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As the Occupy Wall St protests in the US and the connected protests outside St Paul's Cathedral in London in October 2011 dominate the headlines, reading Geoffrey Pleyers' account of the alter-globalization movement has a certain poignancy, as well as engendering a sense of excitement and the glimmer of new possibilities. What has characterised the global protest movement since the early 1990s is a position that is not about wresting power from the state or even taking a stance against globalization per se - an untenable position for a movement seeking and claiming global relevance and adherence - but the demand for "another way", a world in which human rights, freedom and justice would be recognised within globalization. The activists involved strive, in fact, for an international space in which to solve the major problems of our times, for the recognition that citizens and global social movements can have an "impact on the way our common global future is shaped".
What animates this huge and heterogeneous set of social movements and forms of activism is a set of shared meanings and principles, as Pleyers argues. The animating notion of freedom seems Kantian in its persuasion: what can I know; what should I do, what can I hope for? The movement has gone through a series of historical phases since the early 1990s, and has at different times been allied with, and momentarily defined by, pressing issues of the moment. As for example, in the case of action against the Iraq war in 1993 and 1994. Indeed, such movements, precisely because of the way they engage individuals as global citizens, are particularly responsive to the crisis ridden character of the contemporary world, at once focusing on anti-war politics, then international trade agreements, climate change, and now...