The Global Anti-War Movement Within and Beyond the World Social Forum

This article contributes to the ongoing activist debate over the nature and future of the World Social Forum as well as to scholarly reflection and theorization of the Forum as an open space versus a more action-oriented and partisan organization at the current stage of global struggles against neoliberalism and war. It does so by addressing whether and to what extent the WSF's organizational ethos of bounded diversity plus decentralization has fostered the creation and cross-pollination of movements at the transnational level of contention by analyzing the emergence of a global anti-war movement with in the WSF. It finds that the Forum shave provided a hospitable environment for movement crossovers to shift priorities, resources, frames, claims, campaign strategies, and coalitions in response to the emergent threat of war. It then addresses the more polemical critique of whether the WSF inhibits alliance-building with the most decisive anti-neoliberal and anti-imperial forces of our time, by examining the Beirut and Cairo anti-war conferences. It finds that the polarization and power imbalances exacerbated in these two initiatives suggest that the proscriptions delineated in the WSF Charter aimed at preserving and promoting diversity within the Forum milieus should be maintained