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

4 From carnival against
capitalism to death at
high noon
States fight back
Introduction
The AGM has been dealt with as a network of networks engaged in
conflictual and co-operative movement capacity building at a global level
acting as a strange attractor in the process of emergence associated with global
civil society actors. Within this process we have argued that the strength of
weak ties and significance of small world networks are critical factors in the
ability of the AGM to perturbate normative repertoires organising political
discourse. These processes are technologically enabled and mediated through
CMC and physical mobility. As we explored in Chapter 3 technological and
face-work networking at a global level also typify the activities of state and
supra-national actors responding to AGM activities, particularly those associated
with ‘summit sieges’. Whilst the technical mediations are common in kind
if not scale, this chapter argues that their use by ‘security state’, ‘political state’
and ‘financial state’ reproduces established and dominant discourses through
‘strong ties’ consolidating established ‘habits of mind’ associated with Western
nation state actors on the global stage understood as an arena of international
relations.
In particular, this chapter considers the replication of political discourses
utilising fear, terror and the identification of outsiders as dangerous ‘others’
in attempts to discredit and marginalise the AGM. These ‘moves’ were in
train long before events of 11 September 2001, which merely added impetus
to an established trend rather than precipitating a new era in which ‘nothing
would be the same again’. This is a point of fundamental importance as the
‘war on terror’ cannot be adequately theorised or engaged with if it is
approached as a ‘new phenomenon’. Here we argue that the application of
terror tropes to AGM actors is an extension of deviance tropes (Martin
2002) in the attempt to create a new ‘folk devil’ aligning AGM actors with
‘evil’ and creating an ‘enemy within’. Such moves legitimate harsher policing
regimes, erosion of civil rights, the need for ‘strong security states’ and
organs of global surveillance.
As we show, the portrayal of apparently fixed activist identities as an ‘evil
enemy’ within the public sphere are problematic in terms of public resonance,