Talking New Politics

In the run-up to the fourth World Social Forum held in Mumbai, India in January 2004, civil activists and students organised a major series of seminars in Delhi University to discuss the Forum and its politics. The Open Space seminar series, as it came to be called, picked up on the idea of the Forum as a relatively free space, where all kinds of ideas could meet and be discussed. These books explore the new ideas generated by the discussions. Can the World Social Forum, the authors ask, help us to conceptualise and actualise a new politics? Can this new politics be free from violence? Can the experience and knowledge of great movements such as the movement for the environment, and the women s movement, contribute to the creation of a new politics? How can such a politics be sustained? These volumes offer the reader different and complex ways of understanding the processes that have helped to shape the World Social Forum and the new politics thatseems to be emerging.