ABSTRACT
For just over a decade, the World Social Forum (WSF) has functioned as a focal meeting point for movements, groups and individuals to discuss and develop alternatives to neoliberal globalization. Partly emergent from the optimism and strength of anti-globalization demonstrations and social movement formations of the late 1990s, early assessments centred on the ‘globalization of solidarity’ and the World Social Forum as a concrete expression of ‘counterhegemonic globalization’ headed by an ‘emancipatory global civil society’ (Santos 2006a: 42-43). This was carried forward by the momentum of its annual event and support by organizers and participants. During the early years, there was a consistent increase in attendance at annual gatherings such as Mumbai, India in 2004 and Porto Alegre, Brazil in 2005. The annual forum was extended to Nairobi, Kenya in 2007, Dakar, Senegal in 2011, and Tunis, Tunisia in 2013.1 The momentum of the World Social Forum has been reinforced by descriptions of it as a novel ‘open space’ (Whitaker 2004) or ‘new Bandung’ (Hardt 2002) in which the disparate groups that make up an ‘emancipatory’ global civil society are able to converge and synthesize their common points of opposition to neoliberal globalization and work towards the creation of another possible world (Worth and Buckley 2009). However, expressions of global civil society in relation to global contestation
and global governance more broadly tend uncritically to celebrate resistance rather than engage in critical conceptualization to understand more fully the position of global civil society on the terrain of the global political economy. This takes places alongside recognition of the conceptual shortcomings of global civil society. It is described as ‘to a large extent an analytical mirage’ that lacks sufficient accuracy in providing clear accounts of changing forms of globalization and contestation (Cerny 2006: 97). It is also argued that global civil society retains illusory and phantasmal qualities that ‘may actually stunt rather than stimulate political thinking about what might be born in the world economy’ (Drainville 2004: 6). Indeed, global civil society has been considered ‘an analytical and political milestone around postmarxist necks’— for its analysis of globalization, reification of boundaries and spheres, and failure to deal with the political implications of the differences between global movements (Eschle 2001: 62).
