The present-day forms and scope of worldwide intransigence to globalization policies and processes is one of the most significant political developments of the last decade. However, to speak unusually of “resistance” is itself something of a misnomer. For just as globalization must in the end be recognized as comprising a multiplicity of forces and movement, including both negative and positive dimensions, so too must the resistance to globalization be understood as applying to highly complex, contradictory, and sometimes ambiguous varieties of struggles that are an assortment from the radically progressive to the reactionary and conservation. “Globalization” itself is one of the most highly contested terms of the present era passionate advocates and militant critics (Kellner, 2002). By the 19th century debates raged over whether the global reach of the capitalist market system and the disturbances it brought were producing a beneficial “wealth of nations” or generating an era of exploitation and imperialism. For the Marxist tradition, globalization has since suggested an oppressive hegemony of capital, and after the Great Depression and World War II many critics have discussed the manner in which a discourse of modernization emerged to celebrate the growth of a globalized capitalist market system against its ideological and geopolitical competitor, state communism. Conceivably the most noted form of resistance to globalization at the end of the 20th century was first popularly termed the “anti-globalization movement,” which can be seen as attempting to constitute the beginnings of a global civil society that might produce new public spheres of political debate and cosmopolitan culture, as it upholds values of autonomy, democracy, peace, ecological sustainability, equality, and social justice. Around the turn of the new millennium activists began to more specifically describe their opposition to certain aspects and forms of globalization, thereby identifying the possibility of positive forms of globalization. As we shall see below, this resulted in terms like the “anti-corporate globalization movement” and the “social justice movement” gaining currency. Still, many activists have tended to portray globalization in a largely negative fashion. For them, globalization is often considered as being more or less equivalent with programs of top-down neoliberal capitalism, imperialism and terror war, McDonaldization of the planet by transnational corporations who exist only for profit and the states that cater to them, as well as dis-equilibrating cultural change resulting from the global proliferation and migration of Western/Northern science and technology. On the other hand, perhaps due to the significant political involvement of youth throughout the movement, the use of new media associated with the Interested has been key in helping anti-corporate globalizers to coordinate protests, proliferate counter-messages, and manifest oppositional technopolitics and subcultures (Kahn and Kellner, 2003). Thus, the anti-globalization movement’s relationship to contemporary technology must itself be considered contested and complex, if not contradictory in some phases. The anti-corporate globalization movement originally began to collect widespread recognition in 1999, when the first in an ongoing series of large international protests was staged. These protests, which have regularly taken the name of the date on which they happened or the central city which they have occupied, have sustained to erupt outside almost every major international political and economic meeting. Protesters see economic policy-making institutions such as the World Trade Organization (WTO), the World Bank, the International monetary Fund (IMF), as well as conferences such as the Davos World Economic Forum, as central to the development and upcoming planning of unjust globalization and have accordingly made protest of their major meetings a precedence. Furthermore, since 9/11, the anti-globalization movement has increasingly become connected with targeting the militarist policies of the Bush and Blair administrations as part of a growing anti-war grassroots movement. Surely, on February 15, 2003, an anti-war/globalization protest was assembled that brought together an estimated 15 million people in some 60 countries worldwide, which resulted in media outlets such as the New York Times referring to the unprecedented resistance as the “other superpower.” Undeniably, much of the resistance to globalization today cannot be understood apart from its use of the new technologies associated with the Internet. It is for this reason, as well as for more ideological reasons such as the fact that many involved in the so-called “anti-globalization movement” actually desire something like the globalization of positive values and culture, that many scholars and activists have begun to reject the moniker of “anti-globalization” altogether. Instead, people often speak of “globalization from below” as opposed to “globalization from above,” of anti-capitalist or anti-corporate globalization, of the “alter-globalization movement” and of “alternative globalizations,” of the “global justice movement,” or the “movement of movements.” The latter is particularly used to express the political idea of a global solidarity based in the tremendous diversity of resistance to be found to today’s mainstream ruling practices, neoliberal capitalist economics, repressive cultural norms, and other aspects of global society that appear to augment the divides between rich and poor and oppressor and oppressed. Notably, since 2001, the World Social Forum has been held as a sort of annual counter-summit to the World Economic Forum. With its motto of “Another World is Possible,” attendance in the many tens of thousands hailing from over 100 countries, and highly inclusive nature that involves diverse representatives from all manner of progressive groups and causes, many have come to highlight the World Social Forum as prominent example of the movement of movements that can characterize an alternative to capitalist globalization (Hardt, 2002). The new movements against capitalist globalization, then, have placed issues like global justice and environmental destruction squarely in the center of the important political concerns of our times. Whereas the mainstream media failed to vigorously debate or even report on globalization movement and rarely, if ever, critically discussed the activities of the WTO, the World Bank, and the IMF, there is now a widely circulating critical discourse and controversy over these institutions. Stung by criticisms, representatives of the World Bank in particular are pledging reform, and pressures are mounting concerning proper and improper roles for the major global institutions, highlighting their limitations and deficiencies and the need for reforms such as debt relief for overburdened developing countries to solve some of their fiscal and social problems. In fact, this highlights that another aspect of the current resistance to globalization is that it works both to counter and reform in at once, with some social movements working for direct and participatory democracy and autonomous communities, on the one hand, while others seek truly representative and democratically accountable national and global political structures, on the other. Resistance to globalization is also taking place in the form of extreme right political movements that seek to look after ideas such as frontier-style self-determination, national isolationism, and fundamentalist culture against what they perceive as the growing imposition of total global governance, in some cases, or modern liberal and secular culture, in others. Since the 1990s, there has been a dramatic rise in fascist groups and ultra-nationalist and xenophobic politics in European countries, with nations such as France, Italy, Austria, Belgium, and Norway having seen over 15 percent of the popular vote captured by politicians representing these ideological aims. Further, the United States possesses a noteworthy far right population that fights for individualist liberties such as the right to bear arms, live free from governmental intrusions into private affairs, and possess inalienable private property, which it sees as under threat from a global conspiracy of political institutions the seek one form or another of the globalization of a New World Order. Lastly, against the globalization of Western culture and political norms, the last few decades have seen the rise of highly conservative and reactionary forms of religious fundamentalism. In particular, Islamic fundamentalism has been portrayed as a major opponent of globalization, with groups such as the Taliban in Afghanistan signifying an extreme form of resistance to the globalization of modern secular culture and democratic politics. Thus far, as the Taliban is also associated with Osama bin Laden and his Al Qaeda network, who actively use new media technologies to promote their cause and who seek in their own image a “global jihad movement,” it is clear that even here resistance must be revealed as embodying a myriad of complexities and contradictions. It would therefore be incorrect to perceive a simple dichotomy between globalization processes and its resisters. Just as there are positive and negative dimensions to globalization, the same can be said of the various forces which seek to resist it. Consequently in understanding the resistance to globalization, one needs to be context specific and look for the variety of forms of struggle; including individuals practicing lifestyle politics, civic groups and grassroots activist networks, non-governmental and transnational social movement organizations, as well as more national groups and parties – that are often combined in producing resistance events and which comprise a broad spectrum of resistance to globalization.

Bibliography
Kellner, D. 2002: Theorizing globalization. Sociological Theory 20:3, 285-305.
Kahn, R. and D. Kellner 2003: New media, Internet activism, and blogging. In D. Muggleton (ed.), The Post-Subcultures Reader, 299-314. London: Berg.

Hardt, M. 2002: Porto Allegre: Today’s Bandung? New Left Review 14.