Social Forum Process Research Articles

Reflecting the Nepali Social Forum processes and 2018 event

ABSTRACTThis article reflects on one experiment that grounds the politics of World Social Forum in national and regional struggles. Nepal has now built a dynamic but fragile democratic process after a decade long Maoist insurgency that led to political transformation including secularism, republicanism, etc. The analysis is particularly relevant for political movements seeking ways forward in a political situation marked by sectarian struggles but also by the need to bring unity in the struggle against externally induced forces of oppression and exploitation.

Anarchism in the Web of Transnational Social Movements

Anarchists have played a visible and significant role in global civil society since the 19th century and in the New Global Left since it emerged in the 1990s. Horizontalism and social libertarianism have been central components of the contemporary World Revolution and were also important in the world revolutions of 1968 and 1989. Anarchists have participated in the Social Forum process at the global, national and local levels and, in various ways, have influenced the contemporary world revolution far beyond their numbers. We use surveys from Social Forums to examine how self-identified actively involved anarchists are similar or different from other attendees. We also conduct a formal network analysis to examine the links that the anarchists have with other social movement themes. Despite the small number of self-identified anarchists, our findings suggest that anarchist organizational approaches and political values are widely shared among the activists who have been involved in the Social Forum process.

Forging a Diagonal Instrument for the Global Left: The Vessel

This article takes up Samir Amin’s challenge to rethink the issue of global political organization by proposing the building of a diagonal political organization for the Global Left that would link local, national and world regional and global networks and prefigurational communities to coordinate contention for power in the world-system during the next few decades of the 21st century. The World Social Forum (WSF) process needs to be reinvented for the current period of rising neo-fascist and populist reactionary nationalism and to foster the emergence of a capable instrument that can confront and contend with the global power structure of world capitalism and aid local and national struggles. This will involve overcoming the fragmentation of progressive movements that have been an outcome of the rise of possessive individualism, the precariat, and social media. We propose a holistic approach to organizing a vessel for the global left based on struggles for climate justice, human rights, anti-racism, queer rights, feminism, sharing networks, peace alliances, taking back the city, progressive nationalism and confronting and defeating neo-fascism and new forms of conservative populism.

Needed: A New International for a Just Transition and Against Fascism

Mestrum draws from her extensive experience in the World Social Forum process to outline some of the reasons for past failures of left struggles to come together around the kind of fifth Internationale Amin proposes. A new Internationale, she argues “will require some serious and honest self-criticism and a downright rejection of all romanticism and naive utopianism…. we have to look for solutions beyond the easy slogans and assumptions.” Mestrum identifies important structural and ideological rifts in the global left. She is also wary of localized movements such as those advocated by Sklair, fearing that they could detract from the left’s ability to coalesce around a strong structural critique of globalized capitalism. What she sees as essential is the construction of “alter-globalist” identities and solidarity across issues and borders. This will require moving beyond abstract “anti-capitalist” ideology to build inter-connected campaigns that tackle the complex inter-connections among movement struggles. While cautioning against slogans, she sees lasting wisdom in Enlightenment principles of freedom, equality, and solidarity and modernity’s respect for universalism and diversity. These can help advance a politics of system change that is “emancipatory and transformative, geared towards the full realisation of individual and collective human rights for all.”

Truncated 21st-Century Trajectories of Progressive International Solidarity

Patrick Bond provides a biography of Amin’s work as a global political thinker and leader on the left. From his early days building the Third World Forum and establishing “origins of a South-centric organic intelligentsia with global visions” to his work with the World Social Forum process, Amin dedicated his life to trying to lay the foundations for a Fifth International. Bond notes Amin’s frustration with the extreme fragmentation and limited policy impacts of left struggles. Yet he points out some recent exceptions here in the successes of global South campaigns around the right to water, access to medicines and the right to health, and Via Campesina and MST’s success in building global resistance to corporate land grabbing.

Forum on Samir Amin's Proposal for a New International of Workers and People

Amin argues that “[w]e are now in the phase of the ‘autumn of capitalism’ without this being strengthened by the emergence of ‘the people’s spring’ and a socialist perspective. …There is no alternative other than that enabled by a renewal of the international radical left, capable of carrying out—and not just imagining—socialist advances.” What is needed is “the lucid and organized intervention of the international front of the workers and the peoples.” He proposes the establishment of a “new Internationale” that consists of “an Organization… and not just a ‘movement’” or discussion forum (such as the World Social Forum process). Such an Internationale should draw from experiences of previous worker Internationales, and seek to apply lessons from this history to the current context.

