WTO Protests In Seattle Research Articles

Crowdsourcing Documentary Making

The creative commons documentary Preempting Dissent (2014) builds upon the book of the same name written by Greg Elmer and Andy Opel. The film is a culmination of a collaborative process of soliciting, collecting and editing video, still images, and creative commons music files from people around the world. Preempting Dissent interrogates the expansion of the so-called “Miami-Model” of protest policing, a set of strategies developed in the wake of 9/11 to preempt forms of mass protest at major events in the US and worldwide. The film tracks the development of the Miami model after the WTO protests in Seattle 1999, through the post-9/11 years, FTAA & G8/20 summits, and most recently the Occupy Wall St movements. The film exposes the political, social, and economic roots of preemptive forms of protest policing and their manifestations in spatial tactics, the deployment of so-called ‘less-lethal’ weapons, and surveillance regimes. The film notes however that new social movements have themselves begun to adopt preemptive tactics so as not to fall into the trap set for them by police agencies worldwide.

Anarchism and the Hermeneutics of Faith

Anarchism and the Hermeneutics of Faith Roger Rothman (bio) M. Proudhon has the misfortune of being peculiarly misunderstood in Europe. In France, he has the right to be a bad economist, because he is reputed to be a good German philosopher. In Germany, he has the right to be a bad philosopher, because he is reputed to be one of the ablest French economists. Being both German and economist at the same time, we desire to protest against this double error. —Karl Marx, foreword to The Poverty of Philosophy, 1847 Even more than the attacks on it from the right, it has been the attacks on it from the left that have relegated anarchism to the margins of academic discourse. It appears however that anarchism's fortunes are changing. Though the casual dismissal of it as simply "some vague embrace of chaos, anti-intellectualism, or disorganized violence" is still commonplace, a more complex reception of anarchism has been developing since the 1999 WTO protests in Seattle.1 In 2002, David Graeber was among the first to propose that academics need to come to grips with the fact that "most of the creative energy for radical politics is now coming from anarchism" and that "taking this movement seriously will necessarily also mean a respectful engagement with it."2 Eight years later, Todd May declared similarly, but with a focus on anarchism's adherents, rather than detractors: "Anarchism is back on the scene. Theoretically as well as practically, anti-authoritarian thought is in a resurgence that has probably surprised many of those who have been involved in it in one way or another over the years."3 May, in fact, has proposed that we are witnessing a "third wave" of anarchist discourse (after the first [End Page 429] wave in the late 1800s–early 1900s and the second in the 1960s) (May, introduction to New Perspectives on Anarchism, 1).4 Nevertheless, what Graeber said about anarchism in 2004 is still largely true today: Most academics seem to have only the vaguest idea what anarchism is even about; or dismiss it with the crudest stereotypes. ("Anarchist organization! But isn't that a contradiction in terms?") In the United States there are thousands of academic Marxists of one sort or another, but hardly a dozen scholars willing openly to call themselves anarchists.5 Indeed, the greatest impediment to the advancement of anarchist thought is not the everyday misperception of it as a philosophy of chaos and violence but the Marxist dismissal of it as theoretically immature and naively utopian.6 For scholars like Allan Antliff and Jesse Cohn, the hegemony of Marxist thought had relegated anarchist studies to the distant margins of their respective fields (art history and literary studies). As Cohn notes, despite the recent attention to the role of anarchist thought within the development of literary history, the question of anarchism in literary theory has been "consigned to official oblivion."7 Likewise, Antliff draws attention to the fact that "for most of its [Art History's] existence anarchism in the arts has figured, if at all, as a marginal subject. … The situation has not been helped by the numerous Marxist-oriented art historians firmly ensconced in the academy who are already predisposed towards taking anarchism less than seriously or attacking it as a threat to their perspective."8 What is the source of the Marxist predisposition to dismiss anarchism as unserious? There are a number of ways to approach this question, but I propose we begin with the conflict between David Harvey and Simon Springer that erupted a few years back in "Why a Radical Geography Must Be Anarchist." There, Springer argues that radical geographers, including Harvey, have all but ignored the "anarchist tradition that thrived a century before radical geography was claimed as Marxist in the 1970s."9 Harvey, among the most influential of the Marxist geographers of the 1970s, is singled out by Springer for having persisted in defining anarchism "as nothing more than opposition to the state, while also dismissing—or at least affording little consideration to—anarchism's shared rejection of capitalism and its refusal of the institution of private property" (Springer, "Radical Geography," 250). Harvey's lengthy...

