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Home , People power, World Social Forum

Globalizations, 2017 Vol. 14, No. 4, 504–518, http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/14747731.2016.1254413

Open and the World : 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 and 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, 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 introduced a vision of global unity predicated on the global spread of neo-liberal doctrines. Liberalisation, privatisa- tion, and devolution fostered by institutions—the World Bank, IMF, and

Correspondence Addresses: Giuseppe Caruso, NHS England, Redditch, UK; Richmond Fellowship, London, UK. Email: [email protected] # 2016 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group Open Cosmopolitanism and the World Social Forum 505

WTO—affected the global dynamics of production, trade, and governance. Concurrently, a global culture began to develop carried by waves of consumer goods and by the flooding of the global airwaves (and fibre optics) with entertainment products which established or reinforced global cultural stereotypes and entrenched values of competition, , and consumerism. Narratives about the survival of the fittest increasingly express human relationships and social arrangements. As neo- was hailed by conservative elites as the panacea to social problems and the engine of global development, its dark side was increasingly resisted in around the world targeting labour market deregulation, environmental degradation, poverty, inequality, and exploitation. Localised forms of resistance grew in scale with the intensification of electronic communication between activists. In 1999, weaving networks that criss-crossed the planet, an unprecedented activist convergence burst into the public scene in the mobilisation against the WTO. The critical mass achieved in Seattle moved in waves to successive demon- strations such as those against the World Bank and the IMF in Prague in 2000 or the G8 in Genoa in 2001 (Della Porta, Andretta, Mosca, & Reiter, 2006; Pleyers, 2010; Smith, Byrd, Reese, & Smythe, 2011). In January 2001, the first World Social Forum (WSF) took place in , (Conway, 2013; Juris, 2008a; Teivainen, in press). Grown out of the alter- globalisation movement and shaped by Brazilian activists, WSF’s more recent roots lay in the anti-imperialist, anti-colonialist, peace, and pro- movements since the 1960s and in the alternative NGO forums to the UN conferences of the 1990s (Correa Leite, 2003; Fisher & Ponniah, 2003; Glasius, 2005; Seoane & Taddei, 2002; Wallerstein, 2004; Waterman, 2004). The WSF is the world’s largest and most diverse transnational activist initiative to date. Its global events in Brazil, , , , , , , , and , and the dozens of regional, national, and local avatars have gathered millions of partici- pants and tens of thousands of civil society organisations and social movements (Massiah, 2011).1 The WSF was developed as a counter-event to the (WEF), a gathering of the world’s wealthiest CEOs and most influential finance ministers, heads of gov- ernment, and academics. Its meetings focus on market expansion and economic development. WSF’s activists, instead, stress social and environmental justice when imagining desirable futures. They privilege equity over individual wealth, harmony with over exploitation of the environment, and shared responsibility over profit. The WSF has been described as a global public sphere (Conway & Singh, 2009; Doerr, 2008; Glasius, 2005; Hardt, 2002), a global network of social movements (Byrd & Jasny, 2010; Juris, 2008a; Waterman, 2004), a utopian space (Tormey, 2005), a space of intentionality (Juris, 2008b), an embryonic party (Chase- Dunn & Reese, 2007; Marcuse, 2005; Patomaki & Teivainen, 2004), or a contact zone (Conway, 2011) in which alliances develop transversally (Housseini, 2013) across multiple pol- itical cleavages (Santos, 2004). WSF’s most inspiring political and organisational innovation has been the ‘open space’. The open space, a bottom-up and participatory methodology for , provides a context for the creation of knowledge and experience beyond a directive pursuit of change (Whitaker, 2005). This formula rallied unprecedented numbers of activists from very diverse backgrounds. The open space is the organisational representation of the political environment in which WSF’s open cosmopolitanism takes shape. WSF’s unique cosmopolitan vision is developed both as resistance against neo-liberal cosmopolitanism and as a methodology of individual and collec- tive emancipation. The nature of WSF’s cosmopolitan aspiration has been discussed by Janet Conway and Boaventura de Souza Santos. Scholars familiar with the WSF, they framed WSF’s cosmopolitanism as decolonial (Conway 2011, 2013)2 and subaltern (Santos, 2004, 506 G. Caruso

