Workshop: E023 The future of social forums WSF and ESF

Discontinued model or new beginning?

After its recent event in Mexico, the World Social Forum is facing its reconfiguration as a process, as a structure and as an open space. Ideas range from resignation to the creation of an avant-garde. The European Social Forum will celebrate its 20th anniversary in Florence in November. Will this be the prelude to a new beginning?

The history of the World Social Forum and the European Social Forum began in 2001 with an overwhelming start in Porto Alegre, followed by the first meeting in Europe in 2002 in Florence. These were the attempts to bundle the critique of globalisation in an open space and to find answers to the crisis-like development of intensified neoliberalism. After twenty years and a clear decline in interest in the social forum movement, the future of this movement is being questioned. While the initiators of the ESF are inviting people to Florence for a new beginning in November of this year, the 15th WSF in Mexico was reduced to a regional event of the Southern Americas and finds its International Council at odds over the question of whether the WSF will remain an open space of the globalisation-critical movement in accordance with its founding charter of Porto Alegre, or whether it will transform itself as a political subject into an action alliance. The social struggles coming to a head in the face of inflation and austerity policies in the European Union urgently call for a common strategy of resistance. But what is the right strategy? Activists from the founding years of WSF and ESF will discuss this in this workshop.

Info

Day: 2022-08-20
Start time: 10:00
Duration: 01:45
Room: S103 Organization:
Track: Civil liberties, democracy
Language: de

Links:

Concurrent Events