Whereas, particularly tense in the past (some still use the expression “they made a Berlin” to indicate a very confrontational behaviour reminding of the difficult debate to decide the venues of the 2009 and 2011 world events at the IC meeting held in the German capital in May 2007), everyone quickly agreed in Paris that the next WSF had to celebrate the Arab Revolutions and shall, therefore, take place in either Tunisia or Egypt. The uncertainty will be lifted after the elections will take place later this autumn in those countries and the regional outlook will become clearer. At the same time, the members of the Maghreb-Mashreq Social Forum will sound the ground to establish which venue could offer the best conditions to hold a global event of the size and importance of the WSF.

The process of reaching such consensus took an impossibly short time in the face of at least two previous applications to the IC by two other locations to host the 2013 WSF. Activists from Montreal and Santiago de Compostela had already, at the IC meeting held after the Dakar global event in February 2011, offered their cities as hosts and further offers were later made by Portuguese and Croatian activists. However, those activist unanimously converged with the growing consensus and after briefly considering the possibility of organising a multi-polar, distributed and decentralised Social Forum of the Mediterranean including perhaps both Tunis and Cairo alongside Zagreb, the final decision confirmed that the forum will take place in one location to be decided by the same activists of the Maghreb and Mashreq region based on regional considerations as analysed by local actors.

This decision followed the several remarks on the effect that the events started in December 2010 had on the WSF. Many activists noted that they gave the twofold opportunity to the WSF to project its political profile on the grounds of a practically universal convergence of intents and, on the other side, to engage and influence the regional process by supporting local activists and acting like sounding boards of their claims and struggles the world over. As an Egyptian activist noted, such engagement of the WSF and its transnational networks, acknowledges the crucial relevance of the Maghreb-Mashreq in global politics and the scope of its transformations whose reach may indeed contribute to change the world.

But no degree of over-enthusiasm prevented the members of the IC to reflect on the potential political implications for the activists of the region of the decision to hold a WSF in that region. But another Egyptian activist remarked that “what the revolution united, the WSF will not separate”. No conflict, it was promised from all sides, will mar the decision, later this year, on where to hold eventually the 2013 WSF. If divergences of opinion and political positions and strategies are widely acknowledged among the activists of the regions active in the IC and among them and their future local partners in organising the global event, nonetheless no alliance building, strategic bargaining and Machiavellian machination will shape the political work of the next few months. No Berlin will happen along the Southern shores of the Mediterranean.

The first session of the meeting was indeed entirely dedicated to reports from almost all countries of the region and to an engaged plenary conversation. A member of the Maghreb-Mashreq Social Forum introduced the conversation highlighting the recent developments in the region. He remarked how, whereas in Dakar in February the general atmosphere at the forum was of great excitement, even euphoria, things have greatly developed since, exposing challenges and the risk of a mounting counter-revolution in the countries where the insurgencies had prevailed (Tunisia and Egypt) and increasingly violent clampdowns in other countries affected by popular revolts.

This fast developing regional outlook shapes the contours of several challenges to the uprisings and the novel institutional arrangements advocated and struggled for by activists in the different local contexts. Such challenges can be grouped in the following broad categories: state violence and repression; foreign meddling; counter-revolution; and the so-called “Islamist threat”.

State violence is rampant in states like Libya and Syria, Yemen and Bahrain. In the latter cases state violence has either prevented institutional change and the demise of the regime (Bahrain) or greatly delayed it (if, as it is felt, Yemen’s president will soon enough capitulate) and exacerbated the intensity of the social conflict between warring factions. In the former examples, it has either caused the descent of the country  into outright civil war (Libya) or threats a human cost of enormous proportions (as it stands now, the deaths in Syria are reported topping 1400 and over 11,000 have been the politically motivated arrests by the forces of the regime).

Allegedly, in response to state violence and in accordance with the Right to Protect, foreign actors, mandated by UN resolutions and International Criminal Court arrest warrants have empowered NATO to directly strike as in the case of Libya, have heightened sanctions as in the case of Syria and have exercised varied but generalised degrees of pressure on all governments of the region. In several instances, during the IC meeting, the foreign powers’ genuine desire to help was vigorously questioned. But the profound reformulation of the regional geopolitical dynamics is not limited to a rebalancing or an aggravation of power relations between regional actors vis-a-vis “Northern” powers (mostly Europe and United States or the G8). Some activists even suggested that Tunisia might want to join the European Union and be taken into its political sphere of influence while, at the same time, the Gulf Collaboration Council (GCC) accepted Jordan’s membership application and invited Morocco to join its ranks in an attempt to widen its regional and global political clout. It was through the GCC that the United Arab Emirates and Saudi Arabia contributed forces and resources to suppress the Bahrain uprising.

Issues of hypocrisy and double-standards were highlighted and reference to neo-imperialism repeated. The combination of these predatory attitudes from outside and repressive forces from inside constitutes a dramatic grip that risks strangling the still consolidating social movements in the region both where the movement is still forming and struggling, and where it has succeeded in opening up the political system. A further challenge in this sense is constituted by process of differentiation that is taking place in the originally unitary movement against the dictatorships in Tunisia and Egypt.

The third area of concern is constituted by the counterrevolution. As many in Tunisia and Egypt repeat, the dictator has fled but the dictatorship is still in place. The forces of the former political powers are regrouping and recycling themselves in the new political processes and institutional arrangements. Moreover, they have resources and organised structures both of coercion and of cooption. These forces, as in the case of Bahrain for instance are fully supported by key regional allies of the ruling powers, in that case the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. In Tunisia, months after the revolution, plainclothes security agents have returned to the streets to indiscriminately beat peaceful protesters; media activists and even mainstream journalists are intimidated as the hiccupping transformative process advances along a bumpy road. In Egypt, activists are rather conscious that in the current political environment progressive forces are much less organised than their adversaries, namely the former members of the ruling party, that though disbanded and made illegal will still provide logistical infrastructure and the crucial networks to contest and win election as “independent” candidates, and the Muslim Brotherhood and its political offshoots. The resistance against the early elections (scheduled for September) was won in a referendum in which the parties who could most benefit from early elections outnumbered those who asked the interim military government to hold on to its transitional role until all democratic forces could formulate coherent strategies and learn to play the electoral game.

