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Reviews one of the most well known compilations on the World Social Forum
Introduction: Information and Critical Reflection
This big orange book (about 400 pages overall) is an excellent effort at combining both information and critical reflection on the World Social Forum (WSF) phenomenon:
Information , because many of its contributors summarize and describe, from their own perspective, the phenomenon itself. Repetition runs the risk of tedium, but this is inevitable here, since the majority of the contributions have been written in different contexts and have been already in the public domain for some (generally short) time.
Critical reflection, because this is not a simple celebration of the Forum, but an attempt to air the political and strategic debates central to the enterprise. We have to also acknowledge the attempt of the editors to be inclusive of a wide spectrum of views, especially some of the views at the margin of the forum and even some of those ideologically opposed to it (like the Indian Maoists). In this last case, the contextualization of these contributions, within a wealth of other critical but constructive engagements, does more than words to illustrate the methodological and political gulf between these critical outsiders and the critical participants.
Strengths and Weaknesses
The book is divided into five sections.
The first is on 'antecendents', that is the 'conceptual, ideological and historical landscapes within which the Forum has taken shape and within which it continues to unfold' (xxv). This is, in my opinion, the weakest of all sections. Not only for the metaphor used to introduce the forum - a comparison with the Post-WW2 Non-Aligned Movement, which we must remember, was an alliance of nationalist and socialist governments . That was a quite different species than the space of cross-contamination amongst the grassroots, which the Forum process is supposed to be about. The weakness of this section has to do with the laudable attempt to include every 'antecedent', from the socialist (Samir Amin, Michael Löwy), to the anarchist (Andrej Grubacic), from the feminist (Johanna Brenner) to the literary (Arundhati Roy), yet without a sense of dialogue and cross fertilization among these perspectives.
Also, I cannot fail to notice the absence of a crucial and necessary reflection on the 'historical landscape' within which...