The World Social Forum is one of the most significant civil and political initiatives of the past several decades. Since the first WSF was held in Porto Alegre in January 2001 in Porto Alegre, Brazil, as a counterpoint to the World Economic Forum held in Davos, Switzerland, its call for alternatives, "Another World is Possible!" has been echoing in almost every part of the world. Alternatives that challenge the hegemony of the neoliberal capitalist paradigm of globalisation that seems to have seized the world and got it in its vice-like grip, with profoundly negative effects for a diverse, plural planet. On the eve of the critical fourth World Social Forum gathering to be held in Mumbai, India, in January 2004, The Viveka Foundation announces the first book on the WSF to be published in English from the South, The World Social Forum: Challenging Empires. This committed but critical collection attempts to both comprehensively portray and analyse the richness and depth of the initiative. It not only celebrates but also interrogates the Forum.
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WSF gatherings are increasingly seen as significant social and political interventions in world affairs, and along with other forms of global civil action, are playing a profound role in freeing people from the colonisation of the mind - by empires both 'out there' and within us. Above all, it is a coming together of thousands of individuals and collectives in an 'open space', in a spirit of an efflorescence of solidarity and the celebration of choice.
The Book
On the eve of the critical fourth World Social Forum gathering to be held in Mumbai, India, in January 2004, The Viveka Foundation announces the first book on the WSF to be published in English from the South, The World Social Forum : Challenging Empires. This committed but critical collection attempts to both comprehensively portray and analyse the richness and depth of the initiative. It not only celebrates but also interrogates the Forum.
The edited volume consists of essays from international social movement thinkers as well as protagonists and critics of the WSF, both from the South and the North, coming from many different persuasions but adding up to a core of critical reflection. It includes essays on what the Forum is, the larger historical and political landscape within which it is taking shape, an examination of one of the new crucibles where it is taking shape, India, and the role of the Forum in the practice and theory of building other worlds.
The book will be formally launched at the World Social Forum in January 2004 in Mumbai. The Forewords to the book are by Irene Santiago of the Philippines and Hilary Wainwright of the UK.
The Viveka Foundation
25-C DDA Flats, Shahpurjat
New Delhi 110 049, India
Tel: 91-11-2649 2473 / 2649 7586
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