The forth challenge is widely referred to, not only in the countries affected but the world over, as “The Islamic Threat” (in bold and with great emphasis added). Activists at the meeting stressed that the revolts in the Maghreb-Mashreq were caused by a complex mixture of motivations linked to a) the deteriorating quality of life that for some reached the point of inability to fend for themselves and their families in the context of an aggravating economic and food crisis; b) a radical critique of the dominating role played by the international financial institutions and powerful foreign governments in global development regimes; and c) more broadly a denunciations of global imbalances heightened by decades of unfettered neoliberal market ideology imposed on their countries by those governments and international institutions with the collusions of corrupt local dictatorships. For the Islamists instead, though they are concerned with the imperial role of foreign powers, origins, implications and counter-measures to the regional predicaments have a moral foundation grounded in the teachings of the Qur’an. Their politicisation and the shrewd strategic alliances of Islamist activists with, for instance, the Egyptian military junta will certainly frustrate the progressive forces’ attempt to reform the state and ensure its separation from the domain of religion. Across the region, moreover, Islamist organisations can take advantage of decades of grassroots activism and mobilization and profuse financial support from the Gulf as stressed by a Tunisian activist.

A Tunisian activist vibrantly declared that the Islamists are a fascist force, profoundly anti-democratic. He stated that “there are no democratic Islamists”. He also acknowledged that there are different roles among the different groups, that there are those more trained to instrumental and disingenuous forms of dialogue and those who are more militant. But in the end both Salafists and the Mulim Brotherhood will come together as one to deny the victory to the people’s revolution and impose a confessional dictatorship. An Egyptian activist echoed his words stressing that “whereas people hope for a Turkey model [for Egypt and Tunisia] the Pakistan model could be around the corner”. For him “the Islamists don’t have any social agenda, if they go to parliament, they won’t defend the right to health or housing but they will talk about hijabs and against sexual freedom and other moral issues.”

Egyptian activists stressed their acute awareness of the high likelihood of an electoral victory by a complex coalition of Islamic forces and their strategic allies in the army the September elections. The issue is not limited to Egypt. In the whole region Islamic activists, brutally suppressed during the previous regimes, are conquering the centre stage of the political arena after decades of, more or less, clandestine existence. Progressive activists, as their counterparts abroad (and more reactionary actors in the United States and Europe), see with high suspicion Islamic activists. Others raised their voices to highlight that the Islamic movement is a galaxy of diverse groups only a fraction of which, namely Salafist activists, have positions radical enough to make them incommensurable with the demands of an autonomous state under the rule of a law constructed on the foundations of human rights and whose institutional configuration is determined by parliamentary deliberation by members elected in a free and universal suffrage.

In Tunisia, some activists suggested that stopping the Islamist advance will be the most crucial test for the nascent democracy. For such task a strategic alliance of radical, progressive and even liberal partners was being created. But a regional strategy was advocated: a process that lead perhaps to a regional meeting of progressive forces to take place maybe in Egypt and based on a minimal plan of action to save democracy from the risk of Islamist highjack. Memories from the past were referred to in order to clarify to all what the stakes were and what the risks: “We had a revolution in 1988” said an Algerian activist “and then we had a civil war that cost 150,000 lives!” This is not, and was not perceived as, scaremongering, but a real possibility against which some ideological intransigence will have to give in to a more pragmatic political approach.

At the same time the risk of demonising Islam must be avoided. “Reducing Islamism to obscurantism is wrong!” stressed an Algerian activist. Activists were just as firm on this aspect. A first step to establish forums of debate would be to engage in open and honest dialogues. Conditions for that dialogue to be truly genuine and transformative would be a more complex approach to the complexity of Islam, of its followers and of their political stances. Some also mentioned that Islam is Sunni, Shi’a, Druze and Sufi and that religious denominations draw an even more complex field if they start addressing the presence in the same region of Jews and Christians as a Moroccan activist energetically stressed. An Egyptian activist highlighted how the majority of Egyptians are Sufi Muslims absolutely foreign to the extremism of Salafist activists and not enticed by the politics of the more moderate Muslim Brotherhood.

WSF’s contribution to the revolutions in the Maghreb-Mashreq

The revolution and all its complex dynamics will last years and during such long time span, it will suffer setbacks and counter revolutionary attempts. It would be naive to think otherwise. It is against this outlook for the medium term that activists have to be prepared and organise. It is in this context that transnational activist networks and global civil society forums could become tools of collaborative activism and spaces of debate and reflection. The World Social Forum could become one of such spaces of convergence and alliance building and its networks could constitute solid infrastructures of support to activists in the region. In particular, the Maghreb-Mashreq Social Forum, whose story is almost as long as the WSF itself and gathers dozens among the most active activist groups and networks in the region (Trade Unions, Human Rights organisations, women’s movements, peasant movements and a myriad of NGOs) will be a key referent of alliances and the catalyst of several events in the years ahead. In fact, activists stressed how, one of the most generalised political moods of the activists involved in the revolts was their distrust in political parties and traditional political organisations; the revolutions in the Maghreb and Mashreq do closely converge on many aspects with the wider alter-globalisation movement: its elaboration of forms of activism beyond hierarchical political parties and their attempt to instrumentally subsume each activist’s plight to their political manifesto and action agenda centred on the capture of the nation state, and towards new forms of political organisation facilitated by fluid practices of networking which reach transnationally but are constructed from the standpoint of local cultural dynamics and social struggles.

The following words succinctly and accurately mirror the evolving mood among activists in the IC, highlight the challenges faced by the revolutions and suggest possible ways for the WSF to contribute to the struggles of the people in the region. “In Dakar we were all excited and this morning, if I understand what I hear, it is not only caution but even depressing. We cannot let that happen. (…) The choices are Turkey, Pakistan, Afghanistan, Bangladesh: these are the models. We must avoid that Pakistan and Afghanistan become the realities. What can WSF’s response be? The next two years must be considered as an emergency for the WSF process. It means that all meetings, whatever we do, we put it on hold and we focus on stopping the counterrevolution. All that we do in the world, in Montreal, Bangladesh, Taiwan, Galicia it has to be focused on that. A coordinated resistance from everywhere in the world. And in two years we can see if we won or lost, but we cannot just do nothing.”

The convergence of all activists referred above was repeated on this point as well. The WSF IC indicated that the next two years of the process will be articulated in the following manner. The next IC meeting will take place in Bangladesh in November after the South Asian Social Forum. The first IC of 2012 will take place in the Kurdish region of Turley alongside the Mesopotamia Social Forum in March and the following will be held wherever the next global WSF event will take place, either Egypt or Tunisia. Moreover, there will be a regional or perhaps a continental Social Forum in Tunisia in April 2012, a Solidarity Forum with Palestine in Egypt and perhaps a global seminar on the same topic in Brazil. In Montreal and Galicia, who had offered themselves as possible hosts of the 2013 WSF wide regional events will be organised which will focus on the revolutions and on the effects they have at the regional and global level as they contribute to develop alternative civilisational paradigms, migration patterns and labour and goods and services markets. In Galicia in particular, a global seminar is envisioned that will gather all the organisers of global, regional, continental and local forums to consolidate an extraordinary wealth of experience that spans over a decade a reaches to the four corners of the planet. And this may as well turn out to be a fraction of what the Social Forum movement can do in the two years to come, if we consider that in 2010 alone 55 events were organised by activists who recognise themselves as part of the global movement. In this light, it does not seem farfetched the statement by the Egyptian activist that suggested that the Maghreb-Mashreq revolutions may have started a transformative process that will change the whole world.