Forging a diagonal instrument for the global left: the vessel

ABSTRACTThis article takes up Samir Amin’s challenge to rethink the issue of global political organization by proposing the building of a diagonal political organization for the Global Left that would link local, national and world regional and global networks and prefigurational communities to coordinate contention for power in the world-system during the next few decades of the 21st century. The World Social Forum (WSF) process needs to be reinvented for the current period of rising neo-fascist and populist reactionary nationalism and to foster the emergence of a capable instrument that can confront and contend with the global power structure of world capitalism and aid local and national struggles. This will involve overcoming the fragmentation of progressive movements that have been an outcome of the rise of possessive individualism, the precariat, and social media. We propose a holistic approach to organizing a vessel for the global left based on struggles for climate justice, human rights, anti-racism, queer rights, feminism, sharing networks, peace alliances, taking back the city, progressive nationalism and confronting and defeating neo-fascism and new forms of conservative populism.

Building democratic public spheres? Transnational advocacy networks and the social forum process

AbstractWhat, if anything, can transnational advocacy networks (TANs) contribute to the democratization of public spheres outside Westphalian frameworks? On the one hand, TANs excel at turning international public campaigns into political influence – connecting people and power across borders. On the other hand, the increasingly policy‐orientated nature of TANs raises questions about their legitimacy in speaking on behalf of multiple publics. In this article, I suggest that a TAN's success in ensuring the political efficacy of public spheres, while at the same time undermining their normative legitimacy, reflects two sides of the same coin. This is a consequence of the recent internal professionalization of advocacy networks. Framing professionalization as a particular form of communicative distortion within TAN decision‐making, I suggest that networks should incorporate internal deliberative mechanisms, adapted from international social forums, to enhance the normative legitimacy of democratic public spheres.

Connecting the peripheries: networks, place and scale in the World Social Forum process

Communication technologies occupy a central place in contemporary theorizations of transnational social movement networks. Not only does the internet provide the technical infrastructure through which activists communicate and share information, increasing their capacity to introduce oppositional messages into the public realm (Castells); its network architecture is also closely linked to the organizational logic of contemporary social justice movements (Juris). While recognizing the fundamental importance of communication technologies for such movements, this article cautions against overly disembodied conceptions of transnational activist networks and highlights the need to pay attention to issues of place and scale, as well as the importance of affect in the construction of alternative global imaginaries. Through a case study of a small social forum event held in February 2010 in a poor urban community in the south of Brazil as part of the World Social Forum process, the article examines activists’ use of communication technologies to construct transnational networks between different place-based actors. It shows that these practices are not simply concerned with establishing links between already existing places; the creation of networks is also inextricably bound up with particular constructions of place. By engaging in a politics that is simultaneously place-based and global in scope, these actors challenge traditional conceptions of scale as well as dominant epistemological paradigms.

Movement Building and the United States Social Forum

Despite the growing academic literature on the World Social Forum process, few scholars have attempted to systematically analyze the social, cultural, and political impact of the forums. This has to do in part with the inherent difficulties of assessing movement consequences, which is particularly complicated for an activity geared toward creating ‘open spaces.’ This article presents an analytic framework for evaluating the impact of the social forums through an analysis of the 2010 United States Social Forum (USSF) in Detroit from the perspective of a local Boston-based delegation called the Boston Freedom Rides. We then use that framework to consider the impact of the 2010 USSF, bridging the academic literature on movement outcomes with activist perspectives. We make two related claims. First, the social forums, and the USSF in particular, should be viewed and their impact assessed in light of their generativity as ‘movement-building machines’: infrastructures designed for the production of social capital, networks, solidarities, meanings, frames, identities, knowledges, strategies, skills, and repertoires. Second, with respect to the Freedom Rides, the 2010 USSF contributed to movement building on multiple levels, but more so within rather than across movement sectors. Our goal is less to make a definitive argument about the impact of the 2010 USSF than to provide a helpful way of thinking about movement building as a social movement outcome, which can be applied and refined through further comparative and longitudinal research. We thus favor breadth over depth in outlining a broad framework for future inquiry.

