ABSTRACT
The 1999 protest events in Seattle made the American and global publics aware of the existence of a mass movement which, after years of social and political tranquillity, was again challenging not only specifi c policy choices, but also the dominant model of societal development. If in the 1980s social movements had been described as increasingly institutionalized, preferring lobbying to protest, at the turn of the millennium street politics again became visible – and concurrently, so did the interactions between protesters and police forces.