I asked those I met in Tunisia and other activists from Morocco and Egypt that I interviewed at the World Social Forum in Senegal, the questions that are currently shaping the global debate on the Arab revolts. I discovered that often those very questions are often clumsily framed or indeed fraught by limited knowledge of regional specificities and by shallow stereotyping and trivial generalizations that cloud the debate on the Arab world shaped as it is by centuries of exceptionalism, Orientalism and outright racism. These are some of the questions that criss-cross virtual and real public spheres: Who are the revolutionaries that toppled the regimes in Tunisia and Egypt and challenge others across the region? How did they succeed to unravel their totalitarian police states and why are they failing in other countries? Why did such irresistible wave of dissent rise against national and regional political and economic systems? Why now? What can be expected of the transition process in the near future? Will Islamist forces get a stronger grip on power?

At the same time broader issues of global governance have been raised: What will the consequences be of these protests for global economic, political and cultural dynamics? How would the changes in the region influence global patterns of consumption dependent on the oil some of these countries produce? What global social changes would be caused by such changes in patterns of consumption? Would stability and peace in the region be compromised? Is there a risk to the very existence of the state of Israel? Would more freedom to Islamic activists both challenge the victories of the protesters and global security? Are demonstrators really democratic? Do they believe in universal human rights and women equality? What forms of political and economic transformations, what new and alternative paradigms of development and social organisation, are these revolutions articulating? Would they challenge Western civilisation?

Whereas the scholarship on these ongoing events is still catching up with their fast-paced development, analysts are developing a growing body of comments in newspapers and televisions such as The Guardian, the International Herald Tribune, Le Monde, Der Spiegel, the BBC, and Al-Jazeera and local and specialist magazines both online and hard-published like Foreign Affairs, Public Affairs, Middle East Quarterly, Open Democracy, the Cairo Review of Global Affairs, the New Left Review and Jadaliyya, to mention just a few of the broader collective efforts at analysis and synthesis. These debates are framing some of the issues that scholars will reflect on in the next years and are animated by, among others, Asef Bayat, Rabab Mahdi, Joseph Massad, Perry Anderson, Michael Hudson, Hazem Kandil, Tarak Barkawi, Arshin Adib-Moghaddam, just to mention a few. Furthermore, the recent debate on the Arab Spring is intersecting long standing discussions on democracy and transformation in Eastern Europe or, further back in time, the French and American revolutions of the XVIII century, the independence struggles in South America in the 1820s, the European ’48, the Russian revolution, as well as the anti-dictatorship and pro-democracy wave of the XX and early XXI century in Latin America, South East and Central Asia, and Africa. Authors like Martin Shaw, Mary Kaldor, John Keen, Michael Hudson, David Held, Stephen Weathercroft, Asef Bayat, Perry Anderson and others have been testing theories of revolution, reform and change on the current events.

Prominent among these debates is the recognition that the Arab Spring might have irreversibly changed some of the preconceptions that marred the discussions on global democracy and human rights across political, ideological and cultural frontiers. This debate, based on less than robust theoretical categories that have become common parlance, has been framed in the terms of an alleged “clash of civilisation” between “The West” and “The Arabs”, on the assumptions of an inherently subaltern nature of the Arab; on their alleged inherently religious nature, and on the declared incommensurability between Islam and human rights.

Such Orientalist gaze, whose origins and ethical foundations can be traced back to the 18^th century, depicted the Muslim Arabs (note that the Middle East and North Africa host a wider variety of ethnic groups and religions) as homogeneous, monolithic, agentless (though prone to unpredictable bouts of violence) and immobile due to inherent features of their religion. Among the implications of such depiction was that it would be inconceivable to imagine genuine internal thrusts to change and genuine aspirations to democracy, equality and freedom. Strategic interests of Western countries complemented these speculations and together contributed to design geopolitical doctrines that, with little change, have been applied to the region for two centuries. Domination, control and trusteeship by colonial and post-colonial powers defined the approach to the region. The real or alleged fear of Islamism and the challenge to global security posed by terrorism, together with the commitment to ensure the safety of the state of Israel, legitimised the proxy rule over the region by authoritarian strong men and royal dynasties with treated their own people with contempt and enriched themselves while ruling in the name of foreign powers.

The recent revolutions surprised many for their sudden explosion, their assertive and uncompromising character, their demands for democracy, justice and dignity, and for their widely non-violent character. A myth was challenged, and this may have been the most immediate success of the Arab Spring. At the same time, it matters to highlight that the recent revolts were neither surprising (not more than revolutions always are) nor sudden. The people of the Middle East are not new to powerful accelerations of history and energetically pursued social change in the past. Just in passing let me mention, among the most recent, the 1952 Egyptian revolution, the Iraqi revolution of 1958, the Algerian overthrow of the French colonialist in 1962 and more recently the Iranian revolution of 1979.

The Tunisian and Egyptian revolutions and the revolts that spread like wildfire in the region had been brewing for long time and have been ushered in the realms of history by dramatic manifestation of people’s will and demands over the last decade. To mention just some of the most dramatic episodes in the recent history of Lebanon, Iran, Egypt and Tunisia, consider for instance the 2008 miners’ strike in Tunisia that demanded better work conditions and better public services, the 2007 Iranian Green Wave which opposed an authoritarian regime that stifled their demands for fair electoral processes, the Egyptian Kifaya movement of 2004-5 that mobilised for the release of political prisoners, the rule of law, the abolition of the emergency law and torture in Egypt, and the Lebanese Cedar Revolution of 2005 which resulted in the withdrawal of the Syrian army from Lebanon, to mention some of the most dramatic cases.

Widely representative of national societies, these movements have been defined as post-modern, post-ideological, post-Islamist and post-national. This wealth of descriptive and analytical tags aimed at highlighting their novelty and their rupture with previous forms of political activism in the region. Of these recent movements the media have highlighted the technology driven features, the classless constitution, the democracy and human rights claims to political freedoms and the personal demands of ethnic, religious and gender recognition among others.

