Abstract
A Utopian dream is etched into the modern militant imaginary. A dream of revolution as rupture. An ecstatic storming of the Bastille, of the Winter Palace. Animated by a longing for something different, by fear in the face of repression, and by the (im)possibility of victory. ‘Under the cobblestones, the beach’ — the revolutionaries of 1968 wrote on the walls of Paris, articulating their realistic demand for the impossible. Their dream remains with us, returning as a global social movement once again picks up the cobblestones both to reveal and to make the worlds that might be possible in the absence of neoliberalism’s enclosures and apparent certainties.
A long day of carnival and peaceful protest…timed to coincide with the start of the G8 world leaders’ conference in Cologne…turned into a riot yesterday afternoon as demonstrators trashed a McDonald’s, wrecked part of the Futures Exchange, set fire to a bank, and destroyed cars and empty flats in the City of London…. many people were injured as the police used water cannon and baton-charged up to 2,000 mostly peaceful demonstrators on horseback. By early evening, there were running battles in side streets with a hard core of protesters hurling stones and bottles, breaking into buildings, throwing out files, setting fire to papers and breaking ground floor windows.1
London, 1999
Riot police launched canisters of tear gas [on] Saturday at about 2,000 protesters trying to breach a safety perimeter a day after one man was killed during demonstrations outside the Group of Eight summit in Genoa, Italy…. Ninety-three people were wounded Saturday, including eight police. Police arrested 36 demonstrators….As they marched, hundreds of extremists broke off from the larger group and set fires in plastic garbage cans, overturned cars, broke shop windows and hurled stones at police. Some called the police assassins.2
Genoa, 2001
Police have used rubber bullets, tear gas and water cannons against anti-globalization protesters in Swiss and French cities near Evian where the Group of Eight (G8) summit is being held….In the Swiss city of Geneva authorities spent more than nine hours battling with demonstrators as they rampaged through the city centre. …Shop windows were smashed and stores looted, leaving the city streets awash with broken glass and choking fumes from tear gas canisters.After protesters began to hurl rocks and petrol bombs, the German police were brought in for reinforcements, storming the front line to scatter the rioters and chasing ringleaders all over the city. … In Lausanne demonstrators wearing black face masks blocked roads with burning barricades and attacked the hotel area where some summit delegates were staying before being driven away by riot police with tear gas. Several demonstrators were injured, one seriously.3
Evian, 2003
There were fresh clashes between police and anti-G8 protestors early Wednesday ahead of the official opening of a gathering of world leaders from the Group of Eight (G8) nations at Gleneagles in Scotland. … Police had been attacked with bottles and other missiles, the BBC said. Late on Monday, riot police clashed with anti-G8 protestors in Edinburgh, the Scottish capital, leading to up to 100 arrests. … Police said [on] Tuesday that demonstrators bent on violence would meet a ‘robust response’ from the authorities.4
Gleneagles, 2005
Germany was shocked this weekend by images of violence in the Baltic port city of Rostock, where violent anti-G-8 protesters clashed with police just days before the start of the G-8 summit in Germany. Around 1,000 police and demonstrators were injured in violent clashes which followed an otherwise peaceful demonstration, with anarchists throwing stones at police and setting cars on fire.5
Heiligendamm, 2007
‘I predict a riot!’6 Globalization and its malcontents7
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Preview
Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.
Notes
Tom Mertes (ed.), A Movement ofMovements: Is Another World Really Possible? (London, 2004).
Michel Foucault, ‘The Birth oí Biopolitics’, in Ethics: Subjectivity and Truth, ed. Paul Rabinow (New York, 1997), pp. 73–79.
Michel Aglietta, A Theory of Capitalist Regulation: The US Experience (London and New York, 1987).
David Harvey, The Condition of Postmodernity (Oxford, 1989), pp. 141–42, 171.
Gerard Dumenil and Levy Dominique, Capital Resurgent: Roots of the Neoliberal Revolution (Cambridge, 2004), pp. 1–2.
Ibid.; cf. Stephen Gill, American Hegemony and the Trilateral Commission (Cambridge, MA, 1990).
‘The New Enclosures’, Midnight Notes no. 10. (1990). A process that saw its first expression in Britain’s ‘enclosure movement’ which opened in the early Middle Ages and saw major consolidation with the General Enclosure Acts of the early 1800s. For an excellent analysis of the radically transformative effect that this process has, particularly in terms of disembedding economy from the regulatory effects of both nature and other social institutions, see Karl Polanyi, The Great Transformation: The Political and Economic Transformations of Our Time (1944; rpt. Boston, 2001).