2005a). Dialogue (Conway, 2012) and translation (Santos, 2005b) are among the strategies deployed to develop WSF’s field and to extend its reach across world society. The two authors differ in the understandings of the tensions and conflicts in the WSF. Santos sees the cleavages traversing the WSF as a guarantee of openness against the domination of one ideologi- cal and organisational form. Conway warns about power dynamics among WSF participants and points at the contradictions of a space in which structures of domination not only are not chal- lenged, but through denial are also in fact strengthened. WSF’s open cosmopolitanism, I argue, invokes a struggle for global justice built on and resistance, driven by emancipatory aspirations, and fuelled by a global alliance against neo-liberal globalisation: dissent against any totalitarianism that denies social complexities, that attempts to subsume them forcefully, or that attempts to annihilate them; resistance against hegemonic lifeworlds; emancipatory because it is predicated on individuals’ and groups’ self-determination. In previous examinations, I have described the WSF in terms of ‘emancipatory cosmopolitanism’ (2012b) and ‘open cosmopolitanism’ (2012a). Here, I consider the latter as a recursive process of power and resistance, conflict and emancipation taking place both across and within the boundaries of WSF’s open space. Open cosmopolitanism understands that denied conflict between allies reinforces dynamics of domination and that courageous engagements of those conflicts, however painful and apparently destabilising of activists’ con- tingent goals, promote trust and, potentially, effectiveness (Caruso, 2004). Open cosmopolitanism is not based on a blueprint, it develops in fits and starts, it is traversed by powerful ambivalences, it often suffers setbacks, and its outcomes are not foreseeable and are always open to reframing and reinterpretation as the activists’ work develops into new and pre- viously unimaginable forms. Power dynamics, ideological cleavages, and pragmatic concerns about organisation, alliance building, and strategic efficacy traverse the open space and, accord- ing to some, challenge WSF’s ability to pursue its goals (Worth & Buckley, 2009; Zibechi, 2012). Criticism centred on the extent to which the excitement that the WSF generated among activists may be justified; on the gap between values and practices in the open space; on the disappointment generated by the unrealistic investments in the possibility for global social change afforded by the WSF; and, more recently, on the ability of the WSF to adapt to a changed political environment. Tensions, internal struggles, and critical analysis, I argue, con- tribute to make WSF’s cosmopolitan project, though apparently harder to achieve, more realistic (but by no means easier) than statements of universal solidarity among global activists or, even more, among all human beings united in a common destiny on a shared planet. When acknowl- edged and worked through, conflicts and power dynamics contribute to the recursive nature of the struggle for individual and collective emancipation. As conflicts are engaged and negotiated and as the ambivalent nature of human existence is made central to groups’ organisation, resist- ance to domination becomes the ground on which the alternative is constructed and emancipa- tion can realistically be achieved. WSF’s open cosmopolitanism is here understood as the struggle between Empire and Cosmopolis as discussed by Gills (2005). This struggle is not only represented by the opposition of WSF’s Cosmopolis to the WEF’s Empire, but also, more broadly, as the struggle between two contending visions of human existence and global community. With Gills, I understand these contending visions as the expression of a ‘perennial historical tension, [which is] deeply embedded in history and human psyche’ (2005, p. 5). I have been involved in the WSF since 2002. The present article is based on material collected during participant observation in four continents complemented by extensive virtual ethnography and unstructured interviews.3 The remainder of this article is organised as follows. The next section discusses WSF’s founding cosmopolitan principles. The following introduces WSF’s Open Cosmopolitanism and the World Social Forum 507 cosmopolitan practices. Section 4 discusses conflict in the open space. Section 5 spells out WSF’s open cosmopolitanism. Section 6 concludes.

2. Cosmopolitanism of WSF’s Founding Principles Following the first global event, WSF’s International Council met for the first time to draft a Charter of Principles that defined WSF’s values and vision. About a hundred organisations, movements, and networks from all continents (but mainly from Latin America and Europe) attended that meeting. According to its Charter, the WSF is an ‘open meeting place’. As such, it has no leaders, no shared agendas, and it ‘does not constitute a locus of power’ (WSF, 2001). WSF’s open space gathers ‘groups and movements of civil society that are opposed to and to domination of the world by capital’ (WSF, 2001). WSF’s par- ticipants discuss action-oriented proposals without central direction in a ‘context that, in a decentralized fashion, interrelates organizations and movements engaged in concrete action at levels from the local to the international’ (WSF, 2001). The WSF is a movement of ideas that prompts reflection [ ...] on the mechanisms and instruments of domina- tion by capital, on means and actions to resist and overcome that domination, and on the alternatives proposed to solve the problems of exclusion and social inequality that the process of capitalist glo- balization with its racist, sexist and environmentally destructive dimensions is creating internation- ally and within countries. (WSF, 2001) WSF’s objective is to ‘increase the capacity for non-violent social resistance to the process of dehumanization the world is undergoing’ (WSF, 2001). Resistance is not only a challenge to pro- cesses of dehumanisation enforced by neo-liberal policies, but also an epistemological