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Networking Futures: The Movements against Corporate Globalization (Experimental Futures) ReviewSince the Internet revolutionized communication technology in the nineties, the concept of the network has become an organizational model to be emulated--a utopian vision even--across vastly different spheres of social life, not the least of which is political activism. The growing importance and prevalence of activist networks, however, has been reflected in only a limited way in the anthropological literature on social movements, and few scholars have approached networks as more than mere abstractions and metaphors at best or, at worst, as static structures. Networking Futures: The Movements Against Corporate Globalization by Jeffrey Juris, on the other hand, provides us with a very necessary and highly successful ethnographic study of the concrete mechanisms, practices, and social relations that constitute the activist networks characteristic of the anti-corporate globalization movements that began with the Zapatista uprising in 1994 and the anti-WTO protests in Seattle in 1999. Since those times, the organizational models and utopian imaginaries of activist networks have profoundly reshaped the social movement landscape across the globe--particularly in Western Europe, Latin America, and the United States--making Juris' well-theorized and richly descriptive study relevant for readers across scholarly disciplines and geographical boundaries.
Juris describes activist networks as "locally rooted, but globally connected", and he attempts to make his own research similarly "multi-scalar". Thus, his research is rooted in long-term ethnographic fieldwork with the Movement for Global Resistance (MRG), a Barcelona based activist network, with which he actively participated in numerous meetings, discussions, events, and direct-action protests. While the most engaging chapters in Networking Futures may be the ones dedicated to how networks are "embodied" and made visible during protests, the work's larger aim and greater accomplishment is to study these networks during their "submerged" phases, illuminating how activist networks such as the MRG are not so much rigid organizations, but fluid processes animated as much by "transnational flows of people, ideas, strategies, and tactics" as by Catalan cultural and political landscape and history.
The central argument of Networking Futures, which Juris repeats like a mantra throughout the book, is that "anti-corporate globalization movements involve a growing confluence among networks as computer-supported infrastructure (technology), networks as organizational structure (form), and networks as political model (norm), mediated by concrete activist practice" (p. 11). He is thus concerned with examining how new technologies, and particularly the Internet, not only provide the arena and means of organization for these movements, but also shape its logic and political goals, such that spreading network technologies, forms, and norms outward becomes a political goal itself. Like anarchists of old, these activists practice a "dual politics", attempting to influence dominant politics, but also to create the embryonic foundations of a new society "in the shell of the old" by engaging in autonomous, decentralized networks.
As a self-ascribed "militant ethnographer", Juris is clearly a sympathetic and enthusiastic participant in the movements he studies; however, it is to his credit that he does not romanticize or fetishize networks, instead paying due attention to the limits of network forms and the contradictions of its norms. The chapter on state repression and performative violence during protests is particularly illuminating in this respect. Equally noteworthy is Juris' sober evaluation in the conclusion of what impact these movements have (and have not) concretely effected upon state or corporate policies. However, what makes this book especially dynamic is that it holds appeal not only across scholarly disciplines, but beyond them as well, since the author makes a concerted effort to make it relevant and useful, not only to scholars, but to activists... Juris makes a significant contribution to the field of social movement studies and should hold a broad appeal to readers in various disciplines, as well as general non-academic readers, concerned with politics and political culture.
-- -- -- Bruno Renero-Hannan
This review was originally published in the journal COMPARATIVE STUDIES IN SOCIETY AND HISTORY, Vol. 52, Issue 01, January 2010, pp 210-211.
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