Constructing the anti-globalisation movement

This chapter asks a deceptively simple question: is there a transnational anti-globalisation social movement? Some critics of the movement have already produced its obituary. They point to the failure to rival the spectacle of the Battle of Seattle and, more fundamentally, to the ramifications of the September 11 attacks. The space for protest is understood to have closed down and the movement thrown into an identity crisis (see discussion in Martin 2003; Callinicos 2003a: 16-19). I am not responding in this chapter to such contentious claims, nor to the undoubtedly changing conjuncture for activism. Rather I want to interrogate the more basic proposition that there has ever been such a thing as 'an anti-globalisation movement'.