Edges of Global Justice: The World Social Forum and Its 'Others'

This book explores how the World Social Forum (WSF) has developed in response to the current period of profound crisis and transition in the history of Western capitalist modernity. The WSF has been thrown up by social forces as a laboratory of practices for other possible worlds; it is at a leading edge of the transition, where other possible futures are being imagined and constructed, but it is also firmly rooted in the order that is passing. Based on ten years of field work on three continents, this book examines social movements as knowledge producers. It pays attention to specific movements and their praxis-based knowledges and its arguments are grounded in sustained empirical attention to what movements are doing and saying on the terrain of the WSF over time and from place to place. Engaging with several strands of social and political thought, global civil society, autonomism, and transnational feminism, each chapter outlines a set of contestations and contributions with relevance beyond debates about the WSF. It will be of strong interest to students and scholars of social movement studies; international politics; gender studies; sociology; political theory and social work.