Merely one of the many ways in which the world has changed since September 11 is that international policymakers seem more able to meet in relative peace.

In the two large meetings since the attacks - the World Trade Organisation conference in Doha, Qatar, and the International Monetary Fund and World Bank meetings in Ottawa, Canada - the large crowds of demonstrators against the institutions, and economic liberalisation in general, have been sharply diminished. A mere two or three thousand protestors attended the Ottawa summit, mostly Canadians and many with local, rather than global, concerns.

Leaders of the globalisation protests - first evident on a large scale, at least in the northern hemisphere, at the WTO meeting at Seattle in November 1999 - insist that the issues which brought the protests into existence are now more relevant than ever. With renewed interest among rich country governments in development issues, this seems a fair conclusion. But whether the appetite remains for the tactics of physical confrontation with the authorities and the police, particularly in view of the violence which greeted meetings this year in Gothenburg, Quebec City and Genoa, remains a more difficult question.

The nature of "The Movement", as the loose coalition of organisations and individuals with concerns about economic liberalisation and globalisation is sometimes known, precludes sweeping generalisations about what its members believe. They have an overlapping set of arguments about free trade, poverty, privatisation and environmental concerns.

The way that the protests are organised, on an ad hoc basis with different groups taking responsibility for different functions, also precludes easy categorisation and a single message coming out. But broadly, the protestors oppose what they see as the rise of the power of corporations at the expense of consumers and governments, and the spread of market forces and open markets around the world.

The problems for the Movement have arisen when this rather broad-brush critique comes up against a sharply reduced appetite since September 11 for fundamental attacks on the values underlying the US and other western industrialised countries. Susan George, the vice-president of the Paris-based Attac organisation, which campaigns for more regulation on international capital flows, says that she was repeatedly contacted by journalists in the wake of the September 11 attacks, wanting to know whether criticisms of American values would render her organisation unpopular. She says: "Eventually, I snapped and said that I was brought up with American values and there is nothing in my views that has changed or should change as a result of September 11."

But the links have been made between the views held by the Movement and the complete rejection of Americanism in all its forms - political, cultural and economic - which inspired the attacks. Clare Short, the outspoken UK development secretary, recently said that the protestors and those behind the September 11 attacks had at least one similar aim - to reduce world trade.

And the onset of a global economic slowdown, if not a full-scale recession, seems to have created a feeling that rejecting the system in its entirety is something of a luxury. The recent agreement on a trade deal at the WTO owed at least something, according to many observers, to a feeling that countries were better off sticking together than rocking the boat in the face of a global slowdown.

Ms George, among others, says there are opportunities as well as threats for organisations like hers from the heightened consciousness of global interdependence since the attacks. She cites the clampdown on terrorist finance since September 11 as an example of how the US administration can do a complete U-turn on issues such as tax havens and offshore financial centres when it realises how they affect domestic security and concerns.

The apparent renewed interest in development issues among policymakers - UK chancellor Gordon Brown's recent headline-grabbing call for $50bn more development aid a year is an example - seem to suggest that Ms George may be right. But there may be limited potential for the Movement to transform itself into a narrow, focused organisation like the astonishingly successful Jubilee 2000 and Drop the Debt campaigns to take advantage of this and push forward with specific issues.

There seems little appetite, or even capability, within the Movement itself to become a set of permanent lobbyists, in the mode of the more established non-governmental organisations (NGOs) like Save the Children or the Catholic aid agency Cafod.

For one thing, members of the Movement point out that, contrary to popular belief, the pre-September 11 protests were a set of ad hoc events with a shifting membership, rather than a travelling circus of the same people each time with the same concerns . "Very few people could ever afford to summit-hop," says Matt Smucker, a volunteer with the well-known US group the Mobilization for Global Justice. "That is a media myth."Such loose organisation makes it hard for the Movement to change direction as a whole.

Second, members of the Movement appear to be temperamentally opposed to restricting themselves to the traditional routes of dialogue and persuasion.

"We don't think we will get change through convincing the World Bank they are wrong," says Soren Ambrose from the Fifty Years is Enough Network, which campaigns for radical reform of the IMF and World Bank. "We hope to reach out to a wider audience rather than hear a promise for yet another set of 'World Bank reforms'."