The new generation of activists (indignados, occupy), gathered around Global Square, recommend this book about their predecessor movements:

* Book: World Social Forum: Critical Explorations. OpenWord, 2012

Global Square writes:

“This is an extraordinary book about an extraordinary phenomenon. From the outset of the 21st century, the World Social Forum has been the premier venue of world social movements. It has been the home of globalized challenges to corporate globalization and neoliberalism from the global opposition to the Iraq war to the transnational challenge to caste and racism to the anti-austerity politics of the Great Recession. It has led to renewed hope that “another world is possible”.

As the Indignados, Occupy Wall Street, climate protection, and other large new movements have spread around the globe in the past two years, the ways in which the World Social Forum and these new movements choose to relate to each other will be critical. For those who wish to understand the WSF and its limits and potentials for the period ahead, there is no better guide than the new book World Social Forum : Critical Explorations. Its 36 essays by diverse contributors from around the world engage deep issues about the WSF, and more broadly about the process of social movement globalization, with conceptual clarity and straightforward language and style. Whether the WSF wheel is modified for new conditions or reinvented, the lessons of its experience will be essential for global social change. This book is an indispensable guide to what the WSF has been and what that means for the future of global social movements. For those in the new movements trying to decide whether and how they should relate to the WSF, this is the book I would tell them to read.”

In a review, Marianne Maeckelbergh writes:

“The constructively encompassing scope, diversity, and dynamically transformative shapings/re-shapings of the World Social Forum phenomenon require an equivalent breadth and fluidity of reflection, critique, and affirmation as we seek to understand positive politics and potentials for the 21st century. This book, World Social Forum : Critical Explorations, offers an original and vitally needed departure point for such an understanding, with its heterogeneity of voices flowing around the global social justice center of gravity.

Importantly, this provocative and energizing compilation, from a wide variety of writer-activists, provides sharply critical discussions of limitations and impediments to the development of the World Social Forum, such as the key issue of male dominance in certain settings, and the vexing question of who financially can and cannot attend such events. This necessary and refreshing openness to doing sharply etched reflections on and from the various World Social Forum gatherings, tells us that the dry-rot of dogmatism – that scourge of leftist history – is being transcended. The openness of Critical Explorations to wide ranging difficulties, possibilities, and organizing necessities is perhaps not so much about ‘a movement’, but rather describes people and organizations around the world that are in movement. With its constantly constructive respectfully dialogues and critiques and its depiction of the fluidity, dissolution, and resolution of diverse global perspectives, this book is an invaluable reader, both explicating and exhorting the best of the human spirit.”