World Social Forum

The World Social Forum (WSF) is often considered a key manifestation of an emerging global civil society. Formed to be the civil society alternative to the business-oriented World Economic Forum, the WSF was organized and held its first meeting in 2001 in Porto Alegre, Brazil. Over the years, it has expanded to several continents, and its meetings have attracted hundreds of thousands of social activists. It has inspired a growing body of academic research. For global studies, it also presents various conceptual challenges.

The WSF is, in many ways, a unique experiment in world history. Never before has such a great variety of social organizations gathered together from as many corners of the world with the explicit aim of replacing the hierarchies of the capitalist world-system with a more democratic order. Whereas some have celebrated its novel features, others have emphasized its roots in earlier processes. These range from early international labor unions to transnational women's movements and indigenous alliances. In a relatively recent historical context, the WSF can be considered an attempt to transform the (anti)globalization protest movements of the last years of the 20th century into global democratization movements of the 21st century.

The main global meetings of the WSF were held annually for the first five years, four times in Porto Alegre and once in Mumbai, India. In 2006, a “polycentric” global event was organized in Caracas, Karachi, and Bamako. Thereafter, the main forum has been organized every two years, in Nairobi (2007), Belem do Pará (2009), and Dakar (2011). Apart from the global meetings, the social forum process has mushroomed into hundreds of local, national, regional, and thematic forums, many of them organized autonomously from the global WSF process.

The decision-making process within the WSF has been subject to many debates. Eight Brazilian organizations, ranging from the massive landless peasant alliance MST (Movimento dos Trabalhadores Rurais Sem Terra) and the mighty trade union confederation CUT to smaller nongovernmental organizations and civil society groups, constituted the original organizing committee in 2000. After the successful first WSF, an International Council was formed in 2001. Thereafter, and with its global expansion, the organizational features of the process have become more complex. The Brazilian organizing committee came to form the core of the International Secretariat of the WSF, headquartered in São Paulo, and the International Council assumed more responsibilities in the overall decision making.

Even if WSF decision making is, in principle, based on consensus, there have been various contradictions and tensions in the process. Many of them have been connected with the ambiguity about to what extent the WSF should be an “open space” for movements to gather and to what extent it should assume shared positions that go beyond its Charter of Principles. The existence of the charter, created between the first two forums, expresses the broad commitments that the participants are supposed to share. They can be considered to reflect a broadly leftist, anti-imperialist, and ecologically sensitive ideological perspective, at the same time leaving room for a variety of tendencies to coexist. One of the debates about the interpretation of the charter is whether it expresses a “merely anti-neoliberal” standpoint or whether it can be also seen as “anticapitalist.”

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