claim to truth against ‘all totalitarian and reductionist views of economy, development and history’ (WSF, 2001). This is as far as WSF’s analysis of current global social predicaments goes. What would, instead, WSF’s alternatives look like? The alternatives proposed at the World Social Forum [ ...] are designed to ensure that in solidarity prevail as a new stage in world history. This will respect universal , and those of all citizens—men and women—of all nations and the environment and will rest on democratic international systems and institutions at the service of social justice, equality and the sovereignty of peoples. (WSF, 2001) WSF’s project is framed in terms of global solidarity (against social fragmentation), human rights (against domination and exploitation), democracy (against ), social justice (against exclusion and inequality), and sovereignty of peoples (against the rule of corpor- ations and international financial institutions). Moreover, WSF’s activists ‘condemn all forms of domination and all subjection of one person by another’ (WSF, 2001). The scale of WSF’s aspirations move from struggles for individual self-determination to the global scale. Further, WSF’s activists are encouraged to ‘situate their actions [ ...] as issues of planetary citizenship, and to introduce onto the global agenda the change-inducing practices that they are experiment- ing in building a new world in solidarity’ (WSF, 2001). Such ‘new world’ is defined more prop- erly as ‘a planetary society directed towards fruitful relationships among Humankind and between it and the Earth’ (WSF, 2001). Resisting domination, meeting in the open space, exchanging experience, imagining, and experimenting together alternative forms of sociality constitute the vision of emancipation and social change enshrined in WSF’s Charter. Both unique and rooted in the history of global emancipatory movements, the content and dynamics taking place in an open space 508 G. Caruso were not immediately evident to activists less familiar with the political milieu in which it was developed. A document published shortly after the Charter reiterated the welcoming nature of the ‘open meeting space’ and how it is ‘open to all and does not operate on the basis of invita- tions’ (2002). Admittedly, this document did not do much to unpack the content of the open space beyond reiterating its centrality to WSF’s identity. A great deal more did a document drafted the following year by WSF’s International Secretariat at a crucial juncture in WSF’s development. In 2003, after a third, hugely successful, WSF it became evident that to realise its vision the WSF needed to turn itself into a truly global open space. The International Council pursued WSF’s globalisation by moving the 2004 WSF to India. Given the Subconti- nent’s very different political culture, a more detailed explanation spelled out what to many Bra- zilians were the inherent qualities of an open space and its political implications. The document, meant to introduce the concept of the open space to those unfamiliar with it, deserves to be quoted at length. Diversity, not size, is [the open space’s] fundamental political mark. [ ...]. The WSF [ ...] does not have the objective of defining a hegemonic political orientation, nor to create levels of political power to lead them. [ ...] In the WSF, disagreement is a virtue, not a problem.[ ...] we are also a multiplicity of forms of thinking: through the emotion of drama, singing, music, dancing, image, celebration, or through the rationality of arguments, conferences, essays, roundtables and panels, seminars, and workshops [ ...]. [The WSF] is a kind of university for world citizenship. [ ...] Along with thinking, we develop feeling and emotion. [ ...] The WSF is a space to address and enhance dreams, ideas, experiences, and movements. [ ...] No one has had any experience in meeting and sharing with such a range of diverse collective subjects [ ...]. We are still developing the necessary pedagogy [ ...]. The changes it provokes may have immediate practical effect or, more likely, will impact the way of perceiving and assessing possibilities and constraints of humankind’s action in its diverse situations, relations, structures, cultures, and historical processes.[ ...] WSF impact and expansion depend, to a large extent, on how our way of reflecting on the world impacts the large media [ ...]. The Charter of Principles is a key piece in WSF political engineering. The ethical values uniting us and the extent of our diversity are defined in it. In our Charter of Prin- ciples, consciousness of humanity and shared planetary common good are paramount, as well as the search for sustainable development based on participation, freedom, and human dignity. (WSF India, 2003, italics in the original) WSF’s cosmopolitan vision is framed in a holistic language that talks about dream and ration- ality in the same paragraph, in an attempt to show how from contradictions, disagreements, and conflicts a new world can see the light. It is a language that expresses uncertainty over the future of a process of which ‘no one has had any experience’ and conviction about WSF’s deep and wide-ranging impact. As mentioned earlier, this language reflects the broad coalitions that most Latin American countries formed in the anti-dictatorship movements. At the same time, local idioms feed back onto WSF’s global discourse, enriching and strengthening it. To these local contributions I now turn.

