Author: Jai Sen
Anita Anand/Arturo Escobar
Editor(s): Jai Sen/Anita Anand/Arturo Escobar
Publisher: Viveka Foundation
Year: 2004
Language: English
Pages: 402
ISBN/UPC (if available): 8188251178
Description
This committed and critical collection of writings by women and men spanning three generations from the South and the North, presents the first in-one-place analysis of the World Social Forum. From political ideologies, social movements and processes of the old to present-day-reality, the views expressed in this volume converge on the significance of the World Social Forum.
On the eve of the fourth World Social Forum, The Word Social Forum: Challenging Empires presents views on what led up to the Forums before it, critical engagements around it the significance of the Forum in India, and the future of the Forum.
REVIEWS
The Word Social Forum is vital to creating a global political culture that welcomes open debate not only as a democratic value, but also as the only way to arrive at the truth and, therefore, formulating effective strategies and convincing alternatives. At its best t is like a political jam session, with people bouncing off each other in harmony and in counterpoint. Like the jazz of Charlie Parker and Miles Davis, the World social Forum is experimenting with a politics that can cope with uncertainty and is not constantly straining for formal harmony (in political term, programmatic unity). The goal is to have an underlying structure, which everyone is familiar with, and building a constant process of improvisation whose character it is impossible to predict or orchestrate.
-Hilary Wainwright, Editor, Red Pepper, UK
The future of counter-hegemonic globalisation depends on a process that allows for mutual clarity among the experiences of the world, both available and possible. For example, between the concept of human rights and the Hindu and Islamic concepts of human dignity; between western strategies of development and Gandhi's swadeshi; between western philosophy and African oral sagesse; between modern democracy and traditional authorities, between the indigenous movement and the ecological movement; and between the workers movement and the feminist movement.
-Boaventura de Sousa Santos, University of Coimbra, Portugal
Contents
Forewords
Proem
SECTION1
Antecedents: Critical Perspectives
Proem
WSF Documents
SECTION 2
Diaries : The Experience of the WSF
Proem
Movement Documents
SECTION 3
Critical Engagement: The Worlds Social Forum
Proem
WSF Documents
SECTION 4
Globalising the Forum: The Forum in India
Proem
Movement Documents
SECTION 5
Looking Beyond-Possible Futures, Possible Worlds
Proem
Movement Documents
Glossary
References
Index