ABSTRACT
The years 2000 and 2001 were for me, as for many others around the world, a time of excitement and optimism. A new kind of social movement was emerging. Inspired by the diverse and dialogical networks of resistance imagined by the Zapatistas (Marcos 2001), a variety of grassroots mobilisations and activist-oriented non-governmental organisations – perhaps predominantly but by no means exclusively from the global North – were coalescing into ‘a movement of movements’ resistant to neoliberal globalisation. Among them could be found critics of the International Monetary Fund, World Bank and World Trade Organization; advocates of debt relief for developing countries; proponents of re-regulation and taxation of global finance capital; groups critical of the heightened power of multinational firms; movements of and for small farmers and landless peasants; environmentalists; women’s groups and lesbian activists; labour advocates; direct action networks; and anti-capitalist groups inspired by various articulations of anarchist and socialist ideologies (on the scope of the movement see inter alia Bircham and Charlton 2001; Fisher and Ponniah 2003; Notes from Nowhere 2003; Mertes 2004). Together, these groups seemed to be constructing a new form of politics premised upon transnational solidarity and emergent norms of collective responsibility and reciprocity (see discussions in Rupert 2000; 2003; 2004b).