Consolidated categories of social movement analysis devised in other contexts (mainly European and North American) fail to grasp the cultural and historical specificities of these movements and their ability to explain the dynamics of change of the Middle East and North Africa region are limited and at times misleading. Only recently an alternative scholarship is building on detailed knowledge of the movements in question to offer alternative and complementary analytical concepts. To illustrate the scope of such growing scholarship suffice to say that Asef Bayaf has introduced, among other analytical concepts, the concept of nonmovement, to investigate movement latency and agency in authoritarian contexts. He also proposed the concept of refo-lution to describe the current events in the Middle East and North Africa in order to develop a dialectical term that mediates the binary opposition between reform and revolution in the mainstream literature on social transformation.

The extent to which the engagements with the recent events in the Middle East and North Africa can contribute to a global social science which devoid of Orientalism, that eschews condescending and patronizing analytical attitudes and it is not mere projection of a naturalised moral belief, can only be hinted at here. More can be read in the work of, among others, Asef Bayaf, Sami Zubaida, Quintan Wictorowicz, Roel Meijer, Oliver Roy, Joost Hiltermann, Zachary Lockman, Joel Beinin, Nikki Keddie on the Islamic movement, on the first Palestinian Intifada, on youth movements and women’s movements in the Middle East and North Africa.

In sum, to understand nature and implications of the current wave of democratic movements in the Arab world we need a social science that is neither exceptionalist nor uncritical; a scholarship that does not compare the Middle East to the West and finds it morally and materially lacking; a scholarship that does not uncritically apply to the Middle East social theories developed elsewhere; a scholarship that is sensitive to historical trajectories, cultural specificities, social structure, human traits and dispositions, and engages what it describes in a methodologically sound and situated manner. Such a social science could aspire to become a truly cosmopolitan social science able to both making sense of the world it engages and to contribute to transform it.

To briefly illustrate the width and breadth of the issues that such a scholarship would have to engage with, and to substantiate the claim that an engaged scholarship of the current Arab revolutions can contribute to reformulate a truly post-Orientalist and emancipatory global social science, let me point towards, on the one hand, the latest global crisis and the dynamics it sparked and, on the other, to the multiple revolts and protests it has generated across the planet.

The global crisis of 2008 raised countries and shook them like carpets, the weakest individuals could not cling hard enough and were swept away. Incapable of procuring food for themselves and for their families and abandoned by impoverished global charity networks or national welfare systems, they simply starved. Those among the weakest sections of the population who could cling hard enough started protesting the rise in foodstuff, the lack of jobs, the vulgar wealth of those who speculated even while people were starving and eventually set the spark that inflamed the Middle East and North Africa. As I write these notes the fire has crossed the Mediterranean and protests have been taking place in most of Europe, most notably in Greece, Spain. In the Puerta del Sol in Madrid protesters mention repeatedly the Egyptian Tahrir Square as their example. Opportunities for democratic and inclusive local, regional and global governance might follow from these events. Thorough, robust and engaged social researches might contribute to unveil opportunities and challenges involved and contribute to their transformation.

Markets laws are used to justify downsizing and rationalizations and, paradoxically, their unpredictability are referred to when explaining the crises generated by failing corporate policies elicited by ideological financial practices. The observation of these multiple apparent paradoxes led Ho to ask “how have the severe social dislocations social scientists have usually attributed to global capitalism at large – the dismantling of corporate and governmental safety net, the wave of corporate downsizing, mergers and restructurings; the changing nature of what it means to be a successful worker; the growing concentration of wealth at the top; the social violence of financial booms and busts – been actualized?” (4)

To develop her argument she counters abstract approaches to markets by studying the contextual embodiments of global capitalism in particular sets of practices and ethos by actor-networks (from investment banks to pension funds, private equity firms and mathematical models to compute value and risk). She ethnographically interrogates these actor-networks showing how a context based, in-depth and practice-based methodology can best explain the social dynamics often referred to in abstract and naturalised manners, as in the forces of the market. The reference to forces is not casual as theoretically Ho supports her work not only through Latour’s actor-network theory but by investigating markets as “fields” of social relations à la Bourdieu.

The fieldwork was conducted between 1996 and 1999. Ho worked for the Bankers Trust and after being downsized she continued attending formal and informal events through which the social existence of Wall Street unfolds. She interviewed dozens of co-workers and contacts in key Wall Street institutions enquiring on the mentality and culture that underpin one of the most powerful social groupings on the planet. However, the book is fully updated and relevant in the wake of the latest financial crisis. Indeed it answers recurrent questions such as how could it happen? Who was responsible? How were the hints so blatantly missed? Her blunt, convincing and detailed answer is that such a crisis was “fairly predictable”. From the standpoint of the evidences she collected, bankers’ ideologies and practices do set Wall Street for recurring cycles of liquidation and reconstitutions. The latest financial crisis was a most dramatic case of the former dynamic (liquidation) following the irrational euphoria of reconstitution after the previous bust of the so-called DotCom bubble.

The argument is masterly articulated. Ho challenges the foundations of the generalised belief that such an event could be foreseen let alone prevented. While disproving this self-serving argument, Ho shows how the daily social relations in Wall Street are built on a culture of domination defined by racism, sexism and homophobia and built on disloyalty, irresponsibility, impatience, constant change, and immediacy. This book is about Wall Street, certainly, but it is also about the wider system, American and global, that has embodied whiteness, maleness and heteronormativity and made of them the moral and practical conditions for domination (and potential destruction) of the planet.

Ho develops her findings in three steps themselves articulated in trinomials. The first refers to the foundations of Wall Street’s culture: they are racism, sexism and homophobia; the second imposes its global domination: shareholder value, globalisation and free market; the third ensures its social reproduction: smartness, hard work and flexibility. Through this analytical framework Ho vividly shows the constitutive reiterations between neoclassical ideology, market values, Wall Street’s culture, personal traits and interpersonal relations in the workplace.

Trinomials are used throughout her book to counter her discomfort with radical binaries. This methodological attitude is illustration of Ho’s sensibility for critical methodologies and theoretical attitudes aimed at challenging entrenched binomial approaches to knowledge grounded on moral binaries of good and evil. She uses several of them, here are some: downsizing, corporate profits, stockholder value; workplace models, corporate culture, and individual life-experience. Market ideology is expressed in terms of individualism, private property and neoclassical economics and, to conclude this brief inventory, access, initiation and method define the socialization of bankers but also researchers of Wall Street.

This last point raises urgent questions from within the analytical framework presented in the book. To what extent Ho’s access, initiation and method framed her research? In Ho’s case, access was ensured by her belonging to one of the few institutions appreciated by Wall Streeters for educating smart enough students; her initiation was being downsized; and her method consisted of her idiosyncratic ethnography mostly based on interviews. Each of these aspects is engaged and problematized adding a further layer of sophistication to Ho’s work. It would have been inspiring to read further on these crucial topics were Ho not constrained by space limitations and by a strict issues prioritization.

