The political revival of the anti-war movement after 9/11 launched a controversial debate on global resistance and inspired conceptualizations of a global political collective dedicated to resistance against war. Liberal cosmopolitans characterize the movement as a consensual force of opposition against war in the form of global civil society acting on the basis of ‘universally’ shared values. Radical poststructuralists consider it a preliminary example of the Multitude, waging ‘a war against war’ as a global body of opposition. On the contrary, the state-centric approach argues that global and symbolic forms of resistance lack strategic engagement and escape power in the ‘post-political’ struggle. All three theoretical approaches are problematic due to their failure to engage with the existing anti-war movement. By establishing a dialogue between the metatheories and micropolitics of resistance, the paper evaluates the theories critically from the perspective of ‘critical theory in political practice’, developing them further through an empirical case study. It shows that the theories often resort to a dualistic ‘either-or’ logic in conceptualizing power, effective strategies and primary context of resistance which represents a diversion from the understandings held within the movement where analyses and conceptions are often overlapping and mixed. The paper introduces a ‘both-and’ approach that not only reflects more accurately the way in which the relationship between the local and global–and many other concepts as well–are conceived within the movement and but provides also a more productive perspective for conceptualizing power and resistance in the context of social movements generally. While revealing many political conflicts and power struggles within the movement, it shows that theories fail to take the politics of resistance into account in conceptualizing the Multitude and global civil society as consensual global collectives. Transforming the movement into something permanent and global is an extremely challenging endeavour, one that cannot be established ‘from above’.