3. The Development of WSF’s Open Cosmopolitanism The articulations of WSF’s vision by local activists are impossible to recount here in great detail, but the following are some illustrations of the liveliness of the debate on WSF’s cosmopolitan values and their realisation. As the WSF moved to India, the Indian activists introduced some modifications to the Charter to give their event ‘an Indian character and ethos’ (WSF India, 2002a). This quote is from a document referred to as the Bhopal Declaration from the place where the National Consultation was held that decided to organise the Indian WSF. On the Open Cosmopolitanism and the World Social Forum 509 basis of this declaration, a document was drafted titled ‘WSF India Policy Guidelines’ (WSF India, 2002b), which clarified the relationship between WSF’s values as enshrined in the Charter and their Indian instantiations. In Bhopal indeed a decision had been made that WSF’s Charter ‘needs to be evolved with certain additions required for India’ (WSF India, 2002b).4 Caste domination, , and fundamentalism were added to the forms of domination listed by the Charter. The mention of non-violent resistance was replaced by a formulation pre- cluding the open space to ‘organisations that seek to take people’s lives as a method of political action’ (WSF India, 2002b). The participation of elected individuals in national and local charges was formally allowed and stress was put on achieving ‘self reliance based on local resources’ (WSF India, 2002b). Finally, four chapters (11–14) were added to frame WSF India’s unique features. Chapter 13 states, for instance, that ‘[t]he language of dissent and resist- ance [ ...] will have to be informed by local idioms and forms’. This last statement stresses the importance of articulating political discourses in terms of the local idioms in which power is imposed and opposed, and it highlights how WSF’s understanding of emancipation and change is rooted in resistance and dissent. In a similar way, WSF’s promoters in the Maghreb gave the Charter a distinctive regional grounding (WSF Maghreb, 2012). In a recent interview, an activist from the Maghreb reflected on the adaptation of the Charter to their region: it is not too different to the charter of the WSF, but with our thinking about our local reality [ ...]. For example. [ ...] one thing in the Charter is the identity of the Maghreb. [ ...] We have the problem of Sahara ...we put Sahara in our charter. [ ...] There are a lot of people who don’t under- stand how we work [ ...]. In the same committee we have people who don’t agree with the Sahar- ahui but we sit at the same table, we discuss, we have problems, we solve them and we continue to work [ ...], but when you speak, in the Charter of Porto Alegre, that the people who are representing armed groups are not allowed in the forum ...at the same time Polisario is an armed group. [INT 10] The tensions between the Charter and its following instantiations show the fallacy of a universal approach based, on the one hand, on pre-established values and programmes and, on the other hand, on the creativity mobilised by activists in different regions to develop shared discourses and agendas. This is the way such a negotiation is seen from the Maghreb according to the same interviewee: We discussed it with the Saharahui ...having a group like a women’s group, not representatives of Polisario, but representative of the civil society of the Saharauis and we are working on that. Do you understand? You find a way to put everybody at the same table. As dialogue continues, transformation is sought for and can, therefore, be achieved. A further regional contribution to WSF’s rooting in both cosmopolitan values and situated practices is illustrated by the organising process of the 2011 event. According to the event’s concept note, its goal is to inspire ‘a new universality’ aiming at rebuilding relations between humans, the environment and living beings on the basis of justice, soli- darity and diversity, by giving precedence to groups and social categories which have suffered most from the dominant hegemonic model during the last five centuries, that they may have a voice. (WSF, 2011) The most recent elaboration of WSF’s vision is the methodological document for 2015 titled ‘Dignity and Rights’. Reflecting on the consequences of the 2008 financial crisis and con- tinuing a debate begun in WSF’s 2009 event, the organisers of Tunis 2015 write that WSF’s acti- vists consider the current crisis ‘[n]ot only as an economic and financial one, but also as a crisis 510 G. Caruso of civilization concerning the values and the rules that have ruled over the world for centuries’ (WSF, 2014). The objective of the WSF is, therefore, to provide a space of dialog and solidarity between on one hand the social movements that are usually involved in the WSF, and on the other the new movements that emerged thanks to the struggles waged against austerity policies developed in the last years. (WSF 2014) Built on the global struggles at the turn of the millennium, the WSF both adapts and remains true to itself by building and rebuilding relationships between movements across space and time. The following extract from an interview with a European activist summarises the evolution of the WSF in the context of the two latest waves of the and reflects on the relationship between resistance and alternatives. compared to thirteen years ago when we started, this movement of movements, not just the World Social Forum, let’s say this decade-long dynamic, according to me sowed truly a lot. [ ...] when we started we had a lot of nos [ ...]. No to war, , racism [ ...]. Now, I think that instead we are starting to open up, in a fragmented way but it’s starting to open up, a design, a project let’s call it, of an alternative economy, of an alternative society, [ ...] because there was a moment when it seemed as though on the one hand there were those who said no and on the other those who experi- mented with best practices, those who did resistance and those who pursued alternatives. Currently, it seems to me that the two things go alongside each other. Take Istanbul for instance. Istanbul was a massive resistance operation in the strictest sense, a revolt [ ...]. But at the same time it had strong elements of alternative thought on how to understand the city, on how to understand democracy. In other words, the two things are increasingly together and they nourish each other. [INT 24]

