Networking Futures: The Movements Against Corporate Globalization (review)

In 2001 and 2002, Jeffrey Juris, a University of California, Berkeley doctoral student in anthropology, actively participated in the burgeoning anti-corporate globalization movement in Barcelona. In addition to attending meetings, networking on the Internet, socializing with fellow militants, and building various small and large protests throughout Spain and Europe with Catalan activists, Juris also took meticulous notes on his activities, interviewed key activists, and began to think through theoretically and concretely the nature and characteristics of the diverse anti-globalization movements that arose after the intense mobilizations against the World Trade Organization in Seattle in 1999. The result is Networking Futures, a highly sophisticated ethnographic study of the Barcelona-based Movement for Global Resistance (MGR) and allied coalitions and autonomous movements that helped build a series of large-scale anti-capitalist mobilizations in the first half of the 2000s.

Juris views groups such as MGR as examples of innovative network-based organizational forms involving "horizontal coordination among autonomous groups, grassroots participation, consensus decision making, and the free and open exchange of information ..." (14) although he emphasizes that these are ideals and are not always realized in practice. Nevertheless, he distinguishes rigorously throughout the book how such network-based movements, "Networks as an Emerging Ideal," differ from the representative democratic models practised by the traditional social democratic, Marxist, and socialist left based in political parties, unions, and united front mobilizations. His central argument is that decentralized, autonomous, and grassroots horizontal networks, represented by groups such as MGR, offer a new and better way of doing radical politics that not only frontally challenges corporate globalization, but also conventional representative democracy, prefiguring new radically democratic forms and practices.

Central to these network-based movements are new Internet-based technologies which allow widespread, open, and more democratic information-gathering and decision-making processes. Actively maintaining web sites, listservs, and other interactive Internet tools, activists throughout Europe and the Americas were able to maintain relatively cohesive local, regional, national, and international resistance networks.

Methodologically, Juris practises "militant ethnography," an approach that stresses "1) collective reflection and visioning about movement practices, logics, and emerging cultural and political models; 2) collective analysis of broader social processes and power relations that affect strategic and tactical decision making; and 3) collective ethnographic reflection about diverse movement networks, how they interact and how they might better relate to collective constituencies." (23) This is no neutral approach to scientific investigation: the author is politically committed to the radical anti-capitalist movements in which he participated and he sees his study as a contribution to future radical network-based anti-capitalist mobilizations. To his credit he never succumbs to the supposed academic necessity to remain completely detached from his objects of study. Indeed, he stresses the importance of "affective solidarity" — the social contacts, comradeship, and friendship among the activists — as a glue that helped politically sustain the movements. It is refreshing in an academic study to read of the very practical and human activities that Juris and other activists engaged in through their efforts to resist capitalist globalization.

Networking Futures includes a sophisticated theoretical introduction and conclusion that engage with the ample theoretical and empirical literature on social movements as well as eight substantive chapters that intersperse dense description of the myriad of activities in the anti-capitalist globalization movement and theoretical reflection. After a detailed opening chapter which lays out his approach, Juris usefully traces the critical importance of the Battle of Seattle in 1999, the first large-scale effort against corporate globalization. Subsequent chapters explore the specific dynamics of various radical movements in Barcelona and the importance of Catalan political and cultural traditions in such groups; larger European actions in which Barcelona activists participated such as the anti-G8 protests in Genoa which were brutally repressed by the police; and the World Social Forums in Porto Alegre, Brazil and their smaller European-based counterparts. Juris' scope is ample: he reflects on a myriad of organizational, cultural, and political themes in these chapters, including the innovative politics of performance...