Networking Futures: The Movements against Corporate Globalization

Jeffrey S. Juris

Jul 2008 · Duke University Press

About this ebook

Since the first worldwide protests inspired by Peoples’ Global Action (PGA)—including the mobilization against the November 1999 World Trade Organization meetings in Seattle—anti–corporate globalization activists have staged direct action protests against multilateral institutions in cities such as Prague, Barcelona, Genoa, and Cancun. Barcelona is a critical node, as Catalan activists have played key roles in the more radical PGA network and the broader World Social Forum process. In 2001 and 2002, the anthropologist Jeffrey S. Juris participated in the Barcelona-based Movement for Global Resistance, one of the most influential anti–corporate globalization networks in Europe. Combining ethnographic research and activist political engagement, Juris took part in hundreds of meetings, gatherings, protests, and online discussions. Those experiences form the basis of Networking Futures, an innovative ethnography of transnational activist networking within the movements against corporate globalization.

In an account full of activist voices and on-the-ground detail, Juris provides a history of anti–corporate globalization movements, an examination of their connections to local dynamics in Barcelona, and an analysis of movement-related politics, organizational forms, and decision-making. Depicting spectacular direct action protests in Barcelona and other cities, he describes how far-flung activist networks are embodied and how networking politics are performed. He further explores how activists have used e-mail lists, Web pages, and free software to organize actions, share information, coordinate at a distance, and stage “electronic civil disobedience.” Based on a powerful cultural logic, anti–corporate globalization networks have become models of and for emerging forms of radical, directly democratic politics. Activists are not only responding to growing poverty, inequality, and environmental devastation; they are also building social laboratories for the production of alternative values, discourses, and practices.

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The movement against corporate globalization came of age in Seattle at the end of 1999 during the mass demonstration that contributed to disrupt a meeting of the World Trade Organization (WTO). In the following years it developed into an articulate global(ising) movement. What the alterglobalization movement and the revolutions in the Arab world have in common is their fluid nature structured around an intense use of social media, like Facebook and Twitter. The use of information and communication technologies (ICTs) for movement organising has been central from the very inception of the alterglobalist movement. ICTs were crucial, for instance, to coordinate activist convergences in Seattle and global solidarity with the Zapatista uprising in Mexico against the North American Free Trade Agreement in 1994. These technologies are not only instruments of communication, states Juris, but they have contributed from the very inception of the alterglobalist movement to defining it both organisationally and with respect to political values and practices. Juris develops convincing and robust theoretical arguments on globalization and social transformations and on the role of activist networks in structuring the former by influencing the latter. He engages also crucial methodological issues on researcher’s presence in the field, evidence collection, discourse articulation, participation, observation and engagement. Juris develops a militant ethnography that not only describes the ‘objects’ of research but, by taking ethical and political stands, participates in shaping them and the contexts in which they act and that, eventually, can contribute to the transformation of society at large. Let me address these three aspects -- theoretical, methodological and political -- in turn. Networking Futures concerns itself, first, with the relationship between ICTs and the forms of organisation and the daily practices they elicit and, second, with the way in which political values are inscribed in those organizational forms. At a broader theoretical level it contributes to three crucial debates in anthropology and the social sciences: globalization, networking and social movements. By studying transnationally networked social movements Juris articulates a theory of globalisation as multidimensional and pluridirectional; a globalization, therefore, not merely imposed ’from above’ but an outcome of conflictual dynamics at different scales. In these dynamics the new forms of technologically defined activist networks play a critical role and contribute to constructing a globalization ‘from below’. The fieldwork was conducted both in a situated and networked manner through a methodology that closely mirrored the nature of the activists networks that Juris was part of and was investigating. Network ethnography, according to Juris, should be both place-based and acutely aware of the transnational ramifications of the social movement rhizomes. His research was therefore both long-term place-based fieldwork with the Movement for Global Resistance in Barcelona Spain and multi-sited, as he followed the activists in the protests and gatherings in which they participated such as the Prague protests against the World Bank and the IMF of September 2000, the Genoa protests against the G8 in July 2001, the World Social Forum in Porto Alegre in 2002 and a meeting of its International Council in Barcelona later that year, the No Border Camp in Strasbourg in July 2002, the People’s Global Action Conference in Leiden in September of the same year. Moreover, Juris’ ethnography is both embodied and acutely aware of emotions and aspirations at play in mass protests and in transnational networking among activists. ‘I never imagined’ he writes ‘the intense feelings of power, freedom, and solidarity I would experience on the streets of Seattle’ (p. 3). Juris’ engaged scholarship aims, on the one hand, at contributing to theorize global transformations and, on the other, at reformulating the global political imaginary and the

About the author

Jeffrey S. Juris is Assistant Professor of Anthropology in the Department of Social and Behavioral Sciences at Arizona State University.