4. Conflicts in the Open Space Above, I considered WSF’s cosmopolitan principles as enshrined in its Charter and their devel- opment through regional and local contributions. WSF’s cosmopolitanism is developed not only through discursive engagements between activists, but also in recursive processes involving those principles and the practices they inform. The hiatus between principles and practices often generates conflicts in the open space. These, in turn, are grounded in the historical and psychological tensions between the forces of Empire and Cosmopolis (Gills, 2005). The open space methodology, so central in the WSF narrative, can also obscure (though inadvertently, no less perniciously) the power imbalances structuring, beyond the reach of a benevolent will to forgetfulness (or forgiveness), the WSF space. These imbalances represent, among others, the colonial differences inscribed in the open space (Conway, 2011). At the same time, the struggles to redress these power imbalances make the open space an agonistic arena (Teivainen, 2004) beyond the belief that wishes it to be a liberated zone, one in which power imbalances are resolved by a notion of alliance across difference and by the stipulation of a common goal. The historical consequences of Empire shape Cosmopolis and, at the same time, they generate the conflicts through which cosmopolitan emancipation takes place. Although successful in making the WSF the referent of a wide section of global progressive activists, over the years the debates around power dynamics in the open space and the different valences between allies within it made WSF’s work less effective than its activists hoped. Debates around power dynamics within the open space have often challenged WSF’s organis- ational form and political methodology. Along WSF’s history, a tension developed between the advocates of the WSF as a leaderless space and the advocates of structured organisation and coordinated political activities (Teivainen, 2012, 2004). For the critics of the open space methodology, the escalation of denied conflicts among allies caused WSF’s biggest weaknesses. Open Cosmopolitanism and the World Social Forum 511

To transform them, intentional organisation and sophisticated representation were needed to achieve, in turn, WSF’s two paramount goals: establish internal democracy and mobilise against neo-liberal globalisation. The failure to establish efficient and transformative decision-making in WSF’s organisational spaces generated frustration, as transpired in the words of a European activist according to whom decision-making in the open space resembled a spiral in which you approached an issue and then people agreed to discuss it again in the next meeting but it kept coming down to a few core issues. This whole debate about is this an open space in the absolute sense (with a certain limitations put by the Charter) or should the Forum move in a direction where it takes more clear position on specific issues and then it organises certain actions outside the forum [ ...] related of course to questions how does the [International Council] organise itself and what functions does it have. I think central to this [is the] key debate about the open space versus the more organised and more action oriented model of working. [INT 12] This quote illustrates a complicated conundrum. How can an open, horizontal, and consensus- based organisation ensure the inclusion of all its participants and, at the same time, be able to perform effective decision-making? According to [INT 12], the forum as an idea, as architecture, is quite broad in its composition and therefore, being centreless, being without a hierarchy or or even any form of decision making ...one outcome of that architecture, of that composition, is of course that decisions are not taken quickly. Slow decision-making generates a conservative attitude by the WSF as a whole because, accord- ing to [INT 4], in the attempt to make agreements those that end up being privileged are those more conservative and we never manage to push forward the more ambitious things because we look for a consensus and the things a little bit more ambitious don’t manage to attract consensus. Timely, effective, and democratic decision-making is greatly valued in the WSF, but difficult to perform. A precondition for such decision-making is universal inclusion. But the open space often provides less than inclusive contexts. Consider the following. In the organisational process towards the Indian WSF, English was the shared language among organisers. This caused the exclusion of those speaking other Indian (and foreign) languages. This reproduced within the WSF the divide between English-speaking elites and the majority of Indians. The choice of language entailed the social dynamics of exclusion and subordination rooted in India’s colonial past. This is a clear illustration of the constitutive effects of Empire on Cosmopolis. The pres- ence of gendered and colonial dynamics in the WSF in turn generates struggles for emancipation within its boundaries. A Latin American activist described one such successful feminist struggle following the first WSF: for women [the WSF] was difficult from the beginning. I remember the first forum, there were 58% of women participants, but 10% in the panels [ ...]. And this [ ...] made us organise to both raise the position of women and also to decentralise the organisation of the forum. [ ...] Because at the beginning we had [thematic] axes and the axes were in the hands of the great patriarchs [ ...] but we opposed this arrangements and [ ...] we managed to organise two axes [out of five]. [INT 8] Differences and inequalities need to be engaged, however complicated and painful the struggles between allies, collaborators, and friends may be. More pragmatic approaches suggest instead that these negotiations may turn the WSF into an inward looking space focused only on the res- olution of conflicts among its participants, rather than tackling the social and historical causes that generated those conflicts in the first place. Besides, the negotiations of conflicts engendered 512 G. Caruso by historical injustice may need more time than what is afforded by current political scenarios. Consequently, a strategic approach involving the postponement of some engagements is necess- ary. Moreover, the negotiation of internal conflicts may prove divisive and lead to fragmentation and further vulnerability. Given the struggles in which WSF activists are involved, many of them consider that conflict negotiations within the WSF should be either considered ‘as if’ it doesn’t affect collaboration in the open space or contained within strict and democratically devised organisational structures and procedures. Both arguments are predicated on the activists’ main interest which is to ensure WSF’s political incisiveness. The recognition of power and other inequalities among global justice activists generated dis- appointment and withdrawal among old participants and newcomers alike. But, I argue, it is pre- cisely such recognition of the challenges involved that makes WSF’s open cosmopolitanism more real and, therefore, its goals potentially more achievable. The discovery of Empire in Cos- mopolis (and vice versa) may avoid splitting perspectives morally grounded on the original dualism between good Cosmopolis and evil Empire. Of this some activists are acutely aware: sometimes we want to think that we are better than we are ... or the ideal of what we think [ ...]we are. But in reality we are not there. I mean ... all of these are very good people, very committed people who work very hard ... and when I say these people I include myself trying to construct that other possible world which is not easy to do. If it were it would have been done. [INT 21] The recognition of the conflicts traversing the global justice field expands the activists’ notions of the other and complicates their engagements in the open space. Conflicts become more visible, power imbalance more resented, cooperation harder to muster, and consensus feels both impossible to achieve and a way to disavow WSF’s ambitious vision. At the same time, though, as the issues at stake become more pressing and WSF’s narratives more realistic and sophisticated, emancipation becomes thinkable in non-idealised terms.

