Four weeks ago, Kevin Danaher was one of a group of activists preparing for a march on Wall Street.

Danaher and other anti-globalisation protesters across the US were emailing each other that Monday morning with ideas for a mass demonstration in New York's financial centre.

Using the now well-honed tactics of human blockades, banner hangs and street theatre, while also turning a blind eye to a spot of strategically placed vandalism, they were preparing for a global day of action aimed at the bastions of capitalism to coincide with the World Trade Organisation meeting in Doha, Qatar, on November 9.

The protests, they hoped, would be larger, more ambitious and more widespread than anything anti-globalisation activists had tried before. They would involve people across the world in what Danaher liked to call "a dress rehearsal for the world's first general strike". On the US east coast, the target was to be the New York stock exchange.

Less than a month later, such plans seem to hail from another, more innocent, age. After the deadly events of Tuesday September 11, the new protest movement has gone quiet. It has dropped the language of confrontation, replacing it with condemnation and condolence. Grand plans, such as the Wall Street march, have been abandoned.

Danaher, one of the founders of Global Exchange and a rapid-fire, deep baritone voice of American anti-globalisation, says: "The movement is shifting into educational mode. The activists in New York are going to change their entire tactical approach. There are not going to be militant street protests. There are going to be teach-ins and candlelit vigils."

On the morning the hijackers launched their attack on New York, anti-globalisation activism was riding high.

The demonstrations planned for the last weekend in September were set to attract well over 50,000 people and disrupt, if not derail, the annual meeting of the World Bank and International Monetary Fund. Organisers were expecting so many people flocking to Washington they confidently predicted that they would encircle the White House, besieging the Bush administration with a ring of human protest.

Immediately after the attacks, such activism was silenced. The World Bank/IMF demonstrations planned for Washington were abandoned. True, a smaller, but still sizeable, number gathered for a global peace march. But Robert Weissman, a tall, gaunt disciple of Ralph Nader, was one of the team at the Mobilisation for Global Justice who had been co-ordinating the protests over the summer and then saw things come to a sudden halt. The frenzy of press briefings and logistics meetings in Washington church basements and suburban Virginia homes gave way to a quiet bewilderment. He explains: "We are all a footnote right now."

The movement has come to a stop. In public, activists say this is just a respectful pause. In private, however, some campaigners are asking whether the anti-globalisation movement itself will prove to be a victim of the attacks on America.

On the morning of the hijackings, the FT had just begun a four-part series, titled The Children of Globalisation Strike Back. The following three instalments were held over. Originally, the FT had concluded that the movement was a Fifth Estate. It was a movement of movements, an unruly, unregulated and unaccountable check on corporations, politicians and the institutions of democracy. It was powerful but, in its existing form, would never be in power.

The movement's momentum disguised a diversity of interests. It covered over cracks in the coalition. And it allowed for the absence of both leadership and a cogent philosophy to inspire followship. Hypothetically, the original series had suggested in a throwaway line that the movement could be derailed by a global recession or a war. But the one cer