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Article Excerpt
IMAGES OF ACTIVISTS PROTESTING outside the sites of summits of the global political and business elite have become commonplace in the mainstream media over the last five years. As activists dance and chant, march and shout outside such meetings, states respond with increasingly heavy force--armed police barricade buildings, temporary physical walls are erected, and boundaries of zones of exclusion are drawn to shut out opposition. Yet, rather than be discouraged and dispersed, thousands of global anti-capital activists continue to gather outside of these summits of the world's political and business elites. The activists outside these walled summits, gathered before police and security forces, are doing more than enacting a simple response to the assemblies of power brokers. Global anti-capital activists are creating spaces of inclusion, in complete opposition to the injustices they contend are exacerbated and sometimes generated by the bodies, such as the International Monetary Fund, the World Trade Organization, the Group of 8, and the World Bank, that meet at these summits. Activists create spaces of juxtaposition, in which diversity and inclusion are fostered, both at the sites of the meetings of neo-liberal globalization and in their own meeting spaces, like the World Social Forums (WSFs). These spaces are spaces of justice; they are temporary expressions of what global anti-capital activists are striving towards. Furthermore, these spaces are expressions of the social divine, a sense of being together in a self-directed and -shaped environment.
The International Monetary Fund, the World Bank, the World Trade Organization, and trade and eco-political blocs like the North American Free Trade Association, the European Union and the Group of Eight can all be viewed as the institutional instruments of contemporary neo-liberal globalization (see, for example, Gandhi, 2003). They operate at the transnational level and have enormous, uneven implications on the day-to-day lives of all people. An account of these implications is, however, beyond the scope of this paper. What is of specific interest here is the lack of access to these institutions had by the majority of people affected by the decisions made by their members, individually and at the corporate and nation-state levels. The operations of these institutions carry a facade of openness--documents detailing policies, for example, of the International Monetary Fund can be found through the organization's own publications and on the Internet. However, the meetings of these institutions are held behind walls and zones of exclusion. This exclusion and the security measures employed to ensure it are physical manifestations of the wider injustices wrought by the practices of these institutions of global neo-liberalism, which privilege the interests of capital, uphold injustices in the form of on-going sexism, racism, inequality and violence, and exclude debate and alternatives. Outside the guarded and walled summits, however, alternatives are voiced. Global anti-capital activists gathered outside walled summits are demonstrating their dissent to this exclusion and to the decisions made by these institutions. One means of dissent is to create positive spaces of inclusion, such as at the World Social Forum, in opposition to these summits. In this way, the voices excluded from the formal spaces of neo-liberal politics are asserted (Dobrowolsky, 2001).
This paper explores the physical sites of resistance that develop to counter these exclusive meetings and the dominance of neo-liberal capitalism. Examination of the protest sites reveals that they are places of lived experiments and experiences of justice, the very opposite of the processes practised by the instruments and institutions of neo-liberal globalization. I broadly utilize Iris Marion Young's concept of justice as inclusion to simultaneously depict the meetings and, more broadly, the operations of the institutions of neo-liberal globalization as unjust, and global anti-capital activists' protest spaces as spaces that attempt to foster justice. In utilizing Young's idea of inclusion, I do, however, break away from the assumptions that inclusion is antithetical to autonomy and that inclusion is measured in relation to access to a liberal democratic political system.
A further theoretical framework is used in this paper, that of Michel. Maffesoli's social divine. This is used in conjunction with an examination of Paul Routledge's concept of convergence spaces and David Williams' idea of militant particularism to explore the physicality of sites of protest. I emphasize the physical as well as the less tangible emotional aspects of anti-capital protest gatherings. I argue that activists create spaces, both physically and emotionally, that promote ideas of social justice in explicit opposition to the injustice enacted by the global institutions of neo-liberalism and global capital. I then provide some recent examples of global anti-capital protest spaces that have been forged in opposition to the meetings of global institutions of neo-liberalism and international capital.
Activists' voices, gathered via a critical assessment of post-event analyses and recordings available in zines, flyers, edited book volumes and on-line, are included to reflect a wider view of social justice in the activist milieu, rather than only my own. I not only employ critical discourse analysis but also a participatory action research methodological approach in relation to some of the empirical case studies in this paper. (1) The use of participatory action research methodology facilitates "the seed of the critical perspective that allows insiders to consider the possible as well as the actual in their social world" (Kemmis and McTaggart, 2000: 590). It allows me to situate myself critically (Young, 2000: 14), to be a participant in global anti-capital activism and celebrate the potential of these activisms, and, at the same time, to recognize the shortcomings of the broad movement and the theoretical and practical implications for future activisms.
Dialogues and Practices of Justice
Prior to any review of existing prevailing understandings of social justice and critical engagement with these, I would like to establish recognition of the much disputed nature of the very concept of social justice, reflecting David Boucher and Paul Kelly's efforts to convey this contested character and identify that social justice can refer to many different things (1998: 3). This paper does not seek to confirm a singular definition of social justice; rather, it aims to delineate what I believe are two dominant features in a broad understanding of social justice--inclusion and autonomy. The notion of inclusion is central to Iris Marion Young's definition of social justice (1990; 2000). Yet, further exploration of her conception of social justice and the centrality of inclusion to it will determine that, while breaking with the dominant Rawlsian, liberal idea of social justice as distributive justice, Young's use of inclusion relies on liberal ideals of the state (see Rawls, 1971; Young, 1990; 2000). This, as will be established, is problematic when examining non-state actors and those whose very goals of achieving social justice rely on the subversion of the contemporary neo-liberal state system. I designate that both inclusion and autonomy are central to social justice, in relation to present dominant state systems and possible future just systems of collective organizing. I do acknowledge that this is a very abstracted and generalized definition and that I am not devoting more space to entering into contextualized discussions of notions of social justice (on this difference see, for example, Kiss, 2000).
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