Why Elites Need Your Protests

The social movements that emerge when an activist is young deeply influence the protests they will create or envision in the future. For me, as a high school activist, it was the anti-globalisation movement — in particular, the spectacular Battle in Seattle that shut down the World Trade Organization meeting in 1999 — that would indelibly mark my sense of what a protest ought to look like. This conception would later shape Occupy Wall Street, a social movement that I co-created in 2011.

In protesting against the bureaucratic gatherings of international institutions, the anti-globalisation movement drew attention to global organisations, trade agreements and ideologies that have an outsized impact on local communities. Activists woke the public up and got them protesting in large numbers — over 30,000 participated in the Seattle protests — with the rallying cry that the difficulties their communities faced were being caused by the decisions of distant elites.

The movement of movements, as it would later be called affectionately by organisers when the movement grew to encompass many different causes, demonstrated the capacity of disciplined activists to outwit police and disrupt international structures that are otherwise untouchable. The direct action activists who descended on Seattle brought lock-box protest methods that were developed by anti-abortion activists and…