Ho’s groundbreaking work succeeds in providing the reader with a convincing argument that the anthropology of capitalism is not impervious to small scale ethnography which instead gives abstract capitalism a grounded dimension, showing its instantiation in daily practices, ideologies and institutions. By doing so she eliminates the halo of necessity that characterises the outcome of specific ideological practices of naturalization. This book is a milestone of an increasingly sophisticated and relevant anthropology of markets and it constitutes crucial reading for both undergraduate and post-graduate students. Further, it is useful and engaging reading for transnational activists challenging the domination of the world and the colonization of lifeworlds by capitalist institutions.

Ho, Karen 2009. Liquidated. An Ethnography of Wall Street. Durham and London, Duke University Press.

The African Social Forum, continental Chapter of the World Social Forum (WSF), has convened a solidarity caravan across Tunisia from the 1^th to the 5^th of April to meet the women and men that ignited the transformations that now affect several countries in North Africa and the Middle East. Dubbed by mainstream media the Arab Spring (though it started in December), the wave of protests started in Tunisia spread like wildfire through Egypt, Algeria, Morocco and on to Yemen, Bahrain, Oman, Saudi Arabia (briefly, or so it seems) Syria and Libya. The Tunisian and Egyptian uprisings and the ousting of their dictators have given a distinctive flavour of exhilaration and hope to the latest World Social Forum held in Dakar from the 6^th to the 11^th of February.

Gathering around the vision of Another World is Possible, 70,000 activists from over 100 countries convened in the Senegalese capital for the 9^th global convention of the world largest transnational activist network. In the eleven years since its inception, the WSF has gathered over 10,000 civil society organisations and social movements and in excess of a million participants in its global events in Brazil, Venezuela, Mali, Dakar, Kenya, Pakistan and India.

After the closure of the Dakar event, the WSF International Council plenary meeting was opened by a revolutionary song performed by a Tunisian activist. The song was accompanied by the rhythmic clapping of the moved audience. Following the touching words of an Egyptian activists still shaken by the news of Mubarak’s resignations (coinciding with the closing ceremony the day before), and after a wealth of vibrant remarks by activists from the four corners of the planet that the Arab Intifadas had returned hope to a global movement battered by the consequences of the latest global crises, the International Council expressed the unanimous wish to show support to activists in North Africa with a symbolic caravan to the first country to oust its dictator, Tunisia indeed.

Thirty-four civil society and movements activists from thirteen countries and three continents joined the conveners of the African Social Forum. We were hosted by the Union Generale de Travailleurs de Tunisie (UGTT), the largest Tunisian trade union, whose role was instrumental in the success of the Tunisian Intifada. What follows are some reflections inspired by my participation in the solidarity caravan.

This is what democracy looks like

The first day the caravan was welcomed by the UGTT. The support given by the UGTT to the revolution enabled it to spread and eventually succeed. The union, while infiltrated by the state and the ruling party, managed to keep alive workers’ aspirations towards participatory economic democracy and those aspirations were key in supporting the demands and the aspirations of the Tunisian revolutionaries. However, it would be misleading to consider it as a coherent body. Its internal complexities, its previous relationships with the regime and its current ideological, political and religious differences, its multiple visions of the future and of the paths to fulfil them make of the UGTT a network of ideas, people and resources that represent the complexities of the wider Tunisian society.

In Mohamed Ali Hammi square, where the headquarters of the UGTT are located, we were welcomed by trade union, women, human rights and student activists belonging to Association Tunisienne de Femme Democrates, Ligue Tunisienne pour la defence des Droits de l’Homme, Ligue des Auteur Libres, Union generale des etudiants Tunisiens, Associacion Tunisienne Contre la Torture, Association de Jeunes pour la Continuation de la Révolution, the Student Union and El Taller. We expressed our admiration and solidarity and we offered our support and the promise to carry their stories, their struggles and their aspirations with us and share them in whatever ways we could as our commitment to contribute to imagine and construct a better world, more just and equal, each of us in the places where we live and work. We also explained that we wished to explore the viability of a regional and continental Social Forum in Tunisia to celebrate the revolution and support the transition.

The most vivid images of that first day, though are of a demonstration of a few thousand people that we crossed path with shortly after leaving the UGTT headquarters. The demonstration that passed in front of the National Theatre paraded in front of us and continued towards the Kasbah where it settled into what became the Kasbah 3 sit-in. It followed the successful Kasbah 1 and 2 that called for the change of the interim governments that followed president Ben Ali’s departure still tainted by members of the previous regime. As I write critical reflections are being developed of the disappointing outcome of Kasbah 3 which demanded the exclusion of the current Interior Minister from the provisional government.

After mixing and mingling with the demonstrators, pedestrians, café goers and passers-by of the Avenue Bourguiba were returned to their passionate daily activity, political discussion. Hundreds of people, mostly men in the central section and more mixed groups at the tables of the surrounding cafés gathered, as they do daily since January, and groups formed and reformed to discuss the topic of the day, the Interior Minister, the arrogance of the current Prime Minister, the members of the former ruling party still involved in current politics, along with broader ideological, pragmatical and aspirational issues regarding the future of the revolution, the transition process and its goals.

Those conversations can be breathed everywhere in Tunisia, as I experienced in the following days they impregnate the Mediterranean and the desert breezes. But the perspective over the buzzing Boulevard, as it disappeared behind the bus that took us to our next meeting, was impressive, it looked like an open air forum burst, blossomed, out of decades of repression. Enthusiastic citizens discussed and negotiated their differences, exchanged their experiences, disagreed vehemently, even shouted their frustration and disappointments contributing to give form to their visions and inspiring in each other actions and daily practices towards the establishment of a new society.

Those receding images of the demonstration, commented by the Tunisian friend with us on the bus, told an important story, despite differences, challenges and the titanic tasks demanding fulfilment, the utmost joy felt by all in Tunisia is that talking politics is indeed fine, that expressing one’s ideas, negotiating them, discussing them, and demonstrating for  them is not repressed any more. The demonstrators in Bourguiba Avenue were not only pursuing a very specific political objective, the reinstatement of the former interior minister or at least the replacement of the current, they were also showing their pride at having conquered the right to demonstrate freely.

Kasserine

The following day we visited Kasserine. On the outskirts, a burnt furniture shop, a smashed police van and a service station, its windows in tatters, welcomed the travellers. We stopped shortly after at the central square, where we introduced ourselves to some of the youth who, literally, made history. The young people we spoke to had friends arrested, beaten, killed during the demonstrations or were themselves hurt and maimed by police and security forces brutality. Seventy of them lost their life in the revolution but that was not enough to stop the tide of change. Today the permanent sit-in in Kasserine demands the jobs, the justice and the dignity those girls and boys died for. No less. And they are prepared, they tell us, to fight more if necessary. They can’t stop now, they owe it to their legitimate aspirations and to the memory of those who died.

