Title: A Model for Homeland Defence? The Policing of Alter-Globalist Protests and the Contingency of Power Relations

The emergence of protest events at the sites of transnational summits, meetings and Ministerials has become a primary security dilemma for police forces in locations where such elites choose to meet: Seattle, Genoa, Gleneagles and Heiligendamm. In particular, the prevention of any disruption to political proceedings is a key task facing such police forces. This article considers how such security strategies unfold and encounter significant limitation, making specific reference to the Miami protest against the proposed, and subsequently frozen, Free Trade Area of the Americas (FTAA) agreement between November 19 and 23 2003, in which a corpus of temporary laws criminalising activist behaviour, and the use of “less-than-lethal” weapons incapacitated activists. Taking an approach that draws from a Foucauldian “analytics” of power, efforts to repress activist behaviour, even in such oppressive climates as Miami in November 2003, are always confronted by moments of profound impotence, in which their absence of public legitimacy is exposed through creative forms of resistance among those afflicted. Consequently, these security strategies run into limits, and are always disrupted by contingencies, opening up prospects for critical forms of resistance.