.txt:4:As we walked through the venue for the World Social Forum in Porto Alegre at the banks of the Guaiba river, on January 23, it all seemed so familiar. The WSF was back in Porto Alegre, Brazil, where it had begun in 2001 and had gained strength in 2002 and 2003, after the interlude in Mumbai in 2004. But Porto Alegre 2005 could well have been Mumbai 2004. The same surging crowds – over 100,000 in number, the same cacophony of myriad voices, the same beating of drums, the same confusion, and the same determination on the faces of people who had come to celebrate protest and resistance. And the same determination with which people debated in over 2000 events, spread over four days, and organised in the sprawling venue of makeshift tents over about 4 kms of a green verge skirting the river.

./english/577.txt:6:The first message from the WSF this year was: resistance and protests that confront imperialist globalisation today have assumed truly global proportions. Two years ago in the WSF in 2003, the mention of India or Mumbai was likely to be greeted with questioning looks. No more so – after the Mumbai WSF, both are firmly on the map of the WSF. As will be Africa which shall hold the Forum in 2007, as will be numerous other places in the globe as the WSF takes wings and flies to different corners.

./english/577.txt:16:The differences were there for all to see. Not just in the different languages that people spoke, in the many different ways they expressed themselves, the different ways in which they dressed, but also in the political articulation of the way forward. Possibly nothing captured this as well as the massive 100,000 strong opening march of the WSF on January 23. In 2003, the opening rally was akin to a victory celebration for the then recently installed Lula government in Brazil. Posters of Lula and flags of the PT (the Partido dos Trabalhadores or Workers Party which Lula represents) dominated the march in 2003 and vied for attention with the sea of Che Guevara posters and green Palestinian scarves. In 2005 Che still dominated the march, the Palestinian scarves were as prominent, but the posters of Lula were few and far between. Instead there were far louder voices questioning the policies of the Lula government, some claiming that the government was pursuing the same neoliberal policies of the previous government. The PT was there in force with T-shirts that had “100% Lula” stamped on them, declaiming their support for the government. The PCDoB (the Brazilian Communist Party) had a huge contingent that marched behind a massive truck from where slogans were raised that underlined their critical support for the Lula government. The CUT (the central federation of trade unions in Brazil) also had a huge presence, with a prominent participation by large numbers of youth – both men and women. Between this huge political mobilisation of different hues marched those who espoused a large variety of causes – anti-war and anti-Bush protestors, anti-WTO activists, environmentalists, for cancellation of global debt, for a sovereign Palestinian state, a dignity rally led by the landless peasants movement (MST) in Brazil with a large Indian participation from dalit groups, and so many others. With them marched artists who performed dances, skits and mimes throughout the route, some walking on ten feet high stilts. But not just these – one could also hear a few chants of Hare Krishna from saffron robed men and women and also a handful of saffron clad Ananda Marg activists.

./english/582.txt:10:Around Jose Miguel there is an anthill of people, a whole parade with hundreds of cords of people following and entwining each other. Even if remarkable ( here is an advance, for example, with the call for the international day of protest against war for March 20th, anniversary of Iraq invasion) the blocs that express explicit political demands are the minority. Much more larger are those who want to show to the WSF – and maybe mostly to themselves - that they have identity, beauty, culture, expression. They emerged from the abysmal poverty to say that they do exist.

./english/589.txt:88:With the help of RLHP the slums dwellers set up structures that would represent them legally with public authorities. Women started a womens organisation. The community, now represented by a legal structure, the Abhivruddhi Sangha (CBO = community based organization) joined the Mysore Slum Dwellers Federation which gathers some thirty thousands people in 54 Mysore slums. The community then asked public authorities for title deeds on the university estate they occupied. Faced with a threat of ejection from the university they organised a protest march of 5,000 participants with the help of the Federation, while the community itself consisted of no more than 500 people. They eventually had their occupation made legal.

./english/589.txt:148:Message received from Penny Bright on 19 February: Peoples victory in India! Coke plant forced to close after community protests!

./english/589.txt:150:Update from BBC Coca-Cola water ban unfortunate Coca-Cola has suffered protests in India in recent months Soft-drinks giant Coca-Cola says it is unfortunate it has been banned from using ground water for one of its bottling plants in southern India. The Kerala state government says the four-month ban is necessary because of a severe drought in the area. The decision follows a petition by locals, who have complained that the Coca-Cola plant is depleting ground water and emitting toxic sludge. The company strongly denied the charge. The states high court is to rule soon.

