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

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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
88 States fight back crisis is in effect a crisis of Western civilisation not the organic realm – which will continue irrespective of the fate of consumer society. The primary collective frames of nationhood and liberal possessive individualism emphasising our/my economy/wealth/prosperity/progress which ‘organised’ the conflictual and cooperative military, economic, political and development agendas of the twentieth century are extraordinarily limited in terms of their capacity to give expression to collective global stakes. The move from ‘disorganised capitalism’ (Lash and Urry 1987) to free market complexity and chaos are theoretical expressions of this transition which is structured by human/environment interaction as ‘man’ (sic) becomes a force of nature. Emergence and the complexity sciences assume a position of contested centrality in this transition in terms of both the ‘natural’ and social sciences. The controversial areas central to our argument relate to the temporal horizons of phase shifts and debates over whether these are bi-polar or multi-polar phenomena. There is no prospect of closure on these debates but we would argue that there are some retrodictable acts of sense making offering durable pointers suggesting ‘we’ have entered an era typified by order on the edge of chaos. This is profoundly challenging to linear models of progress and civilisation based on the incremental extension of established scientific, technical, social, economic and political practices conducted under conditions of Darwinian competitiveness and survival of the fittest. The incremental refinement and extension of established techniques underpinning this process has assumed a viable organic realm as an environment, something made particularly clear by post Second World War economic science approaching ‘the environment’ as an external free good. 21 With natural science disciplines increasingly recognising that significant phase shifts in planetary ecosystems can occur within rather short time periods once certain threshold or initial conditions are met, incrementalism based on strong ties is a limited strategy of engagement. What we have argued in this chapter is that the AGM represents the initial expression – the emergence of the first planetary action system from the bottom-up. Attempting to reduce this multi-faceted social actor to ‘mob’ represents the failure to recognise emergence by interpreting it through ‘habits of mind’ derived from the passing era of international relations. As we have demonstrated here national governments in the United States, United Kingdom and Italy have prioritised international summit esteem over citizens’ rights, including rights of assembly. Habermas regards respect for such rights as the ‘litmus test’ of legitimacy for representative democracy, their breach in practice and further erosion through terrorist legislation merely adds to the increasingly pervasive sense of growing democratic deficits in the lands of ‘the (un)free’. More problematic for contemporary ‘power holders and brokers’ is the fact that significant sections of the AGM have no desire to engage with those who are creating the problem and indeed positively eschew such interaction. This is important in terms of
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Complexity and Social Movements Mul
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Contents List of figures vi Acknowl
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Acknowledgements With thanks to all
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Preface ix activists and engaged ci
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2 Introducing global movements poli
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4 Introducing global movements arou
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6 Introducing global movements esta
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8 Introducing global movements Thes
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10 Introducing global movements exp
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12 Introducing global movements che
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14 Introducing global movements Fra
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16 Introducing global movements ‘
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18 Introducing global movements for
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20 Introducing global movements and
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2 Prefiguration and emergence Intro
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24 Prefiguration and emergence on T
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26 Prefiguration and emergence 9 If
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28 Prefiguration and emergence Prop
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30 Prefiguration and emergence agai
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32 Prefiguration and emergence C. E
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34 Prefiguration and emergence The
Page 47 and 48: 36 Prefiguration and emergence Glob
Page 49 and 50: 38 Prefiguration and emergence In t
Page 51 and 52: 40 Prefiguration and emergence Neo-
Page 53 and 54: 42 Prefiguration and emergence from
Page 55 and 56: 44 Identities, protest dynamics and
Page 79 and 80: 68 States fight back when trust in
Page 81 and 82: 70 States fight back academically,
Page 83 and 84: 72 States fight back streets from d
Page 85 and 86: 74 States fight back ‘green Parli
Page 87 and 88: 76 States fight back to trivialise
Page 89 and 90: 78 States fight back beneath Big Be
Page 91 and 92: 80 States fight back ran out. The p
Page 93 and 94: 82 States fight back The attempt to
Page 95 and 96: 84 States fight back Accounts of th
Page 97: 86 States fight back hair, infringe
Page 101 and 102: 5 Ecologies of action within global
Page 103 and 104: 92 Ecologies of action attractor wi
Page 105 and 106: 94 Ecologies of action embedded in
Page 107 and 108: 96 Ecologies of action The assimila
Page 109 and 110: 98 Ecologies of action compatibilit
Page 111 and 112: 100 Ecologies of action linking up
Page 113 and 114: 102 Ecologies of action occurred wi
Page 115 and 116: 104 Ecologies of action leading to
Page 117 and 118: 106 Ecologies of action siege of in
Page 119 and 120: 108 Beyond resistance to global nex
Page 139 and 140: 7 The death of collective identity?
Page 141 and 142: 130 Global movement as a parallelog
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138 Global movement as a parallelog
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148 The map is not the territory th
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150 The map is not the territory of
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152 The map is not the territory Ne
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154 The map is not the territory mi
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156 The map is not the territory or
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158 The map is not the territory mo
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160 The map is not the territory of
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162 The map is not the territory ne
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Notes 1 Introducing global movement
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166 Notes 12 Ya Basta’s! subseque
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168 Notes 19 This practice has been
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170 Notes Afro Bloc parading drum b
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172 Bibliography Barker, C., Johnso
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174 Bibliography De Sousa Santos, B
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176 Bibliography Grubacic, A. (2003
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178 Bibliography Lash, S. (2002) Cr
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180 Bibliography O’Neill, J. (200
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182 Bibliography Thompson, E.P. (19
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Index Note: Page numbers in italics
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186 Index class: affinities 93; and
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188 Index G7 23 G8 23, 100; meeting
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190 Index London 52, 63, 69, 116; E
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192 Index Poland 44, 45; ‘Orange
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194 Index Taylor, P. 168 n.2; call
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