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

64 Identities, protest dynamics and technology
Subsequent actions in Prague, such as those associated with the 2002
Nato summit illustrate the transfer of repertoires of action seeded through
S26, including the presence of a carnivalesque samba band and the use of
an ‘Argentinean style noise protest’ (www.indymedia.org.uk/en/2003/
09/278096.html). Press accounts of the Nato summit replicated frames
prominent in reportage on S26 emphasising property damage, violence and
disruption (e.g. The Prague Post, 27.11.02). The Czech government reportedly
spent $20.6 million on security for the Nato summit (The Prague Post,
20.11.02) and ultimately ceded control of national security to America for
the duration of the event.
In terms of the wider AGM, ‘Pink & Silver’ became a prominent feature
of subsequent summit sieges and social forum events throughout Europe
resonating with other network actors committed to playful or dramaturgical
protest. Given available performance space such repertoires of action
are symbolically potent and difficult to police as the energies released in
such exercises resonate with wider public sentiments which historically
explains the century’s long effort of state agencies to fragment, oppress and
contain such forms of protest (see Chapters 1 and 4). In this sense ‘fear’ and
the playful engagement with the ‘agents of fear’ performed in Prague reformulated
an historically sedimented, potent form of public protest reconfiguring
it in the context of the AGM. This positive multiplier effect added to
the potency of the AGM as a strange attractor around which increasingly
diverse constituencies condensed within networks influenced by the
over-arching values of the PGA.
Conclusions
The global milieu has significantly transformed the potential of minoritarian
voices through enhanced mobility and communications which amplify and
accelerate the processes by which ‘social force’ (Welsh 2000) becomes
mobilised around these emergent agendas. Multiple network actors will
continue to amplify these issues, not through a unified collective identity
(Stallings 1973, McDonald 2002), but via the melding of multiple identities:
national; regional; local; gendered; disabled; parental and so on within
fora such as the PGA and ESF, conceived from the outset as expressions of
global civil society (see Chapter 5). In terms of our theoretical arguments
this chapter empirically demonstrates significant claims relating to communication,
energy, mobility and weak ties as processes constitutive of socially
organised expressions of complexity indicative of emergence.
Communication utilising weak ties structured the event enabling mobility
on the street. An extremely experienced activist commented that it ‘was a
miracle we were not just corralled in Namesti Miru Square as the entire
march had been declared illegal’. There is strong inferential evidence in our
interview material that no such action was taken because of the third elements
success in communicating the blockade as a win–win strategy. This was a