./english/598.txt:17:Events can change the meaning and nature of representation, however. Thus, the brutality with which Italian police attacked protesters at the G8 summit at Genoa in 2002 set the pace for bringing the social movements and trade unions together. It created a desire to cooperate, which made it possible to build trust and organise the [November 2002] Florence European Social Forum in a way that involved everyone, the Italian forum spokesperson and Aids campaigner Vittorio Agnoletto explained in Mumbai. Thus, after experimenting with creating autonomous spaces, many Italian social movements now often work alongside the cautiously left trade unionists of the CGIL.

./english/600.txt:6:Hay tres momentos de origen de esa experiencia. El primero fueron las protestas masivas durante la reunión de la Organización Mundial de Comercio (OMC) en Seattle, en noviembre de 1999. Un gran número de manifestantes, principalmente estadunidenses -una coalición sorpresiva de sindicalistas del AFL-CIO, militantes ambientalistas y anarquistas- logró echar a pique la reunión. Dos meses después, en enero de 2000, en Davos, un grupo de unos 50 intelectuales de todo el mundo intentaron una táctica diferente y organizaron un "Antidavos en Davos", buscando que se difundieran en la prensa mundial una serie de argumentaciones antineoliberales. En febrero de 2000, dos dirigentes brasileños de movimientos populares, Chico Whitaker y Oded Grajew, fueron a París a hablar con Bernard Cassen, director de Le Monde Diplomatique y presidente de Attac-France. Le sugirieron unir fuerzas para lanzar un encuentro mundial que combinara la protesta masiva y el análisis intelectual. Convinieron que esto ocurriera en Porto Alegre, Brasil, en 2001, al tiempo en que en Davos se realizaba la reunión del Foro Económico Mundial. Le llamaron a esto Foro Social Mundial, y Cassen declaró que el objetivo era "hundir Davos".

./english/605.txt:12:Therefore, the IV WSF was made in a context so far away from the western political culture. It was an highly popular event, militant and feminist – reinforced by the massive presence of ground popular movements, not only from India but from most parts of Asia. There, the Forum has become a space for activities which were, first and foremost, protests and invitations to political action. Mumbai and the Indian Organization Committee have qualitatively enriched the WSF process, introducing several elements that must, from now on, be considered in future initiatives.

./english/605.txt:83:A first aspect seems clear: the Forum process has created spaces of encounter to the anti-systemic forces in the world – today fundamentally the annual Forum. In its very heart, took place lots of activities which have given consistency and motivated a common agenda of international mobilizations. The protests against war in January 15th 2003, as well as manifestations against OMC meeting in Cancún in September 13th, were focuses of debates in the WSF process in the years 2002 and 2003. And it came up from Mumbai activities a clear call for manifestations on March 20th 2004. Establishing a reference agenda for movements with capacity of militant convocation has been, in fact, the practical role of the assemblies in “World Net of Social Movements” and now also the “General Assembly of the Global Movement against War”.

./english/607.txt:8:The World Social Forum contends that, instead of ensuring even in the long run, equitable development, neoliberal globalization actually globalizes poverty and aggravates inequality and oppression. Globalization is not an alternative. Only a people-friendly, sustainable, egalitarian and secular development is possible. With the diversity and complexity of the world, no one alternative or model is feasible, which is why the discussion of many alternatives makes eminent sense.Looking to Europe, the WSF seeks allies - not only in like-minded movements but also in governments and the EU - to deal with such core issues as agricultural subsidies, intellectual property rights and trade-related investment measures. There is also a need to reform and reconsider the economic models presented by institutions such as the World Bank, the World Trade Organization and the International Monetary Fund - which are so unfriendly to the South, to a degree protested even by Nobel Laureate Joseph Stiglitz.Debate at the WSF focused on these issues and others: how much does the UN need to be changed? Is the expansion of its Security Council enough, or does the General Assembly need to be empowered so the opinion of members is not sidelined by the council? What are the specific policies and slogans that can ensure the unity of the South? How can democratic forces in the North be mobilized to support the suffering peoples of the South? Which are the most effective ways of combating religious fundamentalism and sectarianism when Muslims are being demonized in the course of the global war against terror? Can new ways of resisting militarism be more effective in isolating warmongers and replacing dominant concepts of national security and power as innovative strategies of peace?

