We have focused on Clayoquot precisely because it puts the contemporary ontology of the political at issue. That ontology presumes sovereign identities. It takes for granted that people are normally and naturally "individuals" and that "individuals" have to be reduced to order by sovereign authority. "Sovereignty-thinking" has many variants, but in all its forms it presents sovereignty as both problem and solution: problem in the sense that sovereign individuals, sovereign states, and indeed sovereign desires are always at odds with one another, always in a form of strife that demands resolution; solution in the sense that sovereignty at some other level-of the individual over his/her desires, of the state over individuals, of global governance over states-appears as the only possible resolution. The problem/solution of sovereignty appears eternal, always there to haunt us. No amount of empirical evidence will make it go away, because this supposed "fact" about the world is not a fact at all: It is as pre-supposition, a pre-supposition that enables us to make sense of the world, to identify "facts," to order them in certain ways, to test them, and to orient ourselves accordingly. That the world is a world of sovereign identities is an assumption that we make before we go looking for "facts" or start developing theories that tell us which facts to look for and how to test them.

We have tried to tell the stories of Clayoquot in a way that puts sovereignty-thinking at issue: that makes us doubt whether people have singular identities, places have singular locations, problems have singular dimensions, or politics has a singular guise. Clayoquot appeals to us as a site of analysis precisely because it eludes us. We cannot reduce its stories to one or represent "it" (what? the place, the story, the problem, the solution, the politics?) as a singularity. Clayoquot defies and disturbs our own recourse to sovereignty-thinking.

One insistent question, is "Why Clayoquot? What's so special about this place or this set of problems or this sequence of events?" (Note the presumption of singularity.) When we try to answer this question, we can only do so by means that trouble the question itself. Let us illustrate this. Writing in a BC context, we are acutely aware that there have been many struggles about forestry in the province, struggles that have pitted environmentalists against logging companies, natives with and against both, small towns against distant authorities, and so on. Among all these struggles, what makes Clayoquot stand out? Is the selection of Clayoquot purely arbitrary? The only answer that we can give to that question is that what had become a typical struggle in BC (and indeed in other parts of the Pacific Northwest) changed its dimensions at Clayoquot. Or, the "global" character of these struggles became manifest in ways that had not been so apparent before. That the struggle was in BC, rather than Washington, Oregon, or California was important, for BC/Canada was too "small," both as a market and as a state to contain the struggle effectively. The environmentalists especially, but also other participants in the struggle, discovered that there was a political space other than the space of Canada/BC. They could act (and indeed had to act) in that space. What that space was, whether in fact it was a single space or many, was to be discovered. It became clear all round that the political space of the global market (and of the various regions of that market: especially the United States and the European Union) and the political space of the global media (again, regionally articulated) were important: in some ways decisive. Not to be there politically was to risk defeat at the hands of one's opponents. Some of the surprise/interest of Clayoquot lies precisely in the apparent effectiveness of the environmentalists (and to a lesser extent Native activists) in operating in these spaces that are evidently "other" than the space of the nation-state. Clayoquot shows us something interesting about the way that these various spaces are configured in relation to one another.

Some would say that the most obvious feature of Clayoquot is that it is so comfortably situated in the First World. Many of the other struggles with superficially similar features (forests at issue, environmental activism, native land claims, etc.) are in what we used to (still?) call the Third World, and many of those struggles have featured a level of violence, environmental degradation, and abuse of human rights not seen at Clayoquot (or elsewhere in the OECD countries). So, why focus on Clayoquot if we wish to see politics in new ways? Part of the rationale is this: When Westerners write about the Third World they almost inevitably slide back into a series of familiar assumptions about the savagery and poverty of the world "out there" beyond the "civilized" corner of the world where they (and their readers) live. Conscious as we are of this problem, we are not at all confident that we, our contributors, or our readers are capable of avoiding it altogether. Our strategy has been to focus on a site close to "home" where issues of colonialism and colonial exploitation are nonetheless visible. Clayoquot is such a place, as was revealed by the effects that the colonial past had on the shape of its politics. Much as the struggles at Clayoquot politicized global markets and global media, forcing actors to engage on that terrain, the presence of colonialism politicized spaces of knowledge, history, identity, community, and science, forcing all actors-local residents, environmentalists, logging companies, the provincial government-to engage with the relations of power embedded in these sources of authority. We might have anticipated histories of colonialism to politicize these sources of authority in Africa, India, or other more widely recognized "post-colonial" political spaces. But Canada? The impact of its colonial past on events in Clayoquot surprised not only observers from far away, but the residents of the region itself. The struggles at Clayoquot politicized relationships in the region in ways that could not be understood without reference to and understanding of this past. The region was thus redefined in the minds of inhabitants (as well as observers) as a post-colonial political space. The future of the region will be developed in and through negotiations over what this means.

Moreover, Clayoquot is a place where other issues familiar to readers in the Western world are also apparent: issues arising from the shift toward a post-industrial economy, changes in the relation between urban and rural, changes in assumptions about gender roles and gender identities, challenges to standard scientific method, demands for democratization, and so on. Clayoquot is a little exotic for a reader in New York or London or Frankfurt, but not so exotic that it can be imagined as a place outside what for him or her is a familiar world. The problems/solutions are more-or-less familiar, the politics of a type that can be related to what is happening at "home". The there there is not something that can be so easily shoved aside as a problem for "them," those unfortunate people on the other side of the world who lack "our" advantages. Clayoquot is in Canada after all, and (as the current Prime Minister, Jean Chrétien, never ceases to remind Canadian electors) Canada rates first on the United Nations' Human Development Index. If there is any place where things should work out well, it is a place like Clayoquot.