Twitter or Radio Revolutions? The Central Role of Açık Radyo in the Gezi Protests of 2013

Radio has been employed as a communication tool during all the social movements and protests of the last decades of the past century, from the student movements of May 1968 in Paris and Mexico City to the 1999 Seattle WTO protests, while the political protests and uprisings at the beginning of the twenty-first century have mostly been supported by social media (Howard and Hussain, 2013). Is Twitter the radio of the twenty-first century?Another, more complex, reality lies beyond the surface of the representation of the protests shaped by the mainstream media: the mediascape in which political movements such as Occupy, the Arab Spring and the Indignados have emerged is a mixed one, a mediascape where old and new, mainstream and underground media co-exist, interact and shape each other.In this paper, we will focus on the case of Acik Radyo, the only independent and listener-supported radio station based in Istanbul, and the role it played in the Gezi Park protests of June 2013. This study is based on an ethnographic investigation undertaken between December 2014 and January 2015 that used a mix of participant observation (Spradley, 1980) and in-depth interviews (Patton, 2001) with 15 Acik Radyo workers and volunteers and 10 Acik Radyo listeners. We will show how radio has not lost the value that it gained as a tool for political and social change during the twentieth century, but how it has only repositioned itself within the changing digital mediascape of the twenty-first century, mixing itself with social media in order to continue amplifying radical political discourses and networking protesters together.

Imagined Globalization - by Garía Canclini, Néstor

Imagined Globalization - by Garía Canclini, Néstor

Direct Action, Deliberation, and Diffusion: Collective Action after the WTO Protests in Seattle

Direct Action, Deliberation, and Diffusion: Collective Action after the WTO Protests in Seattle

John porter lecture: waves of protest--direct action, deliberation, and diffusion.

The book Direct Action, Deliberation and Diffusion: Collective Action After the WTO Protests in Seattle argues that the process of diffusion is dependent on social processes in the receiving context. The most important in social movements is an egalitarian and reflexive deliberation among diverse actors. The book traces the direct action tactics associated with the Seattle protests against the World Trade Organization in 1999 and how these spread to activists in Toronto and New York City. It shows how the structure of the political field, racial and class inequalities, identity boundaries, and organizational and conversational dynamics limited deliberation among activists, and thus limited the diffusion of the Seattle tactics. By constraining the spread of the Seattle tactics, this slowed the global justice movement's wave of protest. In this paper, I explore the application of and implications of this model of protest tactic diffusion to the recent Idle No More mobilizations.

Teaching and Learning Guide for: ‘Securitizing America: Strategic Incapacitation and the Policing of Protest Since the 11 September 2011 Terrorist attacks’

Teaching and Learning Guide for: ‘Securitizing America: Strategic Incapacitation and the Policing of Protest Since the 11 September 2011 Terrorist attacks’

Direct Action, Deliberation, and Diffusion: Collective Action after the WTO Protests in Seattle. By Lesley J. Wood. New York: Cambridge University Press. Pp. xii+186. $90.00.

Previous articleNext article No AccessBook ReviewsDirect Action, Deliberation, and Diffusion: Collective Action after the WTO Protests in Seattle. By Lesley J. Wood. New York: Cambridge University Press. Pp. xii+186. $90.00.David StrangDavid StrangCornell University Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUSFull Text Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditEmail SectionsMoreDetailsFiguresReferencesCited by American Journal of Sociology Volume 119, Number 2September 2013 Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/671156 Views: 73Total views on this site For permission to reuse a book review printed in the American Journal of Sociology, please contact [email protected]PDF download Crossref reports no articles citing this article.

Spillover o Spillout? Il movimento per la giustizia globale negli Stati Uniti dopo l'11 settembre

Spillover or Spillout? The Global Justice Movement in the United States after 9/11 - This article focuses on a seemingly paradoxical sequel to the 1999 Seattle WTO protests: the weakening of the global justice movement in the United States. While the movement has flourished in Europe, it seems largely to have stagnated in the American context. This outcome cannot be explained by either American exceptionalism or by a general decline in activism in the wake of the tragedies of 9/11 and the Iraq War. First comparing expressions of the American and European global justice movements and then turning to original data on movement organizing in Seattle after 1999, the article argues that the weakness of the American global justice movement can be tied to three key factors: (a) a more repressive atmosphere towards transnational protest; (b) a politically inspired linkage between global terrorism and transnational activism of all kinds; and (c) what we call social movement spillout. It is also argued that the strongest movement since September 11th - the antiwar movement - exemplifies a broader trend in the United States towards the spillout of transnational activism into domestic protest.