./english/620.txt:15:We believe that WSF, in effect, has provided this kind of an environment and this has helped not only in revitalising the anti-imperialist struggle internationally, but also in helping different networks and groups to come together. Some of it is already visible in synchronising the anti Iraq War struggle in different countries – demonstrations, protests on the same day throughout the world -- and in working out a common understanding regarding the Cancun Ministerial. The social movement assemblies in the WSF have undoubtedly provided a focus for the above.

./english/626.txt:18:If democracy lives in India, you can feel it in the vibrant culture of resistance. It was the pulse of the WSF. Some march or the other was constantly going on. These were not just protests for the sake of protesting. These were rallies of people with ideas, with histories, with stories, with sufferings, with victories, and with visions. Victims, winners, survivors, fighters. All dreamers. All praxis-builders.

./english/634.txt:14:Aside from numbers and mega-male events (which were not as prevalent as Klein makes out, although the general impression is that women were less well represented than the previous year—an ominous sign!), the atmosphere at Porto Alegre III was electrifying – 5 days of multi-ethnic, multi-racial, internationalism in a country bubbling over with hope after the overwhelming electoral victory of a veritable “working-class hero” to Brazil’s presidency (Lula). Social analyst Peter Waterman has given the flavor of Porto Alegre III in this personal commentary: “[I was inspired by the] energetic and innovative social protest, and original analyses of the local-national-global dialectic in Argentina…by the Kidz in the Kamp who were discussing under a tree, and with informal translation, how to ensure that the emancipatory and critical forces have more impact on the Forum process…by the increasing number of compañer@s, of various ages, identities, movements and sexual orientations, who believe that, in the construction of a meaningfully civil global society, transparency is not only the best policy but the only one” (Waterman, “First

./english/634.txt:23:The WEF’s relative failure at Davos in turn reflected upon a third “triumph” at Porto Alegre III: the impetus and leadership given by the WSF to a nascent international antiwar movement, which two weeks later (February 15) exploded on the international scene and has been shaking world leaders and events ever since. Indeed, the main message coming out of Porto Alegre III was “No war!” A year earlier, Porto Alegre II had called for regional social forums. The European Social Forum held in Florence, Italy, in November 2002 and attended by 50,000 delegates (plus up to a million in the streets), developed the first plans for a February 15-type day of international protests (the date later became set as February 15). The WSF at Porto Alegre III finalized plans for February 15 and concluded its meetings with a spirited anti-war march. Truth to tell, the organizers of February 15 in every nation were caught by surprise when so many millions turned out (from 12 to 30 million globally, depending on your source). Organizers now openly acknowledge that no single group or coalition of groups can possibly lead this new anti-war movement – the movement is leading them!

./english/634.txt:27:The fourth, and in my eyes, final “triumph” at WSF was its making significant progress in its campaigns against the WTO and FTAA and for the cancellation of Third World debt. How significant this progress turns out to be remains to be seen. As Cándido Grzybowski, charged with the task of “officially closing” the Porto Alegre III meetings, stated: “We have succeeded in delegitimizing neoliberalism before world public opinion, although we are far from a victory translated into new macroeconomic and social policies in the world” (my translation, Correo de Prensa de la IV Internacional Boletín Electrónico No 562 – América Latina y el Caribe – 30/1/03 --). Most observers are saying now that both the September 2003 WTO meeting in Cancún, Mexico, and various related “official” meetings on WTO and FTAA in the coming years may be the scenes of not only increased massive protest outside the secretive halls of the powerful but also of protest by official delegates inside them (for example, Brazil, Malaysia, and other regional influentials may balk at current WTO and FTAA plans, the way some such nations did at the WTO summit in Seattle – remember Seattle anyone?).

./english/644.txt:10:Representatives from the United States also contributed examples such as the victory of the Charleston 5, the recent two day national strike by the United Electrical Workers (UE) and the International Union of Electronic Workers (IUE/CWA) against General Electric to protest increases in health care premiums, and Jobs with Justice as one model of labor/community action.

./english/646.txt:14:Since the late 1980s, many of the most visible civil society gatherings have been explicitly, and often antagonistically, related to events of the global elite: meetings of the World Bank, IMF and World Trade Organisation (WTO), including the latter’s predecessor the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT). The battle in Seattle during the WTO meeting in December 1999 boosted local, transnational and global protest against undemocratic sites of global power; spectacular demonstrations from Okinawa to Goteborg and Genoa have become prominent models of critical civil society organising. In most, the main focus has been against something. However, concrete initiatives for transformation are more likely to emerge from proactive meetings.

