The World Social Forum as a Portal of Globalization:: Complex Spatialities in Social Movement Studies

Abstract

Applying the concept of portals of globalization, the goal of this paper is to capture the signiicance of the World Social Forum (WSF) for the alter-globalization movement. Since 200, the WSF brings together social movements and other civil-society actors that are ideologically or geographically disconnected. It ofers a transnational space for sharing experiences about globalization processes and for facilitating the lows of ideas on how to inluence the course of globalization. Analysing the politics of space, place, network, and scale in the WSF, the paper shows that the concept of portals of globalization helps to capture the spatial complexity of the forum. I argue that the WSF is not simply a place of anti-neoliberalism but a portal of globalization that inhabits diferent actors competing for the recognition of their interpretation of the nature of globalization.