Complexity and Social Movements: Multitudes at the Edge of Chaos ...

Catalysts of encounter
Until the rise of the WSF and the explosion of national, regional and local
social fora, the prominence of the AGM arose from its capacity to mount
large-scale protests and interventions during summits of international
government and finance organisations. This capacity was one outcome of
networking processes that were underway for a considerable time before
the public emergence of the AGM in events such as the June 18th Carnival
Against Capitalism in London or the Seattle shutdown of the WTO during
1999. These protests were amongst the first to explicitly articulate a link
between northern movements and the backlash against globalised neoliberalism
that had found its most advanced expression in the resistance of
the majority world of the global south to structural adjustment policies and
free trade agreements during the late 1980s and early 1990s. There were
many catalysts for these links, but the most significant for our discussion of
movement forms and co-ordinating processes are the actions of the
Zapatistas – the EZLN (Ejército Zapatista de Liberación Nacional), an
insurgent movement in Mexico whose military intervention was timed to
coincide with the introduction of the North American Free Trade
Agreement (NAFTA) on the 1 January 1994.
The Zapatistas are a hybrid of initially Maoist cadre, indigenous
movements and civil society supporters, who have successfully created an
autonomous zone of self-government in the Chiapas region of Southeast
Mexico (Holloway and Pelaez 1998). This was achieved through limited
military means and multiplied by their capacity to construct an ‘electronic
fabric of struggle’ (Cleaver 1998), utilising a web-based network of
observers and solidarity campaigners to insure the Zapatistas against a military
onslaught from the Mexican state. The Zapatistas are crucial to any
discussion of the emergence of the AGM (Tormey 2004) because they were
amongst the first to articulate the potential of a global resistance movement
that valorised marginal subjectivities and privileged processes of encountering
the other as a means of building peace and sustaining social change.
Their conception and hosting of the ‘First Intercontinental Encuentro for
Humanity and Against Neoliberalism’ in 1996 gave a form and expression
to the anti-capitalist attractor that was to subsequently animate protests
globally. This was the first point at which the logic of encounter, the emphasis
upon minor subjectivities and the proliferation of weak ties were formalised
as explicit movement goals.
Encounter as method: the mirror and the lens
Beyond resistance to global nexus 109
An echo of this rebel voice transforming itself and renewing itself in other
voices. An echo that turns itself into many voices, into a network of voices that,
before power’s deafness, opts to speak to itself, knowing itself to be one and