To open a crack in history
From Mexico to Thailand via the streets of Seattle, Katharine Ainger tracks the growing grassroots resistance to economic globalization; while The restless margins timeline highlights some key moments of international protest from 1994 onwards.

Tomorrow begins today
The Zapatista declaration that launched a global movement.

The damn water is ours!
The Bolivian city of Cochabamba reclaimed its water from the hands of a transnational corporation. Marcela López Levy talked to those involved.

We are everywhere
PHOTO ESSAY: Resistance across the planet.

The enclosed summit
Richard Swift, on the frontline of
the Quebec City protests, explains why the walls around élite global summits will have to come down.

From Seattle to Soweto
Patrick Bond untangles South Africa’s Faustian pact with globalization, while Ferial Haffajee tracks the resurgence of activism at the grassroots.

Resistance is the secret of joy
John Jordan and Jennifer Whitney on the carnivals against capital that are turning the world upside down.

Beyond the barricade
Artist Dan Baron Cohen working with the Landless of Brazil talks of moving from resistance to liberation, while Eduardo Galeano writes of the Landless Movement.

How to cause trouble

This magazine is about the resistance movement protesting globalization.

It is a very young movement travelling at collossal speed. A messy, fluid, contradictory movement. I must admit I am part of it.

Sometimes it is wonderful: standing outside Bill Clinton’s hotel in the fine Seattle night-drizzle, we hear the World Trade Organization meeting has collapsed and the pizza-boy sent to deliver to the security men gives the pizzas to us instead.

Somtimes it is ugly, stupid, and horrific: a young man frantically tries to stop the blood pouring from his friend’s head, shot dead on the streets of Genoa.

It is also a movement of untold stories.

So this magazine is not a critique of the global economy – plenty of other NI’s have been. It’s not even a description of solutions – you’ll have to wait for our January issue for that.

In these pages you will simply find stories of people at the sharp end of corporate globalization, people who have found the hope, strength, and courage to organize themselves to resist.

This magazine wouldn’t exist if it wasn’t for the tireless, unsung efforts of people working for no reward except perhaps the sweet knowledge that they are in the right place, at the right time in history, doing the right thing.

This magazine is for them.

Katharine Ainger
for the New Internationalist Co-operative
kat@newint.org