ABSTRACT
This chapter intends to study the relation that participants to World Social Forums have to protest practices, both on how they have an experience of them, and on an evaluative aspect. World Social Forums, compared to more local forums, raise important methodological difficulties to carry on such investigations, as the diversity of protest practices and traditions of participants is huge. Johanna Siméant explores professed forms of political protest and how this latter is linked to a number of variables, then follows that with an examination based on a Multiple Correspondence Analysis (MCA), more consistent with a multifactorial conception of commitment than a ceteris paribus model, which would be unwieldy in an international militant event. MCA, and its ability to condense information, enables a full, visual, and summarized view of a population and its diversity, and allows polarities within it to emerge rather than to be posited; it is then possible to draw up a hierarchical classification, which, projected onto a factorial map, makes it easier to identify affinities between modes of action and sub-groups within the population participating in this militant event. Here, MCA and Ascending Hierarchical Clustering seem particularly adapted to surveying internationally diverse populations.
