ABSTRACT
As the 20th century gave way to the 21st, the established, state-centric, international institutions of global governance faced a new rebellion and, potentially, a revolution from the streets. The 25 000 protestors at the 1999 ministerial meeting of the World Trade Organization (WTO) in Seattle, followed by the 250 000 protestors at the G8's 2001 Genoa Summit, dramatically demonstrated civil society's fervent rejection of the old order and its firm demand for greater democratic influence and participation in the international institutions linking economic, environmental, and social concerns. The protestors at the Quebec City Summit of the Americas in April 2001 (whose number has been estimated between 20 000 and 60 000), and the many thousands in Calgary for the G8's June 2002 Kananaskis Summit and in the vicinity of the June 2003 Evian Summit, showed that Canadians, as well as Americans and Europeans, were equally engaged in this cause and that both governors and civil society activists could move beyond violent confrontation toward civil dialogue and creative responses to the new challenges they faced together. Yet the September 11 terrorist attacks on America, and the new concern with national security that followed, led to a diminished civil society presence at some global governance conferences (although not others such as the WTO ministerial meeting in Cancun in September 2003). Indeed, at the U.S.-hosted G8 Summit in Sea Island, Georgia, in June 2004, civil society had virtually disappeared.