We have tried to show that things have not worked out all that "well" at Clayoquot: that the apparent successes have concealed many failures, that the place remains deeply problematic, that the difficulty of responding well to its challenges is no less than it ever was. In doing so, we have been trying to expose the fact that there is no "sovereign solution" for Clayoquot, or indeed for anywhere else. To return briefly to the environmental campaign, it should be obvious that a shift in the locus of "sovereign resolution" from the Canadian state to the global market or to global public opinion is no victory in itself. Environmentalists and others are wise to recognize that they cannot succeed politically if they confine themselves to state-spaces, but they should be (and usually are) under no illusion that other spaces like the market, are configured democratically. If the new politics is a matter of begging at the door of share-holders' meetings or leafleting outside Home Depot or Walmart, so be it; but this is no gain to be welcomed, only a reality to be negotiated. Precisely because Clayoquot is a hopeful sort of place, a place where the new politics (as frequently conceived) has been practiced for some time quite effectively, it may work as a reminder to us that the new politics (if that's what it is) is no easier than the old. If anything, that new politics is more difficult and less promising than what we have come to take for granted.

Since the struggles at Clayoquot hit the headlines in 1993, the forms of politics that Clayoquot seems to represent have become much more widely recognized. This recognition was most obviously expressed in reactions to the "Battle in Seattle": the protests against the WTO in December of 1999. (It was something of a comfort to us, as editors, when we noticed how many of the Clayoquot activists were "there" in Seattle, carrying on their struggle in that forum, confirming by their presence a certain lineage between Seattle and Clayoquot, as there was between Clayoquot and the Redwood Summer or Greenham Common.) What was perhaps most notable in debates about the significance of "Seattle," though, was the reproduction of a familiar set of assumptions about the way events there should be understood politically. Either "Seattle" marked a turning point for politics-the emergence of a global civil society capable of contesting institutions of global governance like the WTO-or it was a "flash in the pan"-only revealing the limitation of political space afforded by the mobile character of these institutions. Either it was a resounding defeat of the creeping authoritarianism of globalization, or it was irrelevant, in the sense that the failure of the WTO negotiations had much more to do with disagreements among governments than with anything that related to the protests in the streets. Either it marked the extension of democracy into the global arena, or it exposed the lack of democracy inherent in social movement activism. Either it had revealed the potential of the Internet as a medium through which alliances of "unity without uniformity" might be formed, or it had highlighted the long?term unsustainability of such alliances. Either institutions like the WTO will now move towards greater democratization, or global governance will be only slightly troubled by the protests and retain all its present characteristics. In short, either "Seattle" is the dawn of "new" politics, or a variation on the "old"; either the state continues to be the frame for democratic politics, or we now have a "global" civil society; either nothing has changed, or everything. Occasionally, of course, there have been those who have sought to avoid the absolutes: perhaps there is something new here, but it is at best a tenuous variation on the old, worthy of equal parts celebration and caution.

The question that was rarely posed is the question we sought to raise in relation to Clayoquot: not, is this new politics or is it old, but what is the political here? What does this site-this particular configuration of events, actors, discourses, representations, strategies, identities-enable us to see about the political that we couldn't see at more familiar sites? What can we tease out from it that might enable us to disrupt the assumptions about the political (including those about novelty and political change) imposed by the ontology of sovereignty? What are the implications of the difference in our question? Consider, for example, how we would misunderstand the politics of Clayoquot if we were to attend to the blockades-their character, participants, "success" or "failure"-as the primary locus of the political in Clayoquot. We would miss the ways in which the struggles at Clayoquot, the very possibilities for its future, were configured not only-or even primarily-through democratic protest against a sovereign authority, but through the constitution of non?territorial communities, the politicization of consumption, the recognition of complex identities, the development and effects of new economies, the politicization of science, the mobilization of ideologies and imaginaries, the creative deployment of images, the redefinition of political authority, the micropolitics of management discourse, and so on. While in retrospect Clayoquot and Seattle may, or may not, come to seem like telling moments in the development of something significantly novel, it is much more important to engage with them as sites that enable us to explore the complex political practices that shape our possibilities today. Engaged in this way, rather than fixed in assumptions about old and new, winners and losers, local and global, singular event and determinate structure, they might allow us to open up and renegotiate terrains of politics through which identities, communities, possibilities, natures, authorities, economies, "realities," are being produced, reproduced and lived.

The contributors to this book have sought to produce narratives that disrupt, that politicize, our sense of the political. (Naomi Klein, Judith Butler, Ernesto Laclau, and Slavoj Zizek had similar ambitions.) The challenge we all face is to create and explore lines of connection amongst our politicizations, to provoke not only new explorations into the character of the political, but more effective engagement with the sites and practices of politics through which future possibilities are being shaped.

We began with a Clayoquot that caught our imagination: a small, dynamic, engaged community seeking to seize some control over its surroundings, its economy, its future. It seemed an ideal that fitted well within a certain democratic imaginary, one that should have found expression through familiar channels of democracy and governance. As we have tried to show, the events that followed were marked by complicated struggles, ones that far exceeded any such understanding of the political. The crucial point is not just that these struggles created a new set of political spaces-as we know, science, economies, communities, identities, representations are always potentially political-but that in these struggles such spaces were politicized, and became explicit terrains through which the communities' futures were negotiated. This conclusion does not sit comfortably with the democratic imaginary that inspired us. This is not necessarily cause for despair, or celebration, but it does highlight the many challenges-theoretical, practical, analytical, administrative-of rethinking the legacies of modern democracy. As seems to be the case in so many other places, responding to these challenges requires a more sustained engagement with the problem of the political.