Violence as a tool of order and change: The war on terrorism and the antiglobalization movement

September 11, it is said, has changed everything. However true or not this may be-and I tend to think that it is not very true at all-one thing it certainly should have changed is the loose manner in which the adjective "violent" has been appended to recent antiglobalization protests. Especially for a conference such as this one-conceived in the wake of the Quebec City events of last year and designed to shed light on the nature of the challenge posed to capitalist democracies by the new antiglobalization movement-the horrific and deadly terrorist attack on New York and Washington, D.C., and the scale of state violence unleashed-literally from on high-by the way on terrorism, certainly put this loose usage in stark perspective. This should give us pause about the way the word "violent" has been invoked in the media, and the way in which massive police and even military forces of containment have been mobilized every time there has been a large-scale protest at gatherings of corporate and political elites to further the globalization agenda. When the whole world is witness to passenger airplanes being deployed to destroy office towers in New York, and to military airplanes being deployed to rain bombs on villages in Afghanistan, the police designation and seizure as a violent weapon of a toy catapult designed to throw teddy bears over a security fence becomes even more surreal than the names of groups like the Society for Creative Anachronism or the Lanarkists that conceived this type of protest. Even those who engage in practices oriented to breaking through police lines and fences to make their objections heard and their presence felt in public spaces adjacent to where the rich and powerful are gathered, or who throw a rock at a McDonald's window along the route of a protest march, or who manage to get so far as to toss a paint bomb at a politician or CEO, are clearly engaged in a form of politics that is fundamentally of a different order in terms of intent, in terms of the material employed, and in terms of effects, than the practice of armed conflict by or against, a state. Indeed, the very charge of disturbing the peace leveled against people sitting down together to block intersections is brought into question by September 11.