The Global Social Forum Rhizome: A Theoretical Framework

This work draws on Deleuze and Guattari's image of the ‘rhizome’ to develop a framework for mapping and understanding the global social forum process and its implications for the broader global left. The image of the rhizome is insightful for analytically accentuating the nature and workings, as well as the challenges and contemporary shortcomings, of the social forum process and more generally the broader global movement(s). Thriving on multiplicity and thus lacking a dominant core or main axis, the social forum-as-rhizome emphasizes the multi-connectivity and heterogeneity of this process, which has no central actor, issue, strategy, or ideology, beyond the strong opposition to neoliberalism. While what I call the ‘Global Social Forum Rhizome’ allows for unprecedented connections as well as tempering and managing inherent antinomies of the alter-globalization movement(s), its logic simultaneously limits the degree of congealed and resilient movement building. In the final analysis, these intrinsic rhizomatic characteristics foster a rather thin articulation of commonalities and convergences, which result in a politics often unable to move beyond mere symbolic acts and resistances and towards organizing, campaigning, and concrete movement building. Este trabajo se inspira en la imagen del ‘rizoma’ de Deleuze y Guattari, para desarrollar un marco para representar y entender el proceso del Fórum Social Global y sus implicaciones para la más amplia izquierda global. La imagen del rizoma es reveladora, tanto para acentuar analíticamente la naturaleza y el funcionamiento, como los retos y las carencias contemporáneas del proceso del Fórum Social y en mayores rasgos, el(los) movimiento(s) global(es) más amplio(s). Creciendo en multiplicidad y por lo tanto carente de un núcleo dominante o de un eje principal, el Fórum Social como rizoma enfatiza la conectividad múltiple y la heterogeneidad de este proceso, que carece de un actor central, cuestión, estrategia o ideología, más allá de la fuerte oposición al neoliberalismo. Mientras lo que yo llamo el ‘Fórum Social Global del Rizoma’ tiene en cuenta a las conexiones sin precedente, como también atenuando y controlando las antinomias inherentes del(los) movimiento(s) de alterglobalización, su lógica limita simultáneamente el grado de congelación y tenacidad del desarrollo del movimiento. En el análisis final, estas características intrínsecas del rizoma fomentan una articulación bastante escasa de similitudes y convergencias, que resultan en una política frecuentemente incapaz de moverse más allá de actos meramente simbólicos y de resistencias y hacia la organización, las campañas y el desarrollo concreto del movimiento. 本文借鉴了德勒兹与瓜塔里的“块茎说”，发展出一种测绘和理解世界社会论坛进程及其对更广义全球左派的意义的框架。“块茎说”是解析社会论坛进程和更普遍、更广泛的全球运动的性质、运作、挑战和当前不足的真知灼见。作为块茎的社会论坛因多样性的繁荣导致其缺少主导的核心或主茎，强调多元连通和进程的异质性，除了强烈反对新自由主义外，社会论坛缺少核心行为体、议题、战略或意识形态。虽然我所谓的“全球社会论坛块茎”虑及前所未有的连通和对另立全球化运动的内在矛盾的调节和管理，其逻辑同时限制了静态和有弹性的组织建设。总而言之，这种内在的块茎特点致其共同点和交汇点甚少，导致了一种往往无法超越仅为象征的行动和反抗，无法开展组织、竞选和具体的运动建构的政治。 이 글은 지구적 사회포럼 과정과 그것이 전 세계 좌파에게 주는 함의를 찾아내고 또 이해하기 위한 틀을 발전시키기 위하여 드뢰즈와 카타리의 ‘리좀(rhizome)’ 이미지를 다룬다. 리좀의 이미지는 사회포럼 과정과 보다 일반적으로 더 광범위한 지구적 운동들의 성격과 작동뿐만 아니라 도전과 현재의 부족한 점을 분석적으로 강조하는데 있어서 통찰력을 제공한다. 다양성이 증진되면서 지배적인 중심이나 주축이 없는 리좀으로서의 사회포럼은 과정의 다연계성(multi-connectivity)과 이질성(heterogeneity)을 강조한다. 이 과정은 신자유주의에 대한 강력한 반대 이상으로 중심적인 행위자, 이슈, 전략 혹은 이데올로기가 없다. 내가 ‘지구적 사회포럼 리좀’이라고 부른 것은 대안 세계화 운동들의 내적인 자기모순을 완화시키고 관리할 뿐만 아니라 전대미문의 연계를 허용하지만, 그것의 논리는 동시에 응집되고 끈질긴 운동의 건설을 제약한다. 최종 분석에서 이러한 내적인 리좀의 특성들이 공통점과 수렴의 약한 절합을 촉진시키며, 때로 단순히 상징적인 행동과 저항을 넘어서 구체적인 운동을 조직하고 선전하는 쪽으로 나아가지 못하는 정치로 끝난다.

