Abstract
Since its first meeting in Porto Alegre, Brazil in 2001, the World Social Forum (WSF) has served as a major international gathering of movements who oppose neoliberal capitalist globalization. Tens of thousands of activists and radical intellectuals arrive in a different city at each of the conferences, which mainly take place semi-yearly in the Global South. Participants come from several continents and from a plurality of organizations, social backgrounds, and political perspectives. As such, these conferences make for fertile spaces from which to study transnational mobilizations for global justice. This book showcases some of the latest research on these themes, based on surveys and observations from the 2011 WSF in Dakar, Senegal.
Using mostly quantitative but also some qualitative methods, the contributors to this volume take up significant questions that advance the existing scholarship on transnational social movements. The role of material inequalities in shaping the contours and forms of participation is a prominent focus in most of the chapters. The authors also investigate the social and ideological diversity among activists from different as well as similar regions of the Global South; how nationalist and anti-imperialist discourses become legitimated as political claims thanks to the distance that most attendees experience from their home territories; and the contentious dynamics whereby women’s organizations within the Dakar WSF attempted to relate to African women’s movements, in a context of increasingly heated African debates around ‘tradition’ and ‘Islam’.
Beyond the relevant questions of global justice movements, in general, and the WSF conferences, in particular, the book offers interesting reflections and applies some advanced techniques pertinent to large-scale multi-lingual survey research at international events. It is thus particularly relevant for scholars and students interested in interpreting the division of labor within international organizations.
Substantively, the book goes beyond what the editors see as a tendency toward overly macro sociology combined with a type of ungrounded, discursive analysis in alter-globalization studies of ‘borderless’ 21st century social movements. Authors find that the professionalization and ‘NGO-ization’ of the African ‘activist’ scene has surged ever since their previous analysis of the WSF gathering in Nairobi. The fact that a large portion of WSF participants in Dakar were salaried members of non-governmental organizations (NGOs), and that African participants were on the whole politically moderate and averse to radical repertoires of protest in their home countries, is not necessarily new or surprising. Still, the careful observations of forum speeches and interactions, along with the descriptions of the boisterous role of Latin American delegations, bring up the interesting question of the cleavages among Global South participants. Partly at issue is the extent to which the Latin American ‘Pink Tide’ can claim legitimate leadership of the WSF process, given that the WSF was initiated in Brazil by the Workers’ Party (PT) and that the ‘Bolivarian revolution’ personified by Hugo Chavez was in full swing during the time of the Dakar conference. The careful observations of how Latin Americans attempted to construct cultural and political affinities with Black Africa were also thought-provoking.
The chapter ‘Mapping a Population and Its Taste in Tactics’ analyzed questionnaires using Multiple Correspondence Analysis and Ascending Hierarchical Clustering to suggest that most African participants shunned violent and disruptive protests/strikes. The fact that most of the Maghreb (North African) countries were undergoing popular uprisings in 2010–2011 that ousted or attempted to oust repressive comprador regimes may imply either that most African attendants in Dakar were drawn from outside the social sectors that joined or supported the Arab Spring. In that sense, the survey results should, of course, not be interpreted as reflecting the points of view of African social movements or of the African ‘Left’ in general, seeing that the authors noted the increasing hegemony of professionalized NGO patronage at the 2011 conference. Or, as the authors claim in their paraphrasing of Charles Tilly, this finding on the relatively conservative tastes of African WSF participants may also underscore how ‘not all activists are equally familiar with protest practices, what they consist of or what they basically mean’ (p. 90). After Dakar, WSF organizers decided to hold both the 2013 and the 2015 conferences in Tunisia, the cradle of the Arab Spring. I was fortunate to attend both of the Tunis conferences, where I had many conversations with Arab participants who had flocked to these events with hopes of continuing the radical transformation of their societies.
The current book might thus have offered a better bridge from Nairobi and Dakar into the post-Arab Spring period of alter-global activism and anti-systemic movements had it included an afterword with preliminary hypotheses (and observations) on the Tunis gatherings. But the editors did not clarify whether they attended or carried out updated surveys at any WSF meetings after Dakar. The book is thus very useful for showcasing rich (mostly survey) analysis of the 2011 Dakar conference and for provoking new thinking on how to study future international activist gatherings. But, its somewhat ‘frozen in time’ character would not make it the ideal text for introducing students to the basic past, present, and future of the WSF process. The chapters on gender, nationalism, and performance aspects of the WSF are appropriate for graduate courses in qualitative methods, transnational resistance to neoliberalism, and political discourse analysis. The quantitative chapters offer innovative ways to analyze large-scale survey data, such as the INSURA (INdividual SUrveys During RAllies) approach that nests respondents into subsamples like countries, organizations, and distance traveled to Dakar. These entries are more suited for graduate courses touching on cross-sectional survey methods and perhaps as exemplars on international social movement research design.
