Open Cosmopolitanism and the World Social Forum: Global Resistance, Emancipation, and the Activists’ Vision of a Better World
Globalizations, 2017 Vol. 14, No. 4, 504–518, http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/14747731.2016.1254413 Open Cosmopolitanism and the World Social Forum: Global Resistance, Emancipation, and the Activists’ Vision of a Better World GIUSEPPE CARUSO ∗,∗∗ ∗NHS England, Redditch, UK ∗∗Richmond Fellowship, London, UK ABSTRACT The World Social Forum (WSF) is the world’s largest activist network to date. Its global, regional, national, and thematic events have gathered since 2001 millions of participants and thousands of civil society and social movement organisations. Its cosmopolitan vision is built on resistance to the planetary domination by neo-liberal globalisation. This paper unpacks WSF’s cosmopolitan project and reflects on its vision of emancipated individuals, convivial communities, and a just planetary society in harmony with the environment. In its open organisational space, WSF’s cosmopolitan project develops while in the process of political action rather than prior to that. At the same time, power dynamics, ideological cleavages, and pragmatic concerns about organisation and strategy challenge WSF’s ability to pursue its goals. However, it is these internal tensions that make WSF’s cosmopolitan project both more difficult to achieve and more realistic than claims of universal unity among all its participants. Keywords: World Social Forum, open cosmopolitanism, global justice movement, global resistance 1. Introduction The resurgence over the past three decades of a cosmopolitan discourse is related to, on the one hand, the expansion of market-led globalisation and, on the other, the intensification of social and political mobilisation for social justice. The fall of the Berlin Wall introduced a vision of global unity predicated on the global spread of neo-liberal doctrines.
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