5. Open Cosmopolitanism WSF’s open cosmopolitanism articulates emancipation and social change through three mutually constitutive aspects: (1) resistance to domination, (2) social imagination, and (3) exper- imentation with alternatives. The sites of resistance and emancipation are multiple and intercon- nected scales from the local to the global. The values on which WSF’s open space is built are truth, equality, justice, and universal rights. A more specific set of guidelines draws its bound- aries in terms of non-, non-party or government affiliation, and non-confessionality. These tenets represent both universal aspirations (like justice) and WSF’s historical boundedness (like claims to political non-partisanship). The conception of the interdependence of resistance and emancipation, the understanding of the interconnection of multiple scales, and the commit- ment to truth and justice constitute WSF’s contribution to the elaboration of an emancipatory cosmopolitanism (Beck, 2006; Calhoun, 2002; Caraus & Parvu, 2014; Held & Patoma¨ki, 2006; Housseini, 2013; Mignolo, 2000; Pieterse, 2006). Open cosmopolitanism represents WSF’s end, its journey, and its mode of travel. Both aspira- tions and realisations develop through recursive conflicts between multiple instantiations, his- torical and psychological, of Empire and Cosmopolis. Open cosmopolitanism is not based on blueprints. It is a work in process, impossible to uniquely define. Open cosmopolitanism invokes a recursive process of emancipation. It is about freeing, just as much as it is about freedom. It is about opening, just as much as it is about openness. It is not built on the assumption of universality, but on continued struggles to confront the conflicts that traverse global society. The following passage illustrates WSF’s conception of resistance and alternatives as one: Open Cosmopolitanism and the World Social Forum 513

To imagine that another world is possible is a creative act to make it possible. The WSF releases contradictions and makes them operate, catalyzing, liberating creative energies. [ ...] The WSF intends to be a space to facilitate pulling together and strengthening an international coalition of the most diverse social movements and organizations, adhering to the principle of respect for differ- ences, autonomy of ideas, and forms of struggle. [ ...] It’s an initiative of the emerging planetary civil society. [ ...] It’s a movement of ideas that feeds on human diversity and possibilities, opposing the ‘single way of thinking’. [ ...] The WSF is a living laboratory for world citizenship. (WSF, 2003, original italics) Resistance and experimentation gather energy from recursive processes of individual and collec- tive emancipation taking place across multiple conflicts both within and without WSF’s open space. This also explains the emergent nature and the mutually constitutive relationship between WSF’s cosmopolitan imaginations, practices of resistance, and new solidarities. Justice, equality, self- and collective realisation, mutual recognition, and radical democracy are, at the same time, methodologies and objectives of WSF’s open cosmopolitanism. The mul- tiple paths it explores are traced by the prevalence of collective work over basic assumptions of ‘equality in the struggle’ and are grounded on values supporting creative thinking: curiosity, empathy, and solidarity. The contradictions between cosmopolitan principles and daily practices express the nature of the conflicts in WSF’s open space and, more broadly, in the global justice movements to which the open space innovation is a historical contribution. While principles and values have an internal coherence of their own given to them by thoughtful formulations, activists’ practices are messy. Such messy contexts generate dynamics of change progressing in fits and starts rather than along linear progressions. On the other hand, as power affects activists in different ways, the stakes are different and the commitments to change are different too. These differences translate sometimes in conflictual approaches to action or withdrawal and in different con- ceptions about strategy and organisation. Resisting assumed equality among allies over con- quered emancipation, and recognising the lack of a blueprint on which to rely reveal the radical uncertainty on which global justice rests. In critical circumstances, however, uncertainty may become unbearable and generate anxiety among activists, empathy is replaced by abstract conceptions, simplified and stark political scenarios about adversaries and allies are imagined to cope with anxiety, and conflicts escalate. Open cosmopolitanism is rooted in conflict and predicated on their transformation within open spaces such as WSFs. The nature of these conflicts varies, but at the bottom it rests on Gill’s historical and psychological forces of Empire and Cosmopolis, forces representing creativity and emancipation or, conversely, of destructiveness. Gendered, racial, colonial, and other group dynamics generate struggles for emancipation. Forms of resistance vary across fault lines and register the intensity of the struggle, on the one hand, and the complexity of building alliances across differences, on the other. Taken together, they express the nature of WSF’s cos- mopolitan project as rooted in resistance across all existing fault lines, the outcome of which is neither predetermined nor inevitable, whose struggles are never completed and carry a connota- tion of endless strive. These struggles of resistance taking place in the WSF are equally consti- tutive of its open cosmopolitanism