Later, we were received at the local UGTT branch. In a large hall, over hundred people gathered to welcome us. In the intense atmosphere made hazy by the smoke of cigarettes inhaled with anxiety and pain, mothers, sisters, fathers, brothers and friends told us their tragedies, their losses, their suffering, their fight, their hope. In a more intimate setting on the third floor of the big building, we met later with others who lost their beloved and cried for justice, who were tortured and demanded their rights.

I spoke to a lawyer of the lawyers’ union whose role was instrumental in backing the youth in the streets in the hottest days of the revolution. She was sitting next to me. Considering what I heard, the pictures I saw, the crying that could move mountains she told me she understood my dismay. Few metres to my left the sister of one of the youth killed in January was holding the wet hands of one of us and the mother of another victim of the revolution is drying the tears of another. To my right the lawyer keeps talking, maybe to help us both fight our ghosts. She says that it is not so difficult any more, it wasn’t at the beginning either now that she thinks about it, and it wasn’t throughout. She says “once you see death right next to you, you fear no more”. And at the beginning it was not courage, it was despair that moved the bodies of those marching against baton charges and live bullets.

Fear has not disappeared she adds, “fear is with us every single minute of our life”, inflicted on Tunisian people by 23 years of dictatorship and exacerbated by distance and marginalisation. She also tells me about the distance from Tunis and the utter abandonment to which the Western districts have been subjected for decades: “only the international press has come here, and now you.” “The Tunisians dislike us deeply, they always did, what you find here around is what the French left. They do not respect us, they do not want us, thankfully there is the Algerian border so close, we get everything from there and cheaper.”

Later that day I ask a union activist, beaten up by the police and who had to spend days in hospital while the revolution won and Ben Ali departed, how can the fear that paralyses become the fear that can’t be stopped. He told me, he was smiling, that “fear is a daily sentiment that has become part of mine and everyone’s life, but fear can be beaten. It is an inexplicable feeling when you face, fight and win your deepest fears.” There was no emphasis in his voice, as if he were explaining the simplest occurrence in any individual’s existence. Later that evening I repeated to myself those words while I stared in the eyes of the sunset beyond the mountains towards Algeria.

Sidi Bouzid and Regueb

The revolution started in 2008 in the mining district of Gafsa and discontent increased until the fire that burnt Mohammed Bouazizi ignited the youth first and then the whole country. Recently the fabric of Ben Ali’s authoritarianism was wearing thin and tearing. The regime had become more brutal and less sophisticated, it had become sclerotic and unable to adapt. Its violence and repression, its only way to keep control, eventually doomed itself. It was humiliation that ignited Mohammed Bouazizi. The humiliated dignity of a vegetable seller whose livelihood was destroyed by abusive public officials, was every youth’s and then every Tunisian’s humiliated dignity. His pain was everyone’s pain and the irresistible empathy that his tragic protest generated produced the final outburst which escalated and could not be stopped. The repeated violation of the youth’s sense of autonomy, self-respect and integrity sparked the revolution. When such horizons of personal representations are denied and when lying to oneself about the real conditions of one’s existence becomes impossible the trauma is such that even dying is acceptable and burning oneself up a viable protest.

In Sidi Bouzid, the expanses of white and purple daisies framed the whitewashed building of the regional hospital. Inside lay a young man who immolated himself to protest against the unjust arrest of his brother. Outside, his mother cried and cried against a background of gardens and olive trees running against the horizon. She held hands as if those hands were his son’s life. Come, she said, see what they have done to us, let people know, let justice, wherever she is, know and ask her to visit this forsaken corner of the world.

Earlier at the headquarters of the UGTT we met some of those who are striving to channel the revolution towards achieving its goals, who are attempting to transform the sheer power of people into jobs and political influence. The youth not too far, shy and suspicious, tell some of us that some of the people in the big room are not true allies, not honest souls. Some of them were members of Ben Ali’s regime, they still reminded everyone how the union was infiltrated, controlled, repressed.

Later, in an olive grove, eating a banquet of sheep meat and salads dripping the delicious olive oil of the region, we asked each other with incredulity how we could tell the genuine from the demagogic and the demagogic from the outright false among the rhetoric that seemed to express the same discourses of liberation and the same aspiration to justice and development for all? This was not the first time that youth in sit-ins, in squares far from the ears of trade union leaders told us in whispers to open our eyes to avoid to be deceived. In Kasserine, a group of young unemployed with whom a few of us stopped to discuss demands (jobs) and dreams (a passage to Europe), told us that there was no trust in those who wanted to use the dead girls and boys for their political advantage. Few steps away from us, as in the square of Sidi Bouzid, some of them are on hunger strike until their demands are fulfilled. All they wanted was jobs and they would not have played the politics game.

We visited, that third day of our caravan also the town of Rgueb were local activists showed us their contribution of blood and life to the freedom of their people. On the bus towards the hotel we compared notes, we talked endlessly. We talked politics, experiences, analyses, theories, anything that could deafen the screams of the dead teenagers shot by snipers a few meters above their heads. I had seen some of the pictures and videos, but it was only when I saw the size of the buildings in Kasserine and Sidi Bouzid that I perceived the magnitude of the atrocity. Snipers shot from positions no more than five metres above the street level. It was not the impersonal videogame-like killing that snipers seem to evoke. Those men and women from the roof could see the eyes of the girls and boys they chose to annihilate.

We also discussed the role of media and technology in supporting activists. Facebook was in everyone’s mouth, Al Jazeera’s journalists were praised for their courage and dedication (though, some told us, “in the long run we can’t forget they are islamists”). But while nobody denied the supportive role of new social media, the general understanding was that though they helped they were certainly not the determining factors pace the international media (perhaps too eager to stress how western technology democratizes the world). Activists in Sidi Bouzid told us something else. They explained to us their sophisticated street strategy. They used cellphones to create zones of pressure and release in lightening-fast succession to disorient the police who ended up running around the town like headless chicken. It was the knowledge of the town down to its tiniest alleyways that won the control of the city, no Facebook or other social media could have been fast enough, they stress, or provided the strength and the courage necessary.

