Jane

osition to free trade, corporate power, and international financial institutions’; the support of �extra-institutional, direct action as a key mode of struggle’; and the recognition of �the diversity of the movement as a strength.’[5]

This diversity is enabled by the absence of formalised hierarchies, something that has proven an integral structural feature of the movement and, according to many, the main source of its success. There are no вЂ?leaders in the traditional sense - just people determined to learn, and to pass it on’[6], and equally, there is a lack of followers. The movement may be вЂ?by the ideas of individual organizers and intellectuals but doesn’t defer to … them’[7], and Klein argues that this lack of internal structure makes it difficult to conceptualise in terms of traditional social movements; indeed, вЂ?it is more accurate to picture a movement of many movements вЂ" coalitions of coalitions.’[8] Whilst there may be an absence of formal hierarchies, these coalitions and alliances вЂ?necessarily involve entangled power relations, where relations of domination and resistance are entwined’[9]. In a Foucauldian sense, this may be a movement вЂ?concerned with power at its extremities, in its final destinations, with those points where it becomes capillary’[10], but the movement itself is far from being free of power’s circulatory threads, both in terms of internal and external relations. Beneath the surface of these fragile coalitions are a plethora of tensions; an inevitable result of вЂ?bringing together groups with such different ideas about power вЂ"unions, political parties, NGOs, anarchist street protesters and agrarian reformers’[11].

These tensions and conflicts have rarely damaged the �anti-globalisation’ movement as a whole, however. Although some may see the odd violent outburst as a fringe element that discredits and delegitimises �the movement’ as a whole’[12], the movement seems strangely resilient to internal fragmentation. Perhaps it is fair to agree with Klein, in that �decentralization is a reasonable, even ingenious adaptation both to pre-existing fragmentation within progressive networks and to changes in the broader culture.’[13] In many ways, it possesses an acephalous organisation, something that it shares with Evans-Pritchard’s analysis of the Nuer. For the Nuer, their �political system is an equilibrium between opposed tendencies towards fission and fusion, between the tendency of all groups to segment, and the tendency of all groups to combine with segments of the same order … fission in fusion in political groups are two aspects of the same segmentary principle, and the Nuer tribe and its divisions are to be understood as an equilibrium between these two contradictory, yet complementary, tendencies.’[14] It could be said that the �anti-globalization’ movement avoids the worst of these ongoing processes of fusion and fission, and indeed outright conflict, by affording each individual unit a remarkable degree of autonomy and agency. Furthermore, the

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