In February this year the World Social Forum (WSF) was held on the campus of the University Cheikh Anta Diop (UCAD) in Dakar, Senegal. Since its inception at Porto Alegre, Brazil, in 2001, the WSF has been scheduled to coincide with the Davos meeting of the World Economic Forum. WSF Dakar didn’t coincide directly with that event, however, and a series of untoward occurrences led to unexpected ramifications. Problems with this year’s event raise questions both about the effectiveness of WSF’s present operational mode and some of its underlying philosophies.
In recent years the WSF has been strongly criticised both from without and within. From without, conservatives have lambasted the event as a pointless, rudderless, leaderless talkfest. The criticism fits the outlook of the New Right closely, who champion the populist heroism of the man or woman of deeds not words.
Problems with the WSF highlighted by the Left are more important. Following WSF Nairobi held in 2007, Firoze Manji wrote,
This event had all the features of a trade fair—those with greater wealth had more events in the calendar, larger (and more comfortable) spaces, more propaganda—and therefore a larger voice. Thus the usual gaggle of quasi-donor and international NGOs claimed a greater presence than national organisations—not because what they had to say was more important or more relevant to the theme of the WSF, but because, essentially, they had greater budgets at their command.
I thus went to Dakar with mixed expectations. WSF 2011 was meant to be different, but in part due to decisions made by Senegalese officials, what transpired in Dakar was largely unproductive chaos. There has been some defensiveness from the Left and relative silence from the WSF itself about what took place. As a sympathetic observer of the WSF for several years and participant in WSF 2011, I believe that a robust debate is needed, if the global justice movement is to clearly articulate its message and show us a way forward to the alternatives it seeks.
WSF Dakar 2011 was kicked off on the Sunday of a five-day event with a massive, peaceful street march through Dakar. Around 70,000 activists from over 150 countries marched four kilometres from the headquarters of the Senegalese national broadcaster to the UCAD site. But from early the next day it became apparent that there was a major problem: university holidays had been cancelled and classes were being held across the campus. Why this occurred is not clear. One rumour suggested that Senegalese President Abdoulaye Wade had demanded the university withdraw its support for the event, while also withdrawing three-quarters of promised funding, in a fit of pique at the organisers’ refusal to allow him to open proceedings. Alternatively, Immanuel Wallerstein, seeing it in the light of the Tunisian and Egyptian uprisings, suggested that the Senegalese establishment wanted to ‘sabotage’ the WSF while keeping face with the numerous foreign dignitaries in attendance, such as ‘Lula of Brazil, Morales of Bolivia, and numerous African presidents’. This explanation was given some credibility by the President’s public pronouncement that he supported market-based development solutions over those offered by ‘ineffective social movements’. Wallerstein reported the firing of the rector of the university four days before the WSF’s opening and the installation of a new rector, ‘who promptly reversed the decision of the previous rector to suspend classes during the WSF so that meeting rooms [would have been] available’.
Regardless of what exactly happened, the WSF was thrown into utter chaos, for which the organising committee was in no way prepared. The whole episode, and the committee’s response, casts considerable doubt on the WSF’s philosophy of ‘self-organisation’, ‘centrelessness’, and its being a ‘network of networks’ and an ‘assembly of assemblies’. Given the heavy internal criticisms of Nairobi 2007, a worse outcome for Dakar 2011 could not have been imagined. Instead of classrooms and lecture theatres, the event was staged in tents in the open. By Tuesday afternoon a program of sorts was distributed, without tent allocations. By Wednesday morning it seemed every street hawker in West Africa had arrived, putting paid to the ideals of Fair Trade and non-exploitation. A number of mobile sound systems—massive speaker banks strapped to the back of utilities—also turned up, making it almost impossible to hear or be heard. This created an amplification Arms Race of sorts among participant groups. No WSF organisers were on hand to ask that volumes be turned down, with the result that even if one did locate a particular seminar tent, it was possible that discussion would be drowned out by amplified music, or indeed the amplified discussion of a better-resourced group in an adjacent tent.