Ras Jber

At the refugee camp of Ras Jber we arrive early afternoon on the fourth day. The blazing sun that welcomes us makes the little market, the tents, our bus and everything else sparkle against the yellow sand and the blue sky. It is a beautiful corner of the southern Mediterranean marked now by 150,000 stories of loss since the explosion of the Libyan conflict and by the five thousand souls running from war and persecution without a place to go. We meet the authorities of the camp, the representatives of the Tunisian army, of IOM and UNHCR. They all tell us that while the limitations are common to refugee camps and inevitable in situations of this kind, there is something unique in this crisis, the hospitality of the local population. So impressive the sentiments of hospitality and their logistical skills in distributing, before the camp was even built, food, water, blankets, that two hundred of them have become UNHCR volunteers in recognition of their work.

Coincidentally, while we were introduced to the hospitality of the people of south Tunisia, the Italian Prime Minister and his delegation met their Tunisian counterparts in Tunis to discuss an agreement on the migrant crisis which involved shutting down Italy and Europe and send back the thousands deluded migrants who thought hospitality was one of the values of a continent that likes to preach to the world cosmopolitan ideals. If those migrants knew that in Italy a debate rages on the extent to which the boats that carry them, in which they risk their lives and die by the dozens, can be shot at to prevent their landing on national shores!

We roam around the camp, moving from one side to the other to meet with different people. We meet a football player from the Ivory Coast, a group of Nigerians forgotten by their government, and some citizens from Chad and Niger who wonder why all the others are coming and going and they are still there. Later we are told that the availability of funds to repatriate those whose governments are not providing the flights is limited and their processing time longer than anyone would desire. At least they know they will make it home at some point. For the two thousand Somali currently at the camp, there is nowhere to go, though UNHCR is starting the process to assess their requests of asylum.

At night we stop at a family run restaurant on our (long) way back to Tunis. We share songs, some dance, we eat excellent food and we stare at the sea metres away from our table. At the end the Italian contingent of the delegation can’t find a better way to thank the hosts than sing Bella Ciao and to our surprise not only hand-claps followed our tune but versions of Bella Ciao in many languages. Every activist in the world, someone said, knows the song of the partisan who died for freedom. In Tunisia those words have a special resonance these days.

Representing the Tunisian Revolution

A visit of short length can achieve only a sketchy portrait of a gigantic work in progress in which rubbles are moved from one side to the other and new relations and institutions are built in its midst as outcome of multiple tensions and conflicts of which only a few are evident to the superficial gaze of a solidarity traveller often unaware of the specificities of the local cultural and social context. Moreover, during those days driving across the whole length and breadth of Tunisia, life rolled over us at a very fast pace, too fast to be able to take stock. With some distance, images crystallise into coherent tales and tales suggest meanings, inspire analyses, suggest answers to questions and raise questions to answers trying to portrait the building of a new Tunisia.

A key challenge encountered by many in representing the Tunisian revolution (and more broadly the unrest sweeping through the whole region) has been constituted by banal stereotyping and versions of negative and positive Orientalism. The awed surprise that welcomed the events of Tunisia, and soon after Egypt and the others, was constructed on the widespread misconception about the inability of the people of the MENA region to affect real change and be agent of their own emancipation from oppressive rule. Such misrepresentation is based on limited knowledge and preconceptions, political propaganda, Orientalism and outright racism.

Ben Ali himself (and Mubarak and the other dictators of the region as well) looked with contempt at his own citizens and considered them too unsophisticated to be entrusted with democracy or any agency over their social and economic destiny. The consequences of his behaviour, his demise, his ousting, his near escape, could be interpreted as a wider warning to the elitist, the racist, the Orientalist. This revolution may have already changed the stereotypes of the submissive, agency deprived, Arab. But as the transition processes develop they may contribute to the elaboration of new democratic practices whose resonance exceeds the national boundaries and make the Tunisian youth rise to the secular Pantheon of historical revolutionaries. And those young activists, more than anything else, feel proud for returning their countries to global history not as dependent or slaves but as empowered actors in the process of negotiating values and institutions of a truly cosmopolitan planet. As an activist in Regueb said “we welcome relationships with Western partners”, but, he explained, he has in mind “an equal relationship, not one based on charity” with activists, intellectuals and NGO members rather than governments. He envisaged a horizontal collaboration to build a cosmopolitan project from the ground up, defined while “walking” together rather than a-priori, a-historical projections of conviviality, morality and human nature.

The demands of the Tunisian revolutionaries

“We want justice, equality, freedom”
(Women’s rights activist, Tunis)

It seemed possible at times, in Kasserine and Sidi Buzid for instance, to feel that it was all so clear and simple. Jobs, is what all demanded, and dignity. Dignity and work, though, became more complex tags when unpacked. Then justice was added to the initial demands and retribution for the repression, the killings, the torture. And then development and equality. And emancipation. Emancipations, in fact. It is only by freeing themselves from the many slaveries that bind them that the youth of Tunisia aim at achieving their goals, jobs, dignity, justice, development, democracy. It is for freedom that so many of them lost their lives.

Freedom from the dictator, from oppressive and exploitative political and economic systems, from ideological hegemonies, from shrewd political manipulations, from the embodiment of class, gender, race, ethnicity, religion, sexuality. There are other ways in which their demands are framed, other discourses, other semantic horizons in which their aspirations are articulated. There is one for each interlocutor and context (as it is the case in complex revolutionary networks of ideas, actors and values). Activists in Tunisia know that the same goal needs to be achieved in relation with the multiplicity of discursive and material spaces in which they live. So they talk also of civil and political rights as immediate demands and the rule of law, new fair and transparent electoral laws, institutional openness, right to form political parties and to demonstrate, a responsive government and human rights sensitive police. They demand development and equality and, as the youth I spoke to in the central square of Kasserine, “a job and a normal life”. It is the apparent simplicity of this demand that can be misleading. This is not a simple demand, “a normal life” is the most complex of all demands and the difficulties to achieve it does not elude them. The tension between the simplicity of its formulation and the obstacles in achieving it is what motivated the hunger strikers in Kasserine and Sidi Bouzid, they know they are entitled to a normal life and they will get it come what may.

The youth or the youths of Tunisia?

Some suggested that the youth in Kasserine and Sidi Bouzid are less politically wise than the youth in Tunis. Some suggested that decades of marginalisation from the rest of the country and economic and political privileges in the capital have generated profound social and human imbalances. One consequence of these imbalances, it is alleged by some of our Tunisian interlocutors, is that the youth in the most deprived areas are easier to manipulate and subject to launch themselves in unrealistic and unsophisticated political actions, like the hunger strike demanding immediate jobs to all unemployed the chances of success of which are nil beyond the actual will of local and national authorities. Others observed that the revolution has to avoid reproducing among allies the marginalisation and the elitism of wider society in order to avoid creating an unbridgeable gap between activists on the basis of alleged political and cultural sophistication defined in exclusive terms.

