Talking New Politics: Are Other Worlds Possible?

In the run-up the fourth World Social Forum held in Mumbai, India in January 2004, civil activists and student 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 not meet and be discussed. The book, the first in a series that explore the new ideas generated by the discusssions took place on all these issues, comprises chapters based on the transcripts of presentation made by academics and activists during the seminars, as well as discussions on the questions arising from the presentation. Can the World Social Forum helps us to conceptualise and actualise a new politics? Can this new politics? Can this new politics be free from violence? Can the experience and knowledge of great movements such as the movements for 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 question. 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.