./english/646.txt:16:Some observers, such as Camilo Guevara, characterise Seattle and other similar media events in the US and Europe as irrelevant for the great majorities of the world, expressions of the delusions of alienated western youth. While I do not fully agree with his observation, it is undoubtedly true that in the poorer regions of the world a lot was going on long before Seattle; middle-class youth protesting in a European or North American city are much more attractive to global media networks than impoverished peasants campaigning against structural adjustment programmes in the south.

./english/646.txt:104:In at least two meetings of the WSF International Council there have been angry demands by some groups to issue a declaration on a particular topic, whether it be crises in Argentina, Palestine or Venezuela. In the Bangkok meeting in August 2002, Walden Bello and others argued that the council should produce a public statement encouraging movements around the world to take part in protests in Cancún in 2003. In the Porto Alegre meeting of the council in January 2003, various delegates argued strongly in favour of making a public statement against the imminent war in Iraq. In both cases, the apparently consensual decision of the council was not to issue any such statements. It is, however, likely that there will be more intense debates on this in the near future.

./english/646.txt:152:Being anti-something can be politically useful, but only up to a point. Protesters in Seattle and at similar events have been very effective in exposing the authoritarianism of the capitalist world-system. But even if the various groups participating do have programmatic statements for alternative futures, the way these events have been staged has not been very conducive to bringing these futures to public attention. Not being able to show a credible alternative, or any alternative at all, has become a problem for the legitimacy of the protest movements.

./english/646.txt:154:In most events post-Seattle, protesters have often been labeled as “anti-globalisation”, and some of them have used the expression themselves. It would, however, be analytically faulty and politically unwise to simply define the movements as being against globalisation, if the term is to be understood as the increasing transgression of nation-state borders on a worldwide level.

./english/654.txt:13:This Charter explicitly states that the World Social Forum of Porto Alegre does not have a deliberative character. The same happens with the World Economic Forum, in Davos, to which the Forum of Porto Alegre is proposed as an alternative (and it is to highlight this aspect that it is held on the same days). To all participants, those days simply represent a stronger and more intensive opportunity to deepen their commitments and articulations, on a worldwide level, within an effort which already existed and will continue to exist after the Forum It is obvious that behind this similarity there exists a huge difference: the participants of Davos aim to maintain and increase the domination of the capital - which they control - over the human beings of the whole world, as well as the expansion of their private business. The Porto Alegre participants, feeding on the increasing protests that come up everywhere against a globalization dictated by the interests of that capital, want to move forward in their proposals to build another world, centered on human beings and respectful of nature, a world which is not only seen as possible but also necessary and urgent and which, in fact, they are already building in their practical action.

./english/654.txt:15:This difference in objectives and contents lead to a difference in method, too: the main activity developed in Davos consists in conferences and debates on previously defined issues, to which the organizers invite great intellectual representatives of the neo-liberal "unique-monolithic thought", the most powerful nations political leaders and great multinationals owners or executives. In the Porto Alegre Forum an important space is also given to conferences and debates, as well as to testimonies of people with significant experiences or reflections. In order to do that, Porto Alegre, like Davos, invite people who have already reflected or are already acting in domains relevant to the issues being discussed - though in 2002, the Porto Alegre conferences have being conducted not by isolated people but by great world nets. But the most enriching activity in the World Social Forum is the one related to the workshops and seminars freely proposed and organized by the participants themselves: 400 in 2001 and 750 in 2002. In fact, it is the joyful people movement around these workshops and seminars that create the atmosphere of enthusiasm of the World Social Forum, in the corridors and gardens where the Forum is held, with a variety of sounds and colors, good spirited protests and presentations of proposals and actions, as well as unexpected performances and events - exactly the opposite of what happens in the well-bred gray of Davos. Obviously, these organizing options of the World Social Forum are not carried out without misunderstandings, pressures, deviations and even attempts at manipulation of the Forum as a whole. Its large scale induces greed and its horizontal character puts in a uncomfortable position those who are in a hurry to see changes taking place and were also brought up within the traditional paradigms of political action.