Alter-Globalization: Becoming Actors in the Global Age, by Geoffrey Pleyers

Geoffrey Pleyers Alter-Globalization: Becoming Actors in the Global Age, with a foreword by Alain Touraine. Polity Press: London, 2010, 272 pp: 9780745646763 16.99 [pounds sterling] (pbk) The alternative globalisation movement has long lost its once impressive media exposure, and has seen many of its prominent Western actors fragment or even entirely vanish from the agenda of social movement politics in the past few years. Yet the movement has survived and become increasingly active in numerous other geographies and venues of struggle, where its silent development has led to and maintained a healthy scholarly interest. Following important recent contributions to the literature by Graham Chesters and Ian Welsh (2006), and Paul Routledge and Andrew Cumbers (2009), in Alter-Globalization, Geoffrey Pleyers offers a new analysis of the movement that aims to grasp its unique composition on a conceptual level. In Alter-Globalization, Pleyers undertakes a difficult challenge, attempting to capture the specificities of the movement by constructing a dyadic framework. The theoretical contribution is built on an impressive research design, which, in Pleyers's own words, was produced by collecting material in '250 activist meetings, over 800 lectures and numerous actions', and through '152 semi-directed interviews' (p. 31). Pleyers's 11-year journey to witness the maturation of a multifaceted global movement becomes the backbone of the book, in which a plethora of activist voices, on-site analyses of the social forum processes and individual narratives from ali over the world come together to form an engaging oral history of the movement. As challenging as it may be in terms of its scope and its subject matter, Pleyers's theorisation of the movement rests on a simple categorisation between two poles. Pleyers argues that the movement should be conceived of as the amalgamation of two distinct modes of organisation and conceptualisation of social change. He defines these two approaches as the 'way of subjectivity' and the 'way of reason'. The former is understood as the approach adopted by mostly non-affiliated activists or autonomous groups that prioritise transformation in everyday life through radical reconsideration of social relations. The latter, on the other hand, captures a form of 'institutional activism' which brings intellectuals, 'ordinary citizens' and issue-oriented NGOS to challenge established channels of policy-making by means of lobbying, campaigning and debunking the orthodoxies of global governance. According to Pleyers, these two poles are based on different visions of 'another world', and they produce distinct methodologies and forms of action. While the way of subjectivity is taken up by those who are disillusioned with traditional social movement politics, and by activists who attempt to create 'spaces of experience' by building non-hierarchical, horizontal networks, the way of reason provides 'spaces of expertise' which 'aim to produce rational arguments in order to reinforce active citizenship' (p. 178). Put simply, Pleyers's framework is an elaborate reconstruction of the horizontalism/verticalism debate (see De Angelis, 2004; Nunes, 2005), but it also enhances the boundaries of contention by bringing other questions into the equation. The book is divided into four parts in which Pleyers unpacks his formula by dissecting various manifestations of the movement around the world. The main contribution of the book is offered in parts 2, 3 and 4 where detailed analyses of the aforementioned approaches and their convergence within the movement are presented. Starting with the way of subjectivity, Pleyers carefully builds his narrative by entering into a dialogue with Zapatistas, piqueteros and various other autonomous struggles, which aim to organise 'places sufficiently autonomous and distanced from capitalist society' (p. 39, emphasis in original). While, unsurprisingly, Zapatismo is portrayed as a major influence for the activists of the way of subjectivity, Pleyers refrains from romanticisation, and remains sensitive to the shortcomings and limitations of 'spaces of experience'. …

Politics of cosmopolitan citizenship: the Korean engagement in the global justice movements

