ABSTRACT
Over the last quarter-century, we have witnessed a sea-change in the nature of leftist activism. Formerly grassroots or nationally focused social movements, nongovernmental organizations (NGOs), and other collectivities are increasingly sharing information, networking, coordinating action, launching campaigns, petitioning, lobbying, protesting, and framing their claims, targets, and visions at the transnational level of contention. These emerging, cross-border networks have even forged a unique and autonomous space, the World Social Forum (WSF) along with a web of regional and local offshoots. Here and through their proliferating joint campaigns, they deepen and broaden their ties and struggle toward “another possible world” beyond the current (dis)order, which activists decry as a globalizing neoliberal rule plagued by worsening poverty and inequalities within and among societies, the corporate takeover of land, the theft of the commons, ecological devastation, the feminization of poverty, the exacerbation of conflicts, and the erosion of democracy. This work seeks to address, first, why and how this shift to the global is taking place among activists (and, in doing so, what is the relationship between transnational activism and economic globalization); second, what is the composition and character of these emerging networks; and, third, what is the role of the WSF in this transnationalizing process.
