Jeffrey S. Juris, Networking Futures: The MovementsAgainst Corporate GlobalizationDuke University Press (2008) 400 pages. ISBN-13:978-0822342694

Jonathan Pattenden

Published online: 29 October 2010# Springer Science+Business Media B.V. 2010

Networking Futures is a ‘militant ethnography’ of the anti-corporate globalisationmovement, undertaken whilst the author was an active participant in one of its keyanarchist groupings—the Catalonia-based Movimiento para la Resistencia Global.The book traces the emergence of the anti-corporate globalisation movement,reviews its defining mobilisations in Europe (in Prague in September 2000 andGenoa in July 2001), exposes the intense micro-political conflicts that simmeredwithin, and outlines the organisational strategies and ideological strands that unitedand divided its participants (NGOs, unions, political parties, Trotskysists andanarchists). Finally, the book attempts to assess the movement’s impact—ininstrumental terms and with regard to its potential legacy for how societies areorganised politically. The result is an important exposé of the inner workings of themost visible social movement the West has seen in a generation.

The central third of the book focuses on the mass mobilisations in Prague andGenoa. The differing tactical strands that characterised the movement arecharacterised by the three-way assault on the World Bank/IMF conference centrein Prague: the symbolic assault on a heavily armed bridge largely by Trotskyists andthe Italian autonomist ‘white overalls’; the ‘tactical frivolity’ of the non-violent ‘pinkand silver’ anarchists, and the ‘performative violence’ of the black bloc. Ten monthslater in Genoa, the numbers of protesters had grown tenfold. Here, Juris notes thecontradictory impact of the black bloc—whilst making the movement more visible,their acts of masked vandalism provided the police with a pretext for heavy-handedtactics that included torture and culminated with extreme acts of brutality againstsleeping protesters in a school building. The violence, accompanied at times byfascist songs, had a long-lasting psychological impact on the movement. Thepolice’s primary targets had not been the black bloc militants but the more radicalelements of the non-violent majority. Juris contends that there had been aninternational move to peg back the movement, whose challenge to core aspects ofthe capitalist system had become too prominent.

Int. Migration & Integration (2010) 11:461–463DOI 10.1007/s12134-010-0147-3

J. Pattenden (*)School of International Development, University of East Anglia, NR4 7TJ Norwich, UKe-mail: j.pattenden@uea.ac.uk

The book’s analytical depth is unsurprisingly at its greatest in Barcelona—the citywhere Juris was based for his fieldwork. Catalonia’s radical past contextualises thedynamic wave of mobilisation and networking that made this part of Spain a key siteof the anti-corporate globalisation movement. The tensions between the main anti-corporate globalisation groupings—a recurring theme of the book—promptedshifting patterns of alliances, with the radical network-based movements attemptingto work both with militant autonomous movements and the institutional sectorswhose top-down organisational processes were anathema to their preference fordirectly democratic forms of organisation.

Some within the movement rejected the emphasis on mass protests, arguing thatenergies should be focused on local level organisation. Juris argues for a balancebetween the two, pointing out that Prague and other key mobilisations precipitatedthe movement’s growth, as well as providing a focal point for the dissemination ofinformation and ideas in the form of teach-ins and face-to-face interactions. He alsounderlines the preponderance of middle-class western participation in the movement,which reflected asymmetries in the capacity to travel, access new communicationtechnologies, and find time to organise. The social classes whose poverty inspiredthe movement in the first place were, then, marginal to its workings.

Some of the radicals who had been at the forefront of the anti-corporateglobalisation movement receded into the background as the more broad-based socialforum process took over from the radical transnational People’s Global Actionnetwork as the movement’s epicentre. Juris’s exploration of the tensions within PGAprovides an insight into how anarchists struggled to realise their goals of horizontalorganisation. At the second PGA European conference in Leiden, some rebelledagainst what they saw as the ‘tyranny or structurelessness’ under which keyorganisers remained relatively invisible within an obliquely labelled ‘support group’.Critics argued that this facilitated a covert centralisation of power, and demandedthat those chosen to convene the network should play a key role in setting its agenda.Others held out for an expanded but more decentralised support group structure inwhich key individuals would facilitate political processes rather than direct them.

Juris points to two achievements of the anti-corporate movement: firstly that it hasinfluenced public discourse and shone a spotlight on the iniquities generated by neo-liberalism. The emphasis on debt cancellation and poverty reduction at the 2005 G8conference in Scotland followed a long line of mass protests and activist gatherings.However, the impact on development practice is, as Juris indicates, altogether morecircumspect.

Secondly, the movement pointed ‘prefiguratively’ towards the utopian anddirectly democratic worlds that activists were ‘struggling to create’. For Juris, theinstrumental and ‘prefigurative’ dimensions of the movement were of equal value.Whilst experiments with alternative forms of organisation might be inscribed intosocieties’ future political practices, those viewing the world from places wherepoverty levels are higher and material deprivation more intense would presumablyhave less patience with the ‘prefigurative’.

Juris does not point out that many in the anti-corporate globalisation movementmade the same mistake as the World Bank: they assumed that community-basedgrassroots organisations and autonomous self-managed networks, or ‘grassrootscounterpower’, could have some import in caste-ridden socially iniquitous regions.

462 J. Pattenden

The Washington Consensus may be dead, as Juris reminds us, but did not itsreplacement—the post-Washington Consensus—deploy arguments about localdemocracy and civil society organisations in order to usher the neo-liberalrevolution through the early 2000s?

Although it sets out with a different set of objectives, it could be argued that thebook, like the movement from which it was drawn, has failed to bring the conditionsof the marginalised, and the mechanisms through which they are reproduced,sufficiently into the picture. Judged on its own terms, though, the book has bothdepth and significant importance for understanding the ebb and flow of radicalmovements and their complex internal contests.

Networking Futures: The Movements Against Corporate Globalization 463