ABSTRACT
This chapter explicitly focuses upon the set of human responses – societal, communal, familial and individual – which can be classified as “resistance” to the dehumanizing and iniquitous effects of globalization’s dominance by disenfranchised, disadvantaged and dislocated peoples; those harmed, threatened and downtrodden by globalization’s privileging of elites and corporations; to wit, the “vulgarly wealthy.” In similar vein, people’s collective resistance to environmental destruction, to nuclear arms proliferation, to pre-emptive warmongering, and on behalf of “world peace,” animal rights, environmental conservation, endangered species, among others, can also take the form of activist
demonstrations, of popular political movements, pamphleteering, popular broadsheets and underground literature. These grassroots movements have, of course, a longer history than contemporary globalization’s, but the progress made by such democratic activism, their successful demonstrations of peaceful resistance, and the authority and power of people’s collective action, certainly reinforces today’s “globalization from below” initiatives. Many of these popular opposition movements, indeed, continue through today, and add their weight to the antiglobalization platforms, if not reinforce many of them; the environmental “green” movement, for example, with pro-peace/anti-war coalitions being another example.
