THE WORLD SOCIAL FORUM: AN OCEAN OF HOPE
Minh Nguyen
February 2004
Revised article appearing in ACSJC’s Justice Trends,
no.112, March 2004
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Anti-Dam protesters at the
2004 World Social Forum
Photo: ACMICA |
January is the traditional month in which the warm weather
ocean swells attract hordes of people like myself to the Australian
beaches. This January however, I was unable to visit my ritual
summer playground, Sydney’s Bondi beach. Instead, I
was almost halfway on the other side of the world in a sea
not made of water, but of hope. I was fortunate to have experienced
the annual global meeting of civil society in Mumbai, India,
known as the World Social Forum (WSF).
I attended the forum as part of the international Jesuit-led
delegation numbering some 1,350 people – a significant
but mere fraction of the total 80,000 participants representing
2,660 groups from 132 countries. The sheer magnitude and diversity
of this meeting is a credit to the spirit and method of the
WSF, which within the short four years of its life has truly
become a global force in its own right.
Not only has the annual WSF event grown steadily, it has
inspired numerous thematical, regional and local forums across
the world, including local meetings in Australia, which gives
rise to the claim that the WSF is indeed a “process”
rather than an “event”. There are few instances
in recent history where such an initiative has spread at such
a speed and on such a scale.
I was once told that ocean swells are the product of distant
storms. If this is meteorologically correct then metaphorically
speaking, the WSF is the tidal surge in the wake of a global
economic storm that reshaped the world.
After two decades of problematic economic “shock therapy”,
people have become sceptical that the prevailing socio-political
world order, which prioritises the economy over the society,
could satisfy human needs in a manner that is safe for both
individuals and society at large.
We are now seeing the emergence of a new global consciousness
celebrating the connectedness, diversity, creativity and unpredictability
of the human person. Within a few years, what was a fragmented
and often destructive resistance to globalisation has become
an accumulating, productive search for alternatives. The WSF’s
slogan in India was “another world is possible –
let’s build it!”
The popularity of the WSF has something to do with its core
ethos but also its innovative organisational method. The WSF
lays claim to the idea of being an “open space”
for movements rather a “movement of movements”.
In its articulated form, the open space approach to organising
meetings is a recent political discovery. In theory and mostly
in practice, the open space method is a self-organising model
in which the people attending a particular meeting on the
day define its agenda. In other words, there is no predefined
meeting agenda or “vanguard” to lead the masses.
At the WSF at any one time you would find hundreds of overlapping
or competing events, including formal WSF-organised plenary
sessions and conferences, self-organised workshops and seminars,
cultural events, exhibitions and stalls, protest marches and
performances as well as informal gatherings on and off the
venue.
Diverse groups with diverse issues take part in different
ways. Catholic groups and agencies had its own global meeting,
organised by Pax Romana, prior to the WSF in India. I attended
this meeting on behalf of ACMICA and appreciated the networking
opportunities it presented me.
It titillates the imagination how any initiative, let alone
order, could emerge from such a seemingly anarchial meeting
and yet the WSF and its regional counterparts have produced
outcomes. One of the noted recent achievements by individuals
and groups participating in last year’s WSF was the
mobilisation of 10 million people worldwide in the historic
February 14-16, 2003 global protests against the war on Iraq.
Short-term successes notwithstanding, the significance of
the WSF is probably in its long-term potentials. The WSF’s
spirit of inclusiveness and diversity – which stands
in contrast to the universalist programme being implemented
by today’s agents of economic globalisation –
is a model for the future and the centrepiece of the hope
it offers for a fairer, just and plural world.
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