Spillover or Spillout? The Global Justice Movement in the United States After 9/11

This article focuses on a seemingly paradoxical sequel to the 1999 Seattle WTO protests: the weakening of the global justice movement in the United States. While the movement has flourished in Europe, it seems largely to have stagnated in the American context. This outcome cannot be explained by either American exceptionalism or by a general decline in activism in the wake of the tragedies of 9/11 and the Iraq War. First comparing expressions of the American and European global justice movements and then turning to original data on social movement organizing in Seattle after 1999, we argue that the weakness of the American global justice movement can be tied to three key factors: (a) a more repressive atmosphere towards transnational protest; (b) a politically inspired linkage between global terrorism and transnational activism of all kinds; and (c) what we call "social movement spillout." We further argue that the strongest movement since September 11th—the antiwar movement—exemplifies a broader trend in the United States towards the "spillout" of transnational activism into domestic protest.

Lost in the WTO Shuffle: Publics, Counterpublics, and the Individual

Contemporary rhetorical theory has been spurred on by the re-examination of the concept of public. This article adds to that discussion by examining the WTO protests in Seattle, WA, in late 1999. The rhetorical concept of testimony helps us to more readily understand how publics and their counters create and sustain messages about themselves. Testimony demonstrates how individuals disseminate, justify, and complicate public and counterpublic agendas. We can no longer take public as a static rhetorical category. But it is equally apparent that testimony should give us pause as we consider where we shall take public and counterpublic theorizing.

Coalitions of Contention: The Case of the WTO Protests in Seattle

Coalitions of organizations are cooperative arrangements that require ongoing management of conflicts among members and potential members. Using data on both successful and unsuccessful attempts at coalition building during the 1999 protests against the WTO in Seattle, we explain the variation in the formation of one type of coalition of organizations, the ‘event coalition’, in which social movement organizations coalesce around a specific protest event. We find that objectively common organizational interests and framing are necessary but not sufficient for explaining coalition partnering. Organizational representatives must also calculate a benefit from pooled resources and be able to commit credibly to delivering promised resources and to resolving the inevitable tensions that arise among coalition partners.

Choreographies of Protest

This essay reconstructs nonviolent protest during three moments in recent US history—the lunch counter sit-ins of 1960, the ACT-UP die-ins of the late 1980s, and the Seattle WTO protests in 1999, asking of them the kinds of questions that a dance scholar might pose. By showing how bodies make articulate choices based on their intelligent assessment of other bodies, the essay frames a new perspective on individual agency and collective action.

From public sphere to public screen: democracy, activism, and the "violence" of Seattle

The WTO protests in Seattle witnessed the emergence of an international citizens' movement for democratic globalization. With the tactical exploitation of television, the internet, and other technologies, Seattle also witnessed the enactment of forms of activism adapted to a wired society. In the wake of Seattle, this essay introduces the “public screen” as a necessary supplement to the metaphor of the public sphere for understanding today's political scene. While a public sphere orientation inevitably finds contemporary discourse wanting, viewing such discourse through the prism of the public screen provokes a consideration of new forms of participatory democracy. In comparison to the public sphere's privileging of rationality, embodied conversations, consensus, and civility, the public screen highlights dissemination, images, hypermediacy, publicity, distraction, and dissent. Using the Seattle WTO protests as a case study and focusing on the dynamic of violence and the media, we argue that the public screen accounts for technological and cultural changes while enabling a charting of the new conditions for rhetoric, politics, and activism.

The Internet and the Seattle WTO Protests

(2001). The Internet and the Seattle WTO Protests. Peace Review: Vol. 13, No. 3, pp. 331-337.

More Form than Substance: Press Coverage of the WTO Protests in Seattle

The mainstream U.S. news media have been shifting rightward for at least two decades, as their corporate owners enforce tighter ideological conformity. Oliver North and Pat Buchanan, for example, are now regular commentators on television talk shows. And all of the media now refer to people as "consumers," cogs in a capitalist machine. But still, news is less than half as profitable as entertainment, and media firms are intensifying pressures on their "news properties" for higher profits, which means the pursuit of upscale demographics. Owners are removing journalism's much vaunted separation of newsroom practices and business decisions, blurring the line between news and entertainment, and forming partnerships with one another to offer online news services.This article can also be found at the Monthly Review website, where most recent articles are published in full.Click here to purchase a PDF version of this article at the Monthly Review website.