Account of how the anti-corporate globalization movement uses new technologies to organize, written by a participant in many of the biggest demonstrations of recent years

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.

"“Networking Futures [is] an exciting and important book, and a contribution to sociology. . . . Juris provides us with an understanding of how activists are at the forefront of this global transformation, through their creative use of internet and other technologies, and through their comprehensively democratic and reflexive exploration of new social forms.”" - Contemporary Sociology

"“Networking Futures is one of the very first detailed ethnographic accounts of the alternative globalisation movement. The book manages to weave together some of the key historical moments of its ineluctable rise into a single compelling narrative from the intimate perspective of someone who was there. . . . Juris’s many accounts of the vitality, creativity and innovativeness of the alternative globalisation movement will inspire activists and academics alike for many years to come.”" - Anthropological Forum

"“As well as being an insightful and inspiring resource for activists, Networking Futures: The Movements Against Corporate Globalisation, is a absorbing history of the ever-evolving contemporary resistance to corporate globalisation. I found it a refreshing antidote to the constant barrage of neo-conservative blather emanating from the mouths of free market evangelists on the pages and the airwaves of the mainstream media—especially read in the context of collapsing global markets!”" - M/C Reviews

"“The view Juris offers is more in-depth than has been generally reported even by sympathetic journalists. . . . Networking Futures stands as a pioneering document of what may yet prove to be a new new world order.”" - Popmatters