Event Title
From Seattle to Genoa, and Beyond: Transnational Recycling, Alt-Global Protest, and World Social Forum
Location
Lindy C. Boggs Conference Center, Room 256
Session
Session One: The Global Justice Movement
Start Date
15-10-2010 3:30 PM
End Date
15-10-2010 6:00 PM
Description
This paper examines the new alt-global politics born at the 1999 Seattle World Trade Organization protests (French 2002) and carried through the sequence of anti-globalization protests that climaxed with 300,000 marchers at the G-8 meeting in Genoa in July 2001. In particular, explores the after-life of styles, tactics, slogans, and critical discourses associated with what was, in essence, a U.S. only protest in Seattle in 1999. How did they achieve an impact and influence sufficient to spark a world-wide protest cycle that saw a remarkable global interchange of protest tactics (all fraught with meanings). These post-Seattle protests, which have still to be studied comprehensively, were accompanied by alt-global political innovation: the rise of the World Social Forum that began in Porto Alegre, Brazil in 2001, at first without any U.S. participation. With each successive year, the WSF grew and by 2003 had attracted the energies that were stymied by the violence at Genoa and the 9/11 attacks. The rise of the WSF, with its slogan “Another World is Possible,” marks the creation of a new practice and style of politics, with its critique of traditional forms of political representation and action (a movement of movements, a space of encounter, the “multitude”). As such, the WSF is a striking story of movement entrepreneurship but one that, unlike Seattle, originated in the global South. Throughout, it makes the case for recycling as the most useful metaphor to understand this phenomenon, which is traced across a complex inter-, multi-, and trans-national and cultural terrain. In doing so, it exemplifies creative rethinking on the left that draws on past movements for solidarity and radical change, while taking the issues facing these movements to a global level.
From Seattle to Genoa, and Beyond: Transnational Recycling, Alt-Global Protest, and World Social Forum
Lindy C. Boggs Conference Center, Room 256
This paper examines the new alt-global politics born at the 1999 Seattle World Trade Organization protests (French 2002) and carried through the sequence of anti-globalization protests that climaxed with 300,000 marchers at the G-8 meeting in Genoa in July 2001. In particular, explores the after-life of styles, tactics, slogans, and critical discourses associated with what was, in essence, a U.S. only protest in Seattle in 1999. How did they achieve an impact and influence sufficient to spark a world-wide protest cycle that saw a remarkable global interchange of protest tactics (all fraught with meanings). These post-Seattle protests, which have still to be studied comprehensively, were accompanied by alt-global political innovation: the rise of the World Social Forum that began in Porto Alegre, Brazil in 2001, at first without any U.S. participation. With each successive year, the WSF grew and by 2003 had attracted the energies that were stymied by the violence at Genoa and the 9/11 attacks. The rise of the WSF, with its slogan “Another World is Possible,” marks the creation of a new practice and style of politics, with its critique of traditional forms of political representation and action (a movement of movements, a space of encounter, the “multitude”). As such, the WSF is a striking story of movement entrepreneurship but one that, unlike Seattle, originated in the global South. Throughout, it makes the case for recycling as the most useful metaphor to understand this phenomenon, which is traced across a complex inter-, multi-, and trans-national and cultural terrain. In doing so, it exemplifies creative rethinking on the left that draws on past movements for solidarity and radical change, while taking the issues facing these movements to a global level.