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

the first European Social Forum (ESF) in 2002 amidst fears of a repeat of
events in Genoa. An estimated one million people attended the closing march
at the end of a meeting containing sessions on every ‘issue’ conceivably relevant
to a modern society. During this plateau, the idea of a global day of
action against the looming ‘war’ on Iraq was proposed seeding a process that
has proved particularly problematic in terms of political legitimacy and trust
in the United Kingdom and United States. Subsequent ESF meetings in Paris
2003 and London 2004 (Welsh et al. 2005) continued the process of network
extension and consolidation through proliferating weak ties.
Conclusions
States fight back 87
In terms of the theoretical stakes central to this volume, this chapter has
addressed the way in which establishment networks responded to the
appearance of the AGM within the public sphere. This engagement has
been structured around the networking of established ‘strong ties’ between
national and international political and security organisations. This network
has applied a range of historically sedimented frames to the movement
of movements emphasising established deviance categories associated
with ‘the mob’ in the context of a global ‘war on terrorism’. Whilst statecentric
actors declaratory postures typically refuse to negotiate with organs
of terror, unofficially lines of communication are frequently opened either
directly or via intermediaries. In the United Kingdom, senior media
reporters have acted as intermediaries between top tier political offices in
an attempt to open such ‘dialogue’. It is however, clear that the public
sphere remains dominated by the application of negative, deviance-based
attributions. These responses are consistent with forms of interaction
extending back several centuries and are part of a process of selective incorporation
of emergent political actors within national political opportunity
structures. This chapter has detailed how the security and political elites
within the fragmented states that typify the global era responded to the
legitimation stripping activities of the AGM. Whilst we have emphasised
the roles of the security and political state in constituting dominant discourse
structured around terrorism, the more ambivalent response of the
financial state is significant (Chapter 2).
Throughout this book, we argue that the AGM represents a process of
global emergence expressing early formalisations of stakes associated with
global civil society and combining social and environmental justice
approaches within an overarching recognition of difference melded by the
commitment to ‘unity in diversity’. The fusion of these concerns within the
AGM is significant because together they constitute a global network actor
which simultaneously bridges and establishes common ground between
civil society actors in the ‘developed’ and ‘developing’ world which foregrounds
Bateson’s insight that an organism plus environment paradigm is
crucial to human survival and progress. In this sense, the environmental