ABSTRACT
There is a growing recognition within international law of the significant role played by actors from civil society, mostly non-governmental organizations (NGOs), both in the creation of international norms and in the work of international institutions (Charnovitz 2006). However, significant obstacles to the integration of civil society into international law remain, such that it is quite difficult, for example, to consider social movements as actors in relation to international law or its institutions. Yet contemporary social movements, with increasing frequency and impact, function to mobilize citizens beyond state boundaries explicitly in the service of international goals and objectives (Della Porta and Tarrow 2005; Drache 2008). This chapter takes up the example of street-level social mobilizations directed against particular international institutions or regimes, such as the 1999 mobilizations in Seattle against the World Trade Organization (WTO), in order to consider how they might be understood as direct interventions into ongoing legal debates over the legitimacy and accountability of that institution. In so doing, it aligns itself with existent and ongoing scholarly work that has begun to consider the constitutive role of resistance in international law and to develop, on that foundation, a methodological approach to the study of international law ‘from below’ (Santos and Rodriguez-Garavito
2005; Rajagopal 2003). This chapter builds on that work both conceptually and historically. Its central insight is that in order to account fully for the constitutive role
played by acts of resistance, one’s account of international law must also be able to take into consideration the performative, and hence unpredictable, eruption of ‘events’. The argument proceeds in four parts. The first part identifies two approaches to thinking about the role of civil society actors in relation to international law, which I describe as modern/cosmopolitan and critical/diverse. The second part will aim to contribute to the critical/diverse approach by articulating a twofold conception of the ‘event’. The third part applies this conception in the course of providing an alternative or ‘people’s’ historical account of the Seattle mobilizations against the WTO in 1999. The chapter concludes with a ‘postscript’ – a discussion of Battle in Seattle, a Hollywood feature film starring Woody Harrelson and Charlize Theron that purports to both fictionalize and re-enact the events of those five days. The film’s release in late 2008 reignited fierce debates over the political meaning of the events in Seattle that had taken place nearly nine years previously.
