ABSTRACT
Make Poverty History and related protests are considered part of a movement for global justice that gained worldwide visibility in Seattle in November 1999, during the campaign against the WTO summit. In subsequent years, hundreds of thousands marched against the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and World Bank meetings in Washington and Prague in 2000, the G8 in Genoa in 2001, and the EU summits in Amsterdam in 1997, Nice in 2000, Gothenburg in 2001, Barcelona, Sevilla and Copenhagen in 2002. They protested against the World Economic Forum in annual demonstrations in Davos, and against the Iraq war in hundreds of cities on the Global Day of Action on 15 February 2003. Linked to this wave of protest, thousands of associations of various types and tens of thousands of activists met in transnational social forums. It is notable that the first World Social Forum (WSF), held in Porto Alegre in January 2001, was attended by about 20,000 participants from over 100 countries – among them delegates of 4,700 NGOs and social movement organisations – and that these numbers grew to 155,000 individual participants and 6,588 organisations at its fifth gathering in 2005 (Rucht 2005). The first European Social Forum (ESF), which took place in Florence on 6-9 November 2002, saw 60,000 participants – more than three times the expected number – attending the 30 plenary conferences,
160 seminars and 180 workshops; about one million participated in the march that closed the forum.
