A Model for Homeland Defense? the Policing of Alterglobalist Protests and the Contingency of Power Relations

This article analyzes the policing of the protest against the Free Trade Area of the Americas agreement in Miami in November 2003. Specifically, it uses the case to develop a theoretical understanding of the contingencies, weaknesses, and unpredictable consequences of ostensibly repressive applications of power in transnational summit spaces. It then evaluates participants' modes of resistance to critique ongoing assertion among academic and activist circles concerning the unity of activists in alterglobalist space, in favor of a view of power relations as constitutive of complex forms of social identity, and which require greater reflection on the part of activist circles in order to translate the experience of repression into a source of activist commonality.