This article explains why and how the Korean social movements engage in the Global Justice Movement (GJM). We believe that Korean social movements gradually developed consciousness of cosmopolitan citizenship through engaging in the GJM. We found that international opportunities like the UN and World Social Forum processes, whether positive or negative, have forced Korean social movements to engage in the GJMs. Environmental and human rights movements (belonging to the ‘new social movements’) were increasingly disappointed with the UN process and focused on the GJM with changing the strategy from institutionalization to global campaigns or south-to-south collaboration. Labor and peasants movements (belonging to the ‘old social movements’) continue to struggle with developing sustained networks because of lack of the so-called ‘rooted cosmopolitans.’ Despite such differences, Korean civil society becomes more conscious of global justice as a new master frame to tackle neoliberal globalization within the future.

Building the Social Forum, Building Our Movement

The 2010 US Social Forum held in Detroit, Michigan, sought to participate in the international Social Forum process while simultaneously advancing the movement building practices in the host city. This essay highlights organizing strategies that Detroit organizers implemented, which included tours and work projects, locally led political actions with national significance, and holding space in the Detroit Local Organizing Committee. The essay contrasts the organizing strategies at the US Social Forum with the observations of local students at the 2011 World Social Forum who felt that its emphasis on the “global movement for change” drowned out local voices. The practical aspect of building a movement for social justice in the United States must deepen, connect, and expand existing motions toward justice. A movement is not a spontaneous phenomenon, but is built from time and energy invested in people and places. The theoretical aspect of an alternate economic system, a “socialism for the twenty-first century,” must build from the foundation of the people's current struggles for the economics of life: work, food, shelter, utilities, water, and so on. Social justice activists in the twenty-first century should take heed of these lessons.

Publikdragande namn eller aktivistermed drag i?

Crowd-pulling names or energetic activists? On symbolic capital as a power resource in the local organizational work within the global justice movementThe article explores the global emergence of local Social Forums by means of an ethnographic study of the organization of the Stockholm Social Forum. In international academic debate, the forums are often discussed as a “globalization from below” and a new deliberative democratic process. However, empirical research on the organizational process, and its power relations, has been very limited. The theoretical concept symbolic capital (Bourdieu) and concepts from conversation analysis (CA) are used to analyze how power in terms of priority of interpretation is constructed in conversations between activists with differing political backgrounds. A detailed empirical analysis is based on the case of an internal discussion about inviting keynote speakers to the local forum. The results show how transnational networks and specific knowledge about the global social forum process became symbolic capital in the organizational process. Holders of this specific form of symbolic capital gained priority of interpretation in the internal discussions. This had an impact on the practical outcome of the organizational process in terms of the symbolic framing of the Social Forum. It is argued that the social forum process produces specific forms of cultural distinctions, social hierarchies and patterns of exclusion.

Culture di democrazia partecipativa ed europeizzazione dal basso nei social forum italiani, britannici e tedeschi

Cultures of participatory democracy and from in the Italian, British and German Social Forums - To what extent can grassroots activists in different sectors of the global justice movements participate in transnational, Europe-wide social forum meetings held between larger protest events, transnational summits and everyday activism - not only dependent on structural, but also cultural patterns of communication and cooperation in movement groups? This question concerns students of European integration as well as thinkers of democracy beyond the nation state, and activists that seek to mobilize a critical discussion on the future of global and European politics. Social movement researchers and cultural sociologists have pointed to the practical challenges of participatory democracy in asymmetric networks composed of groups with pluralist cultural and material resources. Building on ethnographic data and interviews, this article looks at experiments in -deliberative talk-, or discursive democracy in national level social forum preparatory meetings in three different countries. The aim is to compare the challenges and opportunities of coalition building looking at organizational crisis and conflict in domestic social forum processes in Italy, Germany and the UK. This article shows that place-specific cultures of communication and cooperation in the national level social forum processes conditioned and restricted the quality of grassroots participation in the European assemblies and encounters of the ESF. Finally, the article shows that institutional brokerage helps facilitate transnational grassroots mobilization and a Europeanization from below in the case of the ESF process.

