The more than 1,000 activists who gathered at Columbia University on Thursday and Friday for a "countersummit" to the World Economic Forum seem, for the most part, to agree: rumours of the "anti-globalization" movement's demise (or at least the closure of its US branch office) are greatly exaggerated.

According to one National Post column's headline from December, the events of September 11 mean that "Anti-globalization's time is past". The author likened the late-90s coagulation of a rich-world anti-globalization protest movement to the glomming-together of the liquid metal robot in Terminator II. The headline expresses a belief - or maybe just a hope - that many in the North American media have repeated ever since the two World Trade Center towers fell: that after September 11 the wind might have gone out of those pesky summit-hopping protestors' sails altogether.

It’s true that after September 11, there were signs that the misnamed "anti-globalization" movement was not in the best of shape, at least in the United States.

"We felt that protest would hurt the cause," says Jacob Harold, organizing director of Citizen Works, a group founded last year by Ralph Nader which hopes to "strengthen citizen participation in [the] power" by bringing together activists of all stripes to fight it. “There was this strange, weird, temporary burst of patriotism. We thought would be really set back if we kept on.