ABSTRACT
From the point of view of global justice activists, the Republican National Convention constituted an opportunity to protest downsizing, deregulation, privatization, welfare state retrenchment, unfair trade and other neo-liberal austerity measures that are the hallmarks of economic globalization. The relationship between global justice activism and other forms of urban activism is a complicated one characterized by multiple convergences and divergences. This chapter focuses specifically on the importance of the urban growth agenda in constraining political deliberation and dissent and in shaping the nature and scope of grassroots alliances and divisions. Through an ethnographically informed analysis of global justice activism in Philadelphia, the chapter traces the political contradictions that strain relations between global justice and other activist groups, and problematizes the conventional wisdom on the global-local split. The strategy for postindustrial economic growth was self-consciously framed in terms of the "challenges of globalization".
