10.07.2015 Views

Untitled - socium.ge

Untitled - socium.ge

Untitled - socium.ge

SHOW MORE
SHOW LESS

Create successful ePaper yourself

Turn your PDF publications into a flip-book with our unique Google optimized e-Paper software.

344 Jeffrey S. Jurisactions and counter-summit forums against multilateral institutions. The anti-WTO protests were a hu<strong>ge</strong> success, and everywhere activists wanted to createthe “next Seattle.” Mass mobilizations offer concrete goals around which toorganize, while they also provide physical spaces where activists meet, virtualnetworks are embodied, meanings and representations are produced andcontested, and where political values are ritually enacted. Public events canbroadly be seen as “culturally constituted foci for information-processing”(Handelman, 1990: 16), while direct actions, in particular, <strong>ge</strong>nerate intenseemotional energy (Collins, 2001), stimulating continuing networking withinpublic and submer<strong>ge</strong>d spheres. Activists organized a second mass protestagainst the World Bank and International Monetary Fund (IMF) inWashington, DC on April 16, 2000, and went truly global during the subsequentmobilization against the World Bank/IMF in Prague on September 26,2000. Protesters came from around Europe, including lar<strong>ge</strong> contin<strong>ge</strong>nts fromSpain, Italy, Germany, and Britain, and other parts of the world, including theUnited States, Latin America, and South Asia. Solidarity actions were held incities throughout Europe, North and South America, and parts of Asia andAfrica. 10The first World Social Forum (WSF), organized in Porto Alegre, Brazil, inlate January 2001, coinciding with the World Economic Forum, represented animportant turning point, as movements for global justice began to more clearlyemphasize alternatives to corporate globalization. 11 The unexpected success ofthe first WSF was magnified during the subsequent two editions, which drew70,000 and 100,000 people from around the world, respectively. Much morethan a conference, the WSF constitutes a dynamic process, involving theconver<strong>ge</strong>nce of multiple networks, movements, and organizations. WhereasPGA remains more radical, horizontal, and broadly libertarian, 12 the WSF is awider political space, including both newer decentralized network-basedmovements and more hierarchical forces of the traditional left. Meanwhile,mass actions continued to intensify and expand during the spring and summerof 2001, including the anti-FTAA (Free Trade Area of the Americas) protestsin Quebec and increasingly militant actions against the European Union inGothenburg, the World Bank in Barcelona, and the G8 summit in Genoa,where widespread police violence culminated in the death of an Italian activistand a brutal night-time raid on the Independent Media Center. Mass marchesand rallies the following day brought 350,000 protesters onto the streets ofGenoa, and hundreds of thousands more around Italy.US-based global justice movements, which were severely shaken by theSeptember 11 attacks, re-emer<strong>ge</strong>d when activists shifted their attention fromthe war in Iraq back toward corporate globalization, leading to mass mobilizationsagainst the WTO in Cancun and the FTAA summit in Miami duringthe fall of 2003. In the rest of the world, mobilizations continued to grow after

Hooray! Your file is uploaded and ready to be published.

Saved successfully!

Ooh no, something went wrong!