Build Locally, Link Globally: The Social Forum Process in Italy

Considered an innovation because of its capacity to develop transnational processes, the World Social Forum however also has strong local roots as well as effects on organizational models and collective identities at the domestic level. Focusing on the Italian case, this article shows how local social forums, as arenas for exchanges of ideas, played a cognitive role in the import, but also the translation of new ideas, as well as helping the emergence of dense network structures and tolerant identities. The first section of the article examines how local social forums contributed to innovation in the organizational formulas of the Global Justice Movement—considering both structure (organizations) and process (methodologies) aspects—through the development of different, more participatory conceptions of internal decision making. It then addresses the innovations in the definition of collective identities, stressing the linkages of local struggles and global framing as well as the development of a cross-issue discourse around an anti-neoliberal frame. The final section will discuss the contribution of local social forums to contemporary social movements, stressing the role of these new arenas for the cross-fertilization among different movement families and spreading a method of working together that becomes part of the repertoire of action of local social movement organizations. The empirical research consists mainly of in-depth interviews and focus groups with activists from social movement organizations which were involved in local social forums.

African Voices and Activists at the WSF in Nairobi: The Uncertain Ways of Transnational African Activism

Transnational social movement studies have long neglected the way activists from the South, and particularly from Africa, have participated in World Social Forum processes. Alterglobal activists have also been accused of neglecting or dominating southern voices. The organization of the WSF in Nairobi was seen as an opportunity to make African voices be heard. This examines how Africans activists participated in Nairobi, and the complex relationship they have to northern and other southern (such as Asia and Latin America) activists. The African alterglobal movement is seen as a space of tensions (i.e. between South Africans and the rest of the continent, between French and English speaking Africa, or between NGOs and more radical organizations) reflected in national mobilizations. Our team of 23 French and 12 Kenyan scholars made collective ethnographic observations in more than a hundred workshops and conducted 150 biographical interviews of African activists in order to examine how: Africa was referred to in the WSF; activists financed their trip to Nairobi; and Afrocentric, anti-imperialist, and anticolonial arguments have been used.

World Social Forum Activism in Belem and Beyond

A young man dressed as a clown shelters under our umbrella in the center of Belém in the downpour before the opening march begins while a group of people with painted bodies and feathered headdresses chant and charge up the middle as thousands of marchers push apart to let them pass to the front. The words “save the Amazon” are spelled out with human bodies. Union members are present in force, all donning shirts with their syndicate’s name and logo. All these scenes are just a small part of the kaleidoscope of images that are the World Social Forum in 2009. But what do they mean; and what does this most recent manifestation of the World Social Forum process tell us about this nine-year struggle to define an alternative vision to global neo-liberal capitalism? This article provides a brief reflection of nine years of Social Forum activism against the backdrop of the most recent World Social Forum held in the city of Belém, in the northeastern state of Para, Brazil from January 27-February 1, 2009.

Language and Democracy ‘in Movement’: Multilingualism and the Case of the European Social Forum Process

In recent years new cross-European protests and movements have developed on global justice and within the loose platform of the European Social Forum (ESF). One of the major challenges for transnational communication and grassroots democracy within the Social Forums is linguistic communication problems and the ‘work of translation’ required to create a democratic setting. In the willingness to provide open access beyond linguistic communication problems, activists and organizers involved in the ESF preparatory process therefore hold their regular European preparatory assemblies to the ESF summits within a multilingual setting. Given the potential challenges of working transnationally, and of multilingual meetings, the ESF provides a good case study to test whether such processes work effectively in practice in comparison with national social movement assemblies: to what extent is democratic discussion and decision making possible in such emerging multilingual meetings compared to national meetings in which the majority of participants speak the same language? Being interested in linking the theoretical ground of discourse and deliberative democracy to the subject of the emerging Social Forums, I have studied the extent to which democratic discussion in the sense of deliberative debate might or might not take place within the multilingual and Europe-wide preparatory assemblies in the ESF process. The findings of my comparison between Europe-wide Social Forum preparatory assemblies and those taking place at the national level in Germany and the UK show that the absence of one common language within the European assemblies, contrary to what one might intuitively suppose, does not reduce the quality of democratic deliberation as compared to the national context. Therefore, informal power structures and gatekeeping mechanisms frequently rooted at the national level of Social Forum processes, together with a lack of transparency and asymmetries of information, seem to have indirectly reduced the accessibility of European meetings.