Description

“Davos” has become synonymous with everything bad about globalization—capitalist imperialism, elitism, secrecy, and antidemocratic operations. Dating from the first confrontations at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, in 2001, the World Social Forum has become the largest political gathering in human history and offers a direct challenge to the extreme inequities of corporate-led globalization. The forums are an experiment in global and participatory democracy, bringing together networks, organizations, and activists from around the world to create visions of a just and liberated global society. This book is itself an experiment in collaboration among twelve leading scholars, all of whom have participated in World Social Forums around the globe. Recounting dozens of dramatic firsthand experiences from their attendance, these authors draw on their knowledge of global politics to introduce the World Social Forum process, explain its foundations, and discuss its relevance to ongoing transnational efforts toward freedom, peace, and democracy. In keeping with the spirit of the World Social Forums and the collaborative authorship of the book, royalties will be donated to Grassroots Global Justice.

• This is the first book we know of on the World Social Forum process that specifically addresses a nonspecialist U.S. audience
• Many of the book’s authors are well-known experts in the fields this book addresses
• The book’s multiple authors have participated in all of the World Social Forums and in many regional and local ones, offering a unique approach to analyzing this major global phenomenon
• The World Social Forum is the most happening event on the planet and Americans are just starting to learn about it
• This is a perfect handbook for those interested in social activism in the contemporary world
• Leading scholars wrote this book for a general readership including activists and students to alert them to the World Social Forum, currently the most significant global political event

Author Info

Jackie Smith is Associate Professor of Sociology and Peace Studies at the University of Notre Dame. She is author of Global Visions/Rival Networks: Social Movements for Global Democracy (Johns Hopkins University Press 2007). She has coedited three books and numerous articles on transnational activism, including Coalitions across Borders: Transnational Protest in a Neoliberal Era (with Joe Bandy), which explores how people have developed organizations and techniques to build transnational alliances among people of widely varying cultural, political, and economic backgrounds.

Marina Karides is assistant professor of sociology at Florida Atlantic University. She is an active participant in the World Social Forums and Sociologists Without Borders. Her recent work considers gendered dimensions of globalization and the global justice movement. She has published articles in Social Problems, Social Development Issues, and International Sociology and Social Policy and multiple chapters that critically examine microenterprise development and the plight of informally self-employed persons in the global south. She is currently writing a book on street vendors and spacial rights in the global economy.

Marc Becker teaches Latin American History at Truman State University. His research focuses on constructions of race, class, and gender within popular movements in the South American Andes. He has a forthcoming book on the history of indigenous movements in twentieth-century Ecuador. He is an Organizing Committee member of the Midwest Social Forum (MWSF), a Steering Committee member and web editor for Historians Against the War (HAW), and a member of the Network Institute for Global Democratization (NIGD).

Dorval Brunelle is professor of sociology and director of the Observatory of the Americas at the University of Quebec in Montreal (UQAM). He has published extensively on Quebec and the Canadian political economy, law and social exclusion, and social dimensions of globalization. His latest book, Derive globale, has been translated into English as From World Order to Global Disorder: States, Markets, and Dissent (2007). Brunelle has edited or coedited numerous books on global integration, and his current research addresses the World Social Forum process and market liberalization and gender issues.

Christopher Chase-Dunn is Distinguished Professor of Sociology and director of the Institute for Research on World-Systems at the University of California-Riverside. He is the author of Rise and Demise: Comparing World-Systems (with Thomas D. Hall), The Wintu and Their Neighbors (with Kelly Mann), and The Spiral of Capitalism and Socialism (with Terry Boswell). He is the founder and coeditor (with Walter Goldfrank) of the Journal of World-Systems Research. Chase-Dunn is currently doing research on global elite integration in the nineteenth century and on both the growth and decline phases and upward sweeps of empires and future global state formation.

Donatella della Porta is professor of sociology at the European University Institute. Among her recent publications are Globalization from Below (2006); Quale Europa? Europeizzazione, identita e conflitti (2006); Social Movements: An Introduction, Second Edition (2006); and Transnational Protest and Global Activism.

Rosalba Icaza Garza is a Marie Curie Post-Doctoral Research Fellow at the Iberoamerican Institute, Gothenburg University in Sweden. She acts as an external associate of the Centre for the Study of Globalization and Regionalization (CSGR). Her forthcoming Globalizations article is entitles, "To Be and Not to Be: The Question of Transborder Civic Activism and Regionalization in Mexico. A Critical Account of Neo-Gramscian Perspectives."

Jeffrey S. Juris is assistant professor of anthropology in the Department of Social and Behavioral Sciences at Arizona State University. He received his PhD in anthropology from the University of California-Berkeley, where his research explored globalization, social movements, and transnational activism. His forthcoming book, Networking Futures (2008), explores the cultural logic and politics of transnational networking among anticorporate globalization activists in Barcelona. He has also published several articles regarding this topic as well as the relationship between new digital technologies and grassroots social movements.

Lorenzo Mosca is Max Weber fellow at the European University Institute of Florence and collaborates in the DEMOS project with Donatella della Porta. Among his recent publications are "Contamination in Action and the Global Justice Movement" (with Donatella della Porta) in Global Networks (January 2007); Globalization from Below: Transnational Activists and Protest Networks (with Donatella della Porta, Massimiliano Andretta, and Herbert Reiter) (2006); and (with Massimiliano Andretta) "Understanding the Genoa Protest," in R. Taylor (ed.), Interpreting Global Civil Society (2004).

Ellen Reese is associate professor of sociology at the University of California-Riverside. Her research focuses on poverty, welfare state development, urban politics, and social movements. Her book, Backlash Against Welfare Mothers: Past and Presents (2005) examines long-term transformations in the U.S. welfare state. She is also coeditor with Amalia Cabezas and Marguerite Waller of The Wages of Empire: Neoliberal Policies, Repression, and Women's Poverty (Paradigm Publishers 2007). She is currently writing a new book, They Say Cutback; We Say Fight-back! Welfare Rights Activism in an Era of Retrenchment.

Peter (Jay) Smith is professor of political science at Athabasca University, Alberta, Canada. He haspublished recent articles on themes including new communications technologies, globalization and trade politics, transnational organizing, democracy, and citizenship. His work has appeared in Global Governance: A Review of Multilaterialism and International Organizations and in numerous edited volumes, including eTransformation in Governance: New Directions in Government and Politics (edited by Mattie Malkia, Ari-Veikko Anttiroiko, and Reijo Savolainen) and A Hundred Years of Citizenship in Australia and Canada (edited by Pierre Boyer, Linda Cardinal, and David Heaton).

Rolando Vazquez is visiting fellow at the Sociology Department, University of Warwick in the UK and at the Sociology Department, Gothenburg University in Sweden. He has done research on the temporality of the political, by linking the works of Hannah Arendt and Walter Benjamin. In 2006 he published "Thinking the Event with Hannah Arendt," European Journal of Social Theory 9(1): 43-57. He is completing research on the temporality of globalization and on the relationship between art and the commodity.

Reviews

“A must read if you want to understand the harsh economic conditions and the political meanness of the world…a cabal of robber barons ‘gone wild’ on the international landscape and the peoples’ fight-back to reclaim their humanity and dignity, to restore a safe and clean world environment and to create a fair and just world in which democracy works for all peoples.”
—Dr. Gwen Patton, long-time human rights activist

"This book is a real contribution to the worldwide struggle for global justice. It offers the reader (even those who have been to meetings of the World Social Forum) insight into what the WSF has been, what are its internal debates and difficulties, and how we might move forward."
—Immanuel Wallerstein, Yale University