ABSTRACT
This book has sought to unravel some of the complexity of the great countermovement that free market globalization has engendered. We have seen that the counter-movement cannot be reduced to the post-Seattle wave of street protests or the inspiring meetings of the World Social Forum in Porto Alegre and beyond. What we need to do at this stage, is to provide a broad-brush synthesis of the context in which the counter-movements to globalization operate and their prospects for the future. Rather than travel through all the various academic frameworks generated from within particular disciplines over recent years (valuable as these may be in transforming academic discourse) we take as our starting point the emblematic work Empire by Antonio Negri and Michael Hardt, widely seen as an inspirational text for the anti-globalization movement.
