Making Sense of a Pluralist World: Sixth Pan-European Conference on International Relations

The World Social Forum is an open space-movement that contrasts with the formalist self referred political system of representative democracy and inter-State relations. Its banners, decision-making practices and political culture question the social and political orders of global governance that have traditionally been presented as balanced structures aiming at a predictable and universal material progress and a general sense of citizenship. New social movements and, more recently, transnational movements and alterglobalist networks within the WSF bring into challenge the democracy deficit and the social ineffectiveness of global governance and its international regulation mechanisms. They have shown that globalization processes bring about strong paradoxes related to a meaningful cleavage between an idealized progress promised by liberal and Keynesian democracy (not to speak of socialist experiences) and limited institutional capacities to provide equality rooted in a principle of global justice. Consequently, transnational social movements have played an important role by exposing the disconnections between liberty, distribution and recognition on a world-wide scale. This paper is based on the following assumption: transnational social movements are the expression of a new social subject and have shifted their scale of political intervention since the 1990 ́s in order to render their fight for social justice politically pertinent. In pursuance of developing this assumption, this paper approaches the discussion about legitimacy and contestation within global governance in two general parts. Firstly, it presents a theoretical and methodological framework for analysing transnational social movements as key political players that question the legitimacy of current standards of global governance. Secondly, it looks into the World Social Forum as a relevant political expression of transnational social movements, basically through two central aces of analysis: the WSF as a community of social practices facing the challenge of a new culture of politics; and the dilemma of identity-building vis-à-vis its process of global expansion. Salvador (Bahia), 25 August 2007.