as the struggles of emancipation taking place between WSF’s activists and their local, regional, and global adversaries. The conflicts within and across the open space’s boundaries make the difficulties of emancipation evident. As mentioned above in the words of [INT 21], size and success made WSF’s activists oblivious of these difficulties. Forms of denial caused disappointments and withdrawal among its activists and, for some, the eventual failure of WSF’s project in its current form. But this too is a constitutive feature of open 514 G. Caruso cosmopolitanism. Its transformative innovations do affect the organisational forms as well through which its work is conducted. As current forms fail, new ones develop and disappoint- ment turns again into creativity. WSF’s open cosmopolitanism develops at the intersection of individual and collective trans- formation. Acknowledging the multiplicity of domination, the possibility of emancipation, and the nature of change, according to some of WSF’s initiators, could facilitate a revolution in the mainstream understanding of politics, society, and social change. Consider the following: ‘(t)he other world we are trying to build has to be built first in each of us and in our organisations’ (Grajev quoted by Whitaker, 2003). This change in perspective on emancipation makes it poss- ible right here and now and, at the same time, makes directive logics and strict organisational structures less compelling as the horizon of emancipation is moved much closer to each activist. Individual and collective emancipation need a continued commitment over long periods of time, rather than contingent strategies that risk replicating the epistemology of domination they wish to replace (Whitaker, 2005). Deep transformations are slow and require eschewing instrumental thinking and strategic shortcuts. The slowness of the open space methodology is the object of frustration among activists who live the harshest consequences of exploitation and inequality. For some of them, the open space methodology is a luxury affordable exclusively by relatively unthreatened activists and a con- ception predicated on colonial, class, race, and gender privilege. The tension between compre- hensive liberation and a more contingent social and political emancipation is not unique to the WSF. It resonated also in the latest wave of protests following the 2008 financial crisis. Accord- ing to some (Castells, 2012; Juris, 2012), the current generation of activists realised a logic of networked organisation as alliances and decision-making developed through the use of tools such as Twitter, Facebook, Firechat, or YouTube. These undirected processes among equals best foster the dynamics of both individual and collective emancipation in the open space spirit. According to others, their fleeting passage over streets and squares proved the ineffective- ness of such organisational forms in the face of organised and ruthless repression. This conver- sation is nicely summarised by [INT 1]: I’m not saying that those movements were useless, far from that, because it is precisely through these iterations that you arrive at something that is different and it is longer lasting. [ ...] you would remember that there was much breast beating about how it is that we don’t have Occupy in [ ...] the social forum and that is why the social forum is useless ...how relevant is that discussion today? So I think we all were carried away by that initial kind of (laughs) optimism that is coming to an end. Capitalism has shown an ability to renew itself over and over again (laughs) which we still have to contend with. As some activists swore about the power to influence both political agenda and cultural outlooks through a new culture of politics, others, frustrated by the fading of the protests and the failure to establish a strong political movement, wished that activists moved beyond preconceptions of organisationlessness (Nunes, 2014). These debates continue pragmatic engagements with open cosmopolitan methodologies and dilemmas popularised by the WSF and rooted, among others, in feminist experiments in organisational structurelessness (Freeman, 1970). Maybe these debates are even older or, indeed, they are fuelled by the inherent ambivalence of the human condition of which Gills writes about. Empire and Cosmopolis represent the combined, individual, and collective, historical and psychological, forces towards either community and collaboration, or self-affirmation. Gills and Gray remind (2013) us how the dynamic interplay between interdependence/cooperation and independence/competition—and the historical cycles they determine—constituted the Open Cosmopolitanism and the World Social Forum 515 focus of Freud’s investigation on civilisation and its discontents. Freud’s hypothesis reveals the ‘inherent’ ambivalent qualities of human nature in constant tension between hate and domina- tion (Empire, in Gills terms) and love and cooperation (Cosmopolis). The prevalence of one over the other—of creative relationships between autonomous individuals in communities built on solidarity and conviviality over the haunted relationships between competing individ- uals and persecuted communities—depends on complex emotional and cognitive processes. As Gills puts it, ‘Empire thrives in such an environment of the politics of fear’ (2005, p. 7). As fear takes hold of individuals and groups, their submission to Empire increases. and radicalisation are expressions of those fears. Cosmopolis, instead, thrives in environments of trust and confidence. Neither context is permanent or uniquely present.