The Dakar event raises a number of questions. Why was there no contingency plan? Why was there no protocol in place requiring groups that relocated seminars due to noise (to a quieter place on campus or, in the case of the wealthy Northern NGOs, to conference centres and hotel lobbies in the city) to alert others the change? Why were there no childcare facilities? And why was the event held on such a massive campus totally remote from the city centre in such an expensive city? If the idea was to hold the event in the South to facilitate more involvement from African groups, why didn’t someone read the ubiquitous Lonely Planet guidebook, which categorically states that Dakar is definitely not a city for the budget-minded traveller? Why was there no provision for drinking water sanitation, only plastic bottled water? The sight every morning of massive piles of waste gathered from across campus, and overflowing sewage from the very limited public toilets also prompts one to ask: why invite 70,000 people to a place with such a chronic lack of infrastructure?
While I personally had the mixed fortunes of being put up in Le Novotel, adjacent to the French Concession (a gated community in the city centre), from where I could comfortably soirée with French Party Socialistes, European Greens, Jubilee USA and a huge contingent of allegedly taxpayer-funded Brazilian trade union delegates (who incidentally appeared more interested in shopping and clubbing), most delegates were camped in hostel-type
accommodation with intermittent power and water supplies, ten to fifteen kilometres from the city, and often still further from UCAD. Worse, I know of a number of people from African and South-East Asian organisations and more than a few Northerners who were gazumped by those willing to pay higher prices for a bed and so were left without accommodation or internet access at all for the first few days. As South African activist Patrick Bond noted, the ‘debilitating logistical mess’ at Dakar meant, once again, that ‘well-networked middle-class NGO professionals regrouped quickly’ while the lowest income groups, such as the African women who in many cases had travelled hundreds of kilometres by bus, ‘didn’t have cellphones and were most victimized’.
Following Nairobi 2007, and now since Dakar 2011, calls for the WSF to adopt an explicitly political program have increased. Demands have been made that the WSF issue common statements of purpose or manifestos. I don’t feel qualified to argue that what happened at Dakar justifies a radical reorientation of the WSF away from being a focal point for global justice movement networking towards becoming a front of sorts for a global political movement. I do, however, feel that WSF organisers seem to be operating from within some kind of high theoretical plane (the obsession with being a multitude of multitudes, network of networks, an assembly of assemblies) in a way that ignores the fact that untrammelled power fills the vacuum left by such abstract relativism.
Only the strong, rich and lucky could get something out of Dakar; that is, those already well connected into so-called open networks. This said, even relatively well-funded researchers and activists from Australia and other affluent nations were unable to locate seminars, meetings and plenaries. Poignantly, on late Thursday afternoon, I found the activist-author Naomi Klein wandering in the dust, wind and sun, looking forlorn among the mass of half-collapsed tents and garbage that had been the impromptu Climate Justice ‘site’, half-heartedly tapping her mobile in what seemed to be an attempt to reach a node in this network of networks.
In light of Dakar, I think that the WSF should reject its seemingly all-consuming adherence to abstract relativism and, at a minimum, adopt a set of protocols and procedures that participating organisations agree to uphold, including contingency plans. This is not a call for a manifesto (indeed my point may seem mundane given the WSF’s overall success as a focal point for globalising the politics of social justice), but rather a call for agreement on how best to uphold all that is good about open networks and discursive space while at the same time formalising some things with the aim of defending the weakest in the network. For a start, an agreement might include the above-mentioned—and to my mind essential—conditions for discussion: adequate accommodation and transport, childcare, adequate sanitation and water provision, adequate notification of changes to programs and contingency plans that apply equally to all participants.
Dakar also suggests the need for well-informed WSF volunteers placed in strategic locations across the site to help and direct people, and for a well-organised ‘orientation’ site, the latter concerned to not only to orient participants in a physical sense but also socially and historically, and serve as a HQ for organising the translators. Perhaps most importantly, there is a need to question the wisdom of imposing upwards of 70,000 people upon an already stressed and stretched society. Debating these on-the-ground operational issues is necessary if the WSF is to respond to its sympathetic critics, sustaining not only the view that another world is possible but also practically serving as a foundation for long-term debate and action around what that world should look like.
By Andy Scerri
Andy Scerri is a research fellow in the Global Cities Institute, RMIT University. While the trip described in this article was funded by an Australian government research grant, the views expressed are the author’s own and do not relate to the research project itself.