./english/658.txt:25:This is a challenge that was raised since the first Forum. Several of us have highlighted that the World Social Forum is not just a protest movement. It is, of course, but its purpose is to go further and to also be a process of elaboration of plural and diverse proposals to face and overcome neoliberalism. This year, we took a significant step by endeavoring to leave a written record of the results of the debates, not only of the conferences but also of the seminars and workshops. But a look at the page on the conferences on this Web site shows that some of the reports of the conferences of the last two days are not still available and that translations are not systematically provided. Reinforcing the teams that help to produce these written records, resulting from the debates, will be a key task for the next events. By the way, these written records are just that: written records of the different, and hopefully contradictory, exchanges -- we cannot expect them to be summaries, which would drown the diversity of opinions. But it is better to leave a written record, that to leave no record at all.

./english/668.txt:6:The only way to really describe the World Social Forum (WSF), that just ended here in Brazil, is a global political "carnaval." Not that there was much of the glitter and hedonism associated with that most famous Brazilian street party which begins later this week. Rather, inside the conference halls and out, this astounding event--part-political convention, part-art and music festival, part-intellectual gathering of social movements, was in a state of nearly perpetual celebratory protest for five days and five nights.In the friendly territory of the socialist-run Porto Alegre government, one demonstration followed another. Protests spilled into the streets for womens rights, Indigenous rights, Palestinian rights and for land reform.

./english/668.txt:8:Protestors marched against fundamentalism of all sorts, against hunger and genetically modified agriculture, the IMF, the Free Trade Area of the Americas and much more. The vibe was almost always near-euphoric with horns blaring, hands clapping, feet dancing, flags waving and chants singing out regularly in at least four languages.Sharp Contrast to World Economic ForumThe World Social Forum began last year to provide a counter vision and voice to the World Economic Forum a staid corporate and government gathering designed to informally facilitate corporate globalization. And while "Davos" -- along with the protestors against it -- grabbed the lions share of the corporate-media headlines by switching its venue to New York City this year, Porto Alegre was a cauldron of ideas, creativity and debates all under the slogan "Another World is Possible."Candido Gryzbowski, director of the Brazilian Institute of Social and Economic Analysis, one of the events main organizers, went so far as to assert that Porto Alegre had left the World Economic Forum in the dust. "We dont need them. Our message, our concerns are more comprehensive," he noted. "We want to create alternatives, not just to neo-liberalism, but also to various types of fundamentalism and un-democratic governments."Certainly, the World Economic Forum 3,000 person event in New Yorks Waldorf Astoria was a significant gathering of powerful world players. But the sheer magnitude of the Porto Alegre event far surpassed Davos this year, becoming so large as to be difficult to comprehend, even for its most avid participants.The program of conferences, workshops and seminars, along with films, music and artistic events ran more than 70 tabloid pages in each language.

./english/668.txt:9:While last year 15,000 people showed up, this year, all told more than 51,000 people from 131 countries officially participated in the World Social Forum. In the virtual realm, the WSF website found itself hosting another half million visitors a day. Overall, the event was extremely well organized, with barely any noticeable glitches or conflicts.Tens of Thousands in the Streets -- PeacefullyIn contrast with the streets of New York City -- or for that matter Seattle, Prague or Genoa -- police presence in Porto Alegre was once again nearly non-existent as huge marches peacefully wound through the street. The opening ceremony saw more than 40,000 people demonstrating. The anti-FTAA protest, held on the final day, gathered about 10,000. The beautiful and inspiring closing ceremony, held in a giant hall at the main venue -- the beautifully appointed Catholic University -- was packed with a diverse group of 6,000 people; it was simulcast to thousands more at two other venues.This being a left-political gathering in the heart of Latin America, Che Guevara was everywhere.

./english/671.txt:17:The non-sovereign, alternative globalization position, in contrast, was minoritarian at the Forumnot in quantitative terms but in terms of representation; in fact, the majority of the participants in the Forum may well have occupied this minoritarian position. First, the various movements that have conducted the protests from Seattle to Genoa are generally oriented towards non-national solutions. Indeed, the centralized structure of state sovereignty itself runs counter to the horizontal network-form that the movements have developed. Second, the Argentinian movements that have sprung up in response to the present financial crisis, organized in neighbourhood and city-wide delegate assemblies, are similarly antagonistic to proposals of national sovereignty. Their slogans call for getting rid, not just of one politician, but all of them que se vayan todos: the entire political class. And finally, at the base of the various parties and organizations present at the Forum the sentiment is much more hostile to proposals of national sovereignty than at the top. This may be particularly true of ATTAC, a hybrid organization whose head, especially in France, mingles with traditional politicians, whereas its feet are firmly grounded in the movements.