6. Conclusion Following the 2008 financial crisis, a new cycle of global protests developed from places such as Tunisia and Egypt to New York, from Istanbul and Santiago de Chile to Athens and Madrid, from New Delhi, London, and Abuja, to San Paulo and Hong Kong (Badiou, 2012; Castells, 2012; Federici, 2012; Gerbaudo, 2012; Juris, 2012). Democratic struggles have changed since Seattle and the first WSF, but the links between waves of protests are not difficult to trace. They are links across space and time, across political ideologies, across identities and cultures; they are organisational and personal. Also, the tensions among allies in both waves of global activism resonate with each other. Both links and tensions transgressing boundaries between individuals and groups are the foundations of global activists’ cosmopolitan vision: a vision in firm opposition to the totalitarian drives of Empire. The links between waves of protests are not only genealogical. As the WSF continues to organise global, regional, and local events, global activism flows across different spaces signalling both resilience and creativity. Activists occupy streets and squares in some moments and converge in open spaces in others; they revolt in the Tunisian streets and dialogue in the Tunis WSF events in 2013 and 2015. The cosmopolitan vision developed by global justice activists is rooted in diversity as much as Empire promises to flatten global cultures and, perhaps even more compellingly, it is not based on a blueprint, but it is developed in the process of political action. Activists the world over engage in both resistance against global domination and developing viable alternatives to neo-liberal globalisation. Political and social imaginations constructed on values of autonomy and justice inform both resistance and alternatives and are developed in the (temporary and con- stantly changing) spaces of global activism. WSF’s and global justice movement’s activists are concerned with the struggle for democracy and the constitution of a global community based on cooperation and solidarity. To achieve these goals, activists target the causes of violence between individuals and communities: economic and financial violence, social and cultural vio- lence, war, and environmental degradation. The programme for global justice is extensive. The diagnosis, the prognosis, the instruments, the timing of the interventions, and the conception of the issues at stake are different among global justice activists. Ethnicity, race, gender, and religion, among others, seem to deny the possibility of a cosmo- politan existence. How could it be otherwise when, for the first time in history, so many individ- uals and groups from all over the planet join in a common struggle for democracy? But the will to see justice prevail over domination is their shared cosmopolitan project. It is through the iter- ated reconstitution and grounding of a sense of unity that humanity’s most ambitious project can be pursued. But it is not an easy project. It is a social, cultural, and political struggle conducted individually and collectively, at the same time. It is the recognition of these multiple and 516 G. Caruso combined aspects of the struggle for emancipation that constitute the open cosmopolitanism of the global justice movements. Historical and psychological conflicts and the inevitable gaps between aspirations and achievements make it harder for Cosmopolis to prevail. The challenges faced by Cosmopolis are real and grounded in social and political processes of global reach, and they may cause unexpected and unwelcome turns in global activism. Empire and Cosmopolis do traverse the global justice movement but, as Gills compellingly puts it, ‘Cosmopolis is not a dream, or a mere vision of utopia. Rather, like its dyadic antithesis Empire, it is a constant in world history. This should give us confidence for the future’ (2005, p. 9).

Disclosure Statement No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes 1 For a partial calendar of the events, see http://openfsm.net/projects/wsf2012-support/project-home. 2 See also Escobar (2004). 3 The latest such interviews include 28 conversations held in the autumn of 2013 lasting between 55 and 155 minutes. These interviewees have individually and collectively a great experience of the WSF process. Seventeen of them have organised at least one regional or continental social forum in five continents, and eight of them have organised at least one edition of the global event in three continents; all have histories of committed engagement with global justice activism, in some cases going back several decades. They come from all continents except Oceania; their age ranges from late 20s to mid-70s; they are 17 men and 11 women. 4 For a detailed account, see Sen (2004).

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Giuseppe Caruso is an honorary psychotherapist at the Central and North West London NHS Foundation Trust in London and also works for a mental health charity, The Richmond Fellow- ship. His research interests focus on transnational activist networks and social justice. He is interested in conflicting cosmopolitan visions, paradigms of social development, and regimes of global governance. He has written on the Right to the City movement; on free and open soft- ware activism; on philanthropy and activist networks, and has published a volume on traditional healers and social transformation among the Shipibo-Conibo of Peru, and a more recent one on cosmopolitanism as imagined by the activists of the WSF. Copyright of Globalizations is the property of Routledge and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use.