The anti-globalization movement, or counter-globalisation movement, is critical of the globalization of corporate capitalism. The movement is also commonly referred to as the global justice movement,alter-globalization movement, anti-globalist movement, anti-corporate globalization movement, or movement against neoliberal globalization.

Participants base their criticisms on a number of related ideas. What is shared is that participants oppose what they see as large, multi-national corporations having unregulated political power, exercised through trade agreements and deregulated financial markets. Specifically, corporations are accused of seeking to maximize profit at the expense of sabotaging work safety conditions and standards, labor hiring and compensation standards, environmental conservation principles, and the integrity of national legislative authority, independence and sovereignty. Recent developments,^[vague] seen as unprecedented changes in the global economy, have been characterized as "turbo-capitalism" (Edward Luttwak), "market fundamentalism" (George Soros), "casino capitalism" (Susan Strange), "cancer-stage capitalism" (John McMurtry), and as "McWorld" (Benjamin Barber).

Johan Norberg (born 27 August 1973) is a Swedish author and historian, devoted to promoting economic globalization and liberal positions. He is arguably most known as the author of In Defense of Global Capitalism. Since March 15, 2007 he has been a senior fellow at the Cato Institute.

Johan Norberg was born in Stockholm, the son of former Swedish National Archivist Erik Norberg and his wife Birgitta. He grew up in the suburb of Hässelby in northern Stockholm. In his youth, Norberg was active as a left-anarchist but later abandoned those views and became a classical liberal. According to the biography given at his personal website, Norberg was disillusioned with the anarchist view of liberty when he discovered the collectivist themes in the major anarchist works, and was unable to sympathize with the pre-industrial society which its anarcho-primitivism promoted. This realization made him embrace classical liberalism, which he felt "took freedom seriously". He studied at Stockholm University from 1992 to 1999 and earned a M.A. with a major in the history of ideas. His other subjects included philosophy, literature and political science. During his time at Stockholm University he was active in the libertarian network Frihetsfronten ("the Liberty Front") and was the editor of its journal Nyliberalen ("The Neoliberal"/"The Libertarian") from 1993 to 1997.

Takis Fotopoulos (Τάκης Φωτόπουλος) (born October 14, 1940) is a political philosopher and economist who founded the inclusive democracy movement. He is noted for his synthesis of classical democracy with libertarian socialism and the radical currents in the new social movements. He was an academic, and has written many books and over 900 articles, several of which have been translated into various languages. He is the editor of The International Journal of Inclusive Democracy (which succeeded Democracy & Nature) and author of Towards An Inclusive Democracy in which the foundations of the inclusive democracy project were set. Fotopoulos is Greek and lives in London.

Fotopoulos was born in the Greek island of Chios and his family moved to Athens soon afterwards. After earning degrees in Economics and Political Science and in Law from the University of Athens, he moved to London in 1966 for postgraduate study at the London School of Economics on a Varvaressos scholarship from Athens University. He was a student syndicalist and activist in Athens and then a political activist in London, taking an active part in the 1968 student movement in London, as well as in organisations of the revolutionary Greek Left during the struggle against the military junta in Greece (1967–74). During this period, he was a member of the Revolutionary Socialist Groups in London, which published the newspaper Μαμή ("Midwife", from the Marxian dictum, "violence is the midwife of revolution"), for which he wrote several articles.

Naomi Klein (born May 8, 1970) is a Canadian author and social activist known for her political analyses and criticism of corporate globalization.

Klein was born in Montreal, Quebec, and brought up in a Jewish family with a history of peace activism. Her parents had moved to Montreal from the U.S. in 1967 as war resisters to the Vietnam War. Her mother, documentary film-maker Bonnie Sherr Klein, is best known for her anti-pornography film Not a Love Story. Her father, Michael Klein, is a physician and a member of Physicians for Social Responsibility. Her brother, Seth Klein, is director of the British Columbia office of the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives.

Her paternal grandparents were communists who began to turn against the Soviet Union after the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact and had abandoned communism by 1956. In 1942 her grandfather Phil Klein, an animator at Disney, was fired after the Disney animators' strike, and went to work at a shipyard instead. Klein's father grew up surrounded by ideas of social justice and racial equality, but found it "difficult and frightening to be the child of Communists", a so-called red diaper baby.

Cindy Milstein is an anarchistactivist and educator who talks at various anarchist and socialist gatherings. One such talk was the very informal but in-depth class, "Anarchism 101" at the National Conference on Organized Resistance, at the American University in Washington DC, in 2003 and 2004. (See the NCOR Web site for other talks by Milstein each year, including in the new Radical Theory Track.) Milstein's presentation covers the philosophical roots of anarchism and its evolution to the present, including pre-anarchist ideas of liberty, the anarchist-communist split, and a number of different anarchist philosophies, among other things.

She has also been involved with the Institute for Social Ecology, and is currently a board member with the Institute for Anarchist Studies and a co-organizer of the Renewing the Anarchist Tradition conference. Milstein speaks regularly in public, at anarchist conferences and bookfairs as well as radical spaces, including the Finding Our Roots conference, the Unschooling Oppression conference, the Montreal Anarchist Bookfair, the Bay Area Bookfair, the New York Anarchist Book Fair, and Left Forum, among others. She most recently worked to help organize A New World from Below: An Anarchist & Antiauthoritarian Convergence at the 2010 United States Social Forum in Detroit, Michigan. Her essays are published in several recent anthologies--"Anarchism and Its Aspirations" (AK Press, 2010), "Realizing the Impossible: Art against Authority (AK Press, 2007), Globalize Liberation (City Lights, 2004), Confronting Capitalism (Soft Skull, 2004), and Only a Beginning (Arsenal Pulp Press, 2004) as well as on the Free Society Collective Web site. She is also a collective member of the all-volunteer Black Sheep Books in Montpelier, Vermont.