Saturday, April 20, 2024
News and Views from the Global South
WORLD SOCIAL FORUM: Diversity, a Birthright Waiting to Be Recognised
Analysis by Mario Osava
- For many people, the World Social Forum (WSF)’s influence and effect is waning, perhaps because it has outpaced public opinion and the dominant political processes, but not the real needs of the times, which require complex and urgent solutions.
Maintaining an open, unstructured space for debates and coordination in order to strengthen civil society, in a "horizontal" manner and without adopting resolutions, while rejecting the temptation to become a movement with a direct influence on power, are hallmarks of the difference between the WSF and the current political culture. But they are creating internal conflicts within the WSF.
Organising in non-hierarchical networks, and recognising and respecting diversity in all its dimensions, are part of the democracy of the future that WSF theorists propose to build from within its own internal practices. But they are little understood by the general public, or by many WSF participants themselves.
Climate change may be an opportunity for the Forum to recover the initial impact it made on public opinion, now often attributed to the "novelty" value of its early meetings, the first of which was held in 2001 in the southern Brazilian city of Porto Alegre.
The climate change crisis adds new appeal to the WSF slogan, "Another World Is Possible," and emphasises the "…And Necessary" which many activists add to it. The present level of knowledge about climate change indicates that change is inevitable, and may be positive if humanity decides to act, or catastrophic if inertia prevails.
The issue creates opportunities to identify the values and structures that are leading the world towards disaster, and reinforces the need to change them, according to one of the founders of the WSF, Francisco Whitaker of Brazil, in a recent article defending open debate in the forum against proposals to change it into an instrument of action.
Climate and environmental issues will be central to the world conference which the WSF will hold again in 2009, after the decentralised demonstrations promoted this year on the Global Day of Action, held Saturday.
It is no coincidence that the Amazon jungle region was chosen as the venue for the next WSF, which will be held in the northern Brazilian city of Belém.
But the Forum’s basic difficulties ultimately derive from the enormity of the challenge of coordinating and mobilising global civil society for "another world," one that is safer and more just.
The world has become more complex, with diverse interest groups and cultures that are no longer content to submit to domination. Women, black people, indigenous people, the mentally ill, people with disabilities, young people and homosexuals are all demanding their place in society and in decision-making processes.
National states "are no use" to indigenous peoples, "because they are based on a non-indigenous model that is incapable of understanding diversity," said Lisio Lili, a member of the Terena people and of the Inter-Tribal Committee, adding a new complication, hardly considered as yet, to the world the WSF activists wish to transform.
The Terena, who number some 20,000 to 30,000 people, live in the state of Mato Grosso do Sul, close to the Pantanal wetlands shared between Brazil and Bolivia.
They are regarded as virtually assimilated into the dominant society, because many of them have moved to cities and attended university. But lately they have reaffirmed their identity, and even reclaimed their ancestral lands, occupied by ranchers.
Lili, who used to be a schoolteacher and a local leader of the National Indigenous Foundation (FUNAI), a state welfare agency, said that original peoples must struggle for autonomy, which depends on land ownership, in opposition to the state, "which is not theirs" and has in fact harmed them, with inappropriate health, education and economic policies.
Over the border in Bolivia, now headed by indigenous President Evo Morales, representatives of indigenous peoples in Andean and Central American countries, as well as Argentina, Brazil and Paraguay, met in La Paz from Jan. 15 to 17.
They issued a declaration in support of building "plurinational states" in which they would have an active voice and recognition of their territories, rights, customs and community economies.
The indigenous peoples’ reaffirmation of their rights implies rebellion against the national states that were imposed throughout the Americas by means of extermination policies. It will be interesting to monitor and analyse in detail how an indigenous president in Bolivia manages that state, where plurinational and regional models of autonomy are in conflict.
In 1500, the indigenous population of Brazil was estimated at five million, but had fallen to a few hundred thousand a decade ago. Since then it has begun growing again.
The state now has an ambiguous attitude towards its indigenous citizens. The constitution recognises indigenous rights and there are welfare policies – distribution of basic food products, for example – but there are permanent obstacles to the recovery of their traditional lands.
In Mato Grosso do Sul, the Kaiowá branch of the Guaraní peoples are facing administrative and legal delays, and even the murder of their leaders, in their efforts to recover lands along the border with Paraguay, where many of their kin live.
The army is opposed to the demarcation of indigenous lands along the borders, alleging national security risks.
In fact, an "institutional globalisation" has taken place which obliges all people to organise themselves as national states. Such an imposition is also at the root of the vast tragedies in Africa.
This is related to diversity of a kind that has not yet been discussed even by the WSF, but is likely to be debated in Belém in 2009, as the Amazon region has a large indigenous population.
The world has always been complex, but the dominant forces and ideology were able to impose an apparent homogeneity by excluding or isolating those who were different, crushing their demands, and adopting inflexible "one size fits all" laws and a single educational system.
Diversity began to be established as a value and a natural principle quite recently, and in particular since the 1960s. It has been promoted by several activist movements, which have changed the world but, at the same time, fragmented societies.
This situation urges coordination and negotiations that are unlikely to prosper in hierarchical institutions. Open forums are the place where they can flourish.
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