David Harvey, The New Imperialism (Oxford, 2003), pp. 137–79.
Francis Fukuyama, ‘The End of History’, The National Interest, 16 (1989), pp. 3–18; republished as a book length monograph as The End of History and the Last Man (London, 1992).
George Katsiaflcas, The Subversion of Politics: European Autonomous Movements and the Subversion of Everyday Life (New Jersey, 1997), p. 262.
The term ‘glocal’ is being used increasingly by social scientists and others to refer to the conceptual and material collapsing of global and local spheres of organization, made possible by new and rapidly globalising communications technologies, particularly the internet. For a consideration of this term and associated organisational phenomena, see Sian Sullivan, ‘Conceptualising Glocal Organization: From Rhizome to E=mc2 Becoming Post-Human’, in Metaphors of Globalization: Mirrors, Magicians and Mutinies, eds Marcus Kornprobst, Vincent Pouliot, Nisha Shah and Ruben Zaiotti (Basingstoke, 2008), pp. 149–66.
Guiomar Rovira, Women of Maize: Indigenous Women and the Zapatista Rebellion (London, 2000).
Gustavo Esteva, ‘Basta! Mexican Indians Say “Enough”!’, in The Post-Development Reader, ed. Majid Rahnema and Victoria Bawtree (London, 1997), p. 302.
Anonymous (ed.), On Fire; The Battle of Genoa and the Anti-Capitalist Movement (London, 2001); The Free Association, Moments of Excess (Leeds, 2004). Retrieved from http://freelyassociating.org/moments-of-excess; John Drury Steve Reicher and Clifford Stott, ‘Transforming the Boundaries of Collective Identity: From the Local Anti-Road Campaign to Global Resistance?’, Social Movement Studies, 2 (2003), pp. 191–212.
Emile Durkheim, The Elementary Forms of Religious Life (1912; rpt. New York, 1995), pp. 211–12.
Mikhail Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World (Bloomington, 1984).
Henri Lefebvre, Everyday Life in the Modern World (London, 1984);
Sian Sullivan, ‘On Dance and Difference: Bodies, Movement and Experience in Khoesān Trance-Dancing—Perceptions of a Raver’, in Talking About People: Readings in Contemporary Cultural Anthropology, ed. W.A. Haviland, R. Gordon and L. Vivanco (New York, 2006), pp. 234–41.
Arlette Farge and Jacques Revel TheRules of Rebellion: Child Abductions inParis in 1750 (Cambridge, 1991).
David Lockwood, Solidarity and Schism: The ‘Problem of Disorder’ in Durkheimian and Marxian Sociology (Oxford, 1992), p. 34.
Naomi Klein, No Logo: No Space, No Choice, No fobs (New York, 2000).
Ernesto Laclau, New Reflections on the Revolution of Our Time (London and New York, 1990), pp. 32–34.
Cf. Sian Sullivan, ‘An Other World Is Possible? On Representation, Rationalism and Romanticism in Social Forums’, Ephemera: Theory and Practice in Organization, 5 (2005), pp. 370–92.
Georges Bataille, Eroticism, trans. Mary Dalwood (1957; rpt. London, 1987).
Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia (London and New York, 2004), p. 9.
Also see Michel Foucault, The Will to Knowledge: The History of Sexuality, trans. Robert Hurley (1976; rpt. London, 1998).
Julian Reid, ‘Deleuze’s War Machine: Nomadism Against the State’, Millennium, 32 (2003), p. 69.
John Hughes, Lines of Flight: Reading Deleuze with Hardy, Gissing, Conrad, Woolf (Sheffield, 1997), p. 46.
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Copyright information
© 2015 Tadzio Mueller and Sian Sullivan
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Mueller, T., Sullivan, S. (2015). Making Other Worlds Possible? Riots, Movement and Counter-Globalisation. In: Davis, M.T. (eds) Crowd Actions in Britain and France from the Middle Ages to the Modern World. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137316516_15
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137316516_15
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, London
Print ISBN: 978-1-349-55766-0
Online ISBN: 978-1-137-31651-6
eBook Packages: Palgrave History CollectionHistory (R0)