Direct Action, Deliberation, and Diffusion by Lesley J. Wood (review)

Why do some protest tactics spread well beyond their context of origin while others remain localized? More importantly, what factors allow collectives struggling for social change to make good decisions about how to do so? These questions are at the heart of Lesley Wood’s Direct Action, Deliberation, and Diffusion, a work that focuses on the diffusion—or lack thereof—to activist constituencies in New York City and Toronto of a repertoire of tactics associated with the direct action shutdown of the ministerial meeting of the World Trade Organization (WTO) in Seattle 1999. As Wood explains, the “Seattle model” refers to a broad set of tactics deployed extensively on the streets of Seattle in November 1999 in protest against the WTO and the model of neoliberal capitalist globalization it represented. This tactical cluster—including lockbox blockading, puppetry, black blocs, and jail solidarity—would subsequently circulate widely, if unevenly and far from unproblematically, through the alter-globalization “movement of movements.” Whereas the alter-globalization movement would reach its zenith in the years between 1999 and 2001, manifesting most spectacularly in the form of mass convergences of tens of thousands of activists mobilizing in opposition to the summits of global capitalism (meetings of the G8/G20, WTO, World Bank, International Monetary Fund, World Economic Forum, and more), its resonance continues to be felt among the movements that have followed in its wake. Rather than another book about the alterglobalization cycle of struggle and its tactical innovations, successes, and failures, Wood’s book is in fact something much more interesting: a critical, attentive, and sophisticated analysis of the relationship between a collective’s ability to deliberate in the most open, rigorous, and egalitarian manner as possible about tactical choices and the efficacy and appropriateness of those choices in advancing struggles for social justice. Wood’s book also joins a recent corpus of work by self-identified scholar-activists conducting politically engaged research with, for, and about social movements (Conway 2004; Day 2005; Graeber 2009; Haiven and Khasnabish 2013; J. Juris 2008; J. S. Juris and Khasnabish 2013; Katsiaficas 2006; Khasnabish 2008; Maeckelbergh 2009; Shukaitis, Graeber, and Biddle 2007; Selbin 2010; Smith 2008; Sitrin 2012; Turbulence Collective 2010).

Comparing the way in which activists in Toronto and New York City engaged with the “Seattle model” in the context of their own struggles, Wood draws on activist interviews, meeting minutes, e-mail listservs, newspaper reports, and her own first-hand experiences as a participant in these movement spaces to explore how movement ecologies within these contexts affect the diffusion of tactics. Wood’s analysis is nuanced and multilayered: she moves from examining the political economy of Toronto and New York to a close reading of the ways activists discussed and debated the Seattle cluster of tactics in light of how they understood themselves and their own contexts and struggles. Fundamentally, she argues that “[p]otential adopters [of a tactic or tactical cluster] need to be able to gather and talk about the tactics in a relatively reflexive, diverse, egalitarian, and open manner” but that such deliberation is often blocked as a result of “categorical and relational inequalities and historical patterns of exclusion” (3). As Wood further explains, the blocking of the diffusion of new ideas, strategies, and tactics of dissent is one of the key reasons that waves of social change action and protest come to an end, thus according this critical exploration a status beyond a case study of the successes and failures of the “Seattle model” itself. By invoking “diffusion” Wood locates her own work clearly in relation to the body of social movement studies literature that has long taken up the question of how repertoires of protest and ideas about social change travel among diverse activist constituencies. As for “deliberation,” Wood operationalizes this term as referring to “a particularly productive form of conversation … deliberation brings together diverse actors with different opinions to exchange ideas in a relatively egalitarian and...