| Exploring the web of connections between neoliberalism, resistance and global security culture in the last decade of the twentieth century, When Consent Fails illustrates how current modes of power have evolved out of the processes of economic globalization. During this time, the ascendancy of the neoliberal paradigm shifted the priorities of capitalism into a global turbo thrust, while a robust, diverse and global counter-resistance movement, facilitated by new communications technologies, solidified into progressive and effective networks. Alongside these developments a pervasive global security culture has also arisen to shape a cultural landscape in which neoliberalism has become further entrenched, resistance more widespread, police departments militarized and military structures more politicized. Deconstructing the polarities in the relations that shape this arrangement, exposes how the hegemony of neoliberalism has been consolidated through its co-dependent relationship with military and policing structures now codified in the war on terror.; Drawing on the triangulation of power between neoliberalism, resistance and global security culture, this story primarily documents the rise of global resistance and its manifestation in Seattle in 1999. Examining this play of forces within a larger environmental framework that speaks to the consequences of capitalism, reveals how and why this burgeoning international movement connects struggles against oppression, poverty, and globalization with the environment and a common hope for the possibility of a more sustainable world. Additionally, it repositions these contestations of power in a dialectic underscored by the relationship between consumption and resource extraction. As this process closes in on itself, it exposes the contradictions of a system dependent on inequality, which in turn has shaped a space for counter-hegemony to emerge as people across the globe (but especially in the global South) have less and less to lose. Meanwhile global policing---from armed interventions, to civil and civic control---militarizes, and further expropriates the public sphere for exploitation by a few. Ordinary people and the environment suffer in this dynamic, the consequences of which are enormous, yet, in turn it has created the conditions for an environmental consciousness to emerge, borne on the optimism of future possibilities. |
