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

The global ambitions of the current imperium rekindle memories of both
nationalist liberation and domestic class struggles both of which were
cast as law and order problems. The re-emergence and re-formulation of
these discourses within right wing think tanks towards the end of the
twentieth century called for a league of forceful civilised nations to police
Third World movements described as ‘extremist’, ‘terrorist’, and ‘criminal’
(Fukuyama 1992). 4
This so-called ‘Clash of Civilisations’ requiring ‘Western military vigilance
to defend itself against Eastern civilisations’ (1992) consolidated rapidly in
the following decade. Under the leadership of a tightly networked neo-liberal
intelligentsia, 5 the global institutional nexus continues to advance an agenda
underpinned by a notion of freedom to profit and prosper sedimented within
American culture since the seventeenth century (Welsh 2005). In the twentyfirst
century, this process of ‘terrorist’ extension now includes civil society
actors inside the ‘advanced’ economies but simultaneously networked as
global civil society actors advancing global interests transcending national
systems of interest representation. State responses to delegitimise the messengers
as a contemporary ‘folk devil’ (Donson et al. 2004) and subject them
to extreme sanctions have broad similarities but are enacted in a variety of
ways reflecting both national and regional custom and tradition.
These extensions are important and on-going and this chapter concentrates
upon the period between 1999 and 2002 where we are able to remain true
to the Deleuzian genealogical detail underpinning this work. We thus draw
heavily upon material relating to events in Seattle 1999, London 2000, and
Genoa 2001 in support of our argument that there has been a conscious
attempt to construct a new ‘folk devil’ despite the absence of the ‘moral
panic’ traditionally associated with the term (Donson et al. 2004). In this
process, prominent politicians and senior police officers identify activists as
‘violent’, ‘mindless thugs’, 6 views widely reproduced in print and broadcast
media (Wahl-Jorgensen 2003).
Seattle connections
States fight back 69
As we noted in Chapter 1, Seattle was identified as a potential site of
emergence within movement networks from at least 1996. The modus
operandi advanced at this time was substantially realised through nomadic
exchanges central to the diasporic spread of repertoires of action through
enhanced mobility. Far from being an unexpected event, the Seattle plateau
condensed a diverse range of practices, albeit leading to unpredicted and
unpredictable emergent outcomes. It is important to offer an account of
these precursors to give the reader some sense of the agency lying behind
the ‘flows’ of meaning that coalesced to structure this action. The role of
European and UK movements is foregrounded here as an exemplar of a
process paralleled in multiple global sites and enacted via local customs.
However, we would emphasise the situated partiality of our account, as