Another moderate drawback, evident in the ambiguous meaning of the ‘no response’ survey answers and in the alleged passivity of many African participants, is the book’s lack of in-depth interviews, oral narratives, and other similar qualitative approaches to the subject matter. Since narratives can act as powerful devices that motivate political action through affect, it would have been fascinating to include extended sections of interviews with WSF participants from the various socio-demographics that surveys drew from, and then read the authors’ interpretations of these answers to a qualitative questionnaire. Although clearly more time-consuming and requiring greater resources to obtain, even a sample of a dozen qualitative interviews conducted at these international activist gatherings may be able to tell us more about the meaning that the WSF experience, and that individual survey questions, hold for the people who participate.
I would be very interested to read the degree to which survey respondents from different nationalities and affiliations sympathized with (or were alienated from) certain events and encounters that are portrayed in the chapters of this book. This would include the assertiveness and open government involvement of the South American delegations; the attempts by women’s organizations to organize inside, as well as outside the conference; and the nationalist calls for independence by participants from Morocco’s Western Sahara. Since many participants spontaneously hold the default political positions of the organizations who sponsored their travel or of which they are members, interviews with leaders of organizations may be a valuable future proxy through which to understand the context-specific rhetoric and thinking within certain ‘blocs’ of activists. Without, at least some interviews, we remain unenlightened about the subjective significance of, say, professionalization of activism, or of loaded terms like ‘revolution’ and ‘democracy’ for those who employ them. We also would benefit from interviews to gauge participants’ more substantive thoughts on the ongoing debates over local culture, imperialism, and patriarchy.
The ethnographic chapter on the forum’s waste management techniques applies a Goffmanian, dramaturgical analysis to the ‘tangible aspects’ of holding a WSF forum. Herrera, Judell, and Paule used concepts of staging, boundary-setting, audiences, and backstage tactics to illustrate how activist delineated space, in order to sustain the proclaimed values of the WSF. It was helpful and illuminating to read how organizers navigated the institutional constraints of government agencies, previous World Bank programs, and the waste workers union that shaped waste management policy in the months of preparations for the event. It might have been worthwhile to also discuss the status relations among the forum’s waste management personnel, in keeping with the themes of other chapters which analyze survey data to understand the patterns and cleavages common to Senegalese participants and perhaps to Global South participants, in general. Myriad other issues might have been taken up in additional ethnographic chapters.
The book concludes by saying that ‘explaining the pragmatic paradoxes in which activists are caught can give them an opportunity to appropriate this knowledge and de-dramatize what is so often the basis for conflicts between them’ (p. 219). This is indeed true, but one lacks the sense of how this specific research project is being made, or could be made, accessible to WSF organizers and participants in some useful form. This brings up the methodological question of the researchers’ responsibility to their respondents. It can be instructive to learn whether WSF organizers gave consent to having this team of academics formally study the Dakar forum and its participants or whether consent was only sought from individuals who filled out the questionnaire. Reciprocity is particularly important in social movement research where Northern academics study activist events in the Global South. It would be good to see some discussion, perhaps in the appendix, of which steps are being taken to help activists gain use of the knowledge in this volume.
This book is ultimately very beneficial and practical for reflecting on how the division of labor in social movements is shaped by larger material and intellectual conditions. Issues such as the training of activists, the salience of some issues over others to participants, the staging of conferences, and the differential access of organizations to resources and scripts are as much products of the ‘development industry’ as they are of previous WSF experiences, world politics, and the deeply stratified structure of the world-system. In a world where we are often told by dominant institutions (and by some scholars) that global technology and culture are quickly diminishing anachronistic rivalries and provincialisms, this book studies a transitory international activist space in which participants are mutually engaged in constructing a more inclusive and more equal world. It does so not through a bird’s eye view and sweeping generalizations about borderless civil society but precisely by paying attention to place and space through a variety of methodological techniques. This ends up giving readers a better appreciation for the specific kinds of ‘local’ effects that can emerge in any concrete situation of transnational social movement organizing.