Talking New Politics

In the run-up to the fourth World Social Forum held in Mumbai, India in January 2004, civil activists and students organized 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. This book, the first in a series that explore the new ideas generated by the discussions that took place on all these issues, comprises chapters based on the transcripts of presentations made by academics and activists during the seminars, as well as discussions on questions arising from the presentations. Can the world Social Forum help us to conceptualise and actualize 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? The essays in this book, written in an easy and accessible style, are informed by these questions. They offer the reader different and complex ways of understanding the processes that have helped to shape the World Social Forum and the new politics that seems to be emerging, and what all this represents, for life, society, and politics more generally.