These reflections raised a related issue, the relative poignancy of the analytical category of “the youth”. This category while highlighting the existential ordeals encountered by an entire generation in establishing themselves as active and productive members of a society, in constructing a family and, eventually, contributing to the reproduction of their society, it also obliterates multiple social and individual differences. Age is not enough to understand the dynamics at play in Tunisia. Regional and class imbalances, play a crucial role along social and political capital, culture, ideology, religious convictions and practices, gender and others yet. While the youth in Kasserine stressed repeatedly they did not want to be implicated in political battles played on their behalf by people who they did not trust, in Tunis a member of the student union said instead that they were struggling to ignite a “deep social transition” aimed at ushering “a world devoid of capitalism and classism”. He added “we revolted against an economic pattern because we want Tunisia for all Tunisians”. It was not all, he saw many Western activists in his audience and he implicitly sent a message across to those who are anxious about the prevalence of religion in the new Tunisian society: “as far as religious ideologies are concerned, we say that we won against Ben Ali and we shall win against all dictatorships and totalitarianisms”.

There is also one further issue to consider along with cleavages, tensions and other differences as they are perceived in among the Tunisian youth. The context of the communication plays a crucial role in formulating the code of the exchange between local activists and travellers. In the square we spoke with some of the local youth. In Tunis a broader audience and a more formal event elicited a more self-conscious performance and defined the agenda of the speaker. While this observation is so obvious to be almost banal, it has large repercussions on the way a visitor is exposed to nuances and complexities of a huge transformative process involving an entire society. On the cultural politics of representation I will say a few more words in the post scriptum to this text. While the range of demands, discourses and ideological frames is so broad and differentiated so too are the political and pragmatic approaches to action for change.

Politics and practices of change

The debates on practices of change revolve around several alternative or articulated approaches including transitional justice, workers struggles, revolutionary democratic fronts, insurgent practices, civil disobedience, representative politics.

A member of the student union in Tunis regarding practices of change commented that as union “we distinguish political work from union work.” Further, he said “We want to have a political party for the working class”, it would be one of the 51 registered political parties in Tunisia. Such blossoming of political parties witnesses the renewed hope of Tunisians in representative politics and the great differentiation that followed the victory against Ben Ali. A women’s rights and union activist commented that the best way to pursue a democratic and energetic struggle is to “create a progressive democratic front to avoid the return of despotism and defend mutual respect and the principles of the revolution.” In the spirit of connecting the Tunisian struggle with that of people from other regions a UGTT delegation will travel to Brazil to explore ways to form a party like the PT (Worker’s Party). And the representative of the Brazilian CUT reflected on how useful it could be to share the Brazilian experiences in solidarity economy, cooperative, family farming and small business with the local activists.

While the confidence in the democratic system is widespread, some activists highlight how democratic processes need to rest on strong foundations in order to be successful. The presence of many elements of the former regime, at the level of the districts, regions and indeed in ministries, professional and even sport organisations calls for a continued vigilance. A rather more insurgent strategy of change is articulated by some in the left and among the youth and, some suggest, also among religious activists.

The role of women in developing, articulating and practising methodologies of change has been greatly influential in the revolution. An activist in Tunis expressed in the following way her take on change and practices of transformation “we are for the internationalisation of the revolutions to fight against savage capitalism”. Another woman suggested transitional justice, and another still suggested a combination of long term healing processes with constitutional developments and representative politics. The crucial role of women has been recently acknowledged by the Supreme Council for the Defence of the Revolution which has adopted, on the 11^th of April, a law on the election of the constituent assembly whose article 16 established the principle of gender parity in all lists that will be presented for these elections. The importance of this achievement can’t be overstated. As all women’s associations noted, it is a unique opportunity for Tunisia and sets an inspiring example for the entire region.

Some, mentioning the experiences of transition in Spain, Portugal, Chile and East Europe suggest transitional justice as a longer, more complex and more sophisticated way to deal with prolonged injustice under an authoritarian regime that used abuse, intimidation, harassment, torture and corruption to define relationship of power and distribution of resources. While drafting this report I follow a streaming from Tunis of the International Conference on Transitional Justice attended by some of the people we met in Tunisia. Justice and dignity, democracy and accountability, while resonating of profoundly human components are treated as processes whose length and developments are slow, hardly predictable and involve a wealth of actors whose influence exceeds often the national and the regional boundaries. In the elegant conference hall where practitioners, academics, civil society activists met, welcomed by the education minister of the current caretaker government, mention is made repeatedly to the epochal changes sparked by the Tunisian Revolution and to the difficult tasks ahead. Whereas the dictator has fled, justice has yet to be apportioned, institutions need to be developed and democracy and equality are far from being achieved.

Challenges

“Nothing has changed, here they are all the same as before, thieves and corrupt”
(Youth activist in Kasserine)

 The multiplicity of demands, actors and practices is perceived by some as political and strategic fragmentation and a potentially damning weakness. Whereas they achieved a quick and resounding success, the revolutionary forces are now facing a long process of transition full of ordeals and challenges. Such challenges come from the international sphere, from the national context or are indeed internal to the revolutionary front.

According to some activists, the international agents and institutions of capitalism and imperialism are trying to destroy the Tunisian revolution and set back the advances it has inspired in Tunisia and in the whole MENA region. Moreover, news have been circulated that intelligence services are entering the country to stop the revolution as a trade union member warned the audience in Tunis. The dictatorships of North Africa were widely supported by Western governments who found in those strong men reliable allies and a convincing weapon against the spread of the much feared Islamist movement. But the fear of Islamic radicalism has an internal dimension in Tunisia.

Islamism’s growing influence and assertiveness not only concerns Western commentators and governments, it does also concern Tunisians who are concerned about the risk of currently minor forces stealing the revolution. As a human rights activist told me: “I can understand why Western people keep asking about the risk of Islamization: I live with them and I’m scared by them. I can only imagine how scared people must be who do not know how this people think and act”. A leader of the UGTT remarked, at the meeting in Tunis, that “Tunisia is no Pakistan and in no way will it become like Iran. We have a tradition of living in democracy and we know that mosques are places of worship not politics. We are secular and we believe in the rule of law.”

But Islamism is not the only challenge faced by the Tunisian Intifada. As many activists mentioned, though the dictator has be chased away it is necessary to transform the dictatorship. The people who represented Ben Ali’s power in society are still in their positions as governors, judges, university deans and rectors, even as union leaders. Those networks of power are still not only firmly in control of their positions but closely connected and resisting the changes ushered by the institutionalisation of the revolutionary efforts. They work in the dark, plot, resist and they could launch a full-fledged counter-revolution.

There are also internal challenges to the revolutionary movement. There exist tensions between those who want to go back to normality and those who want to fight for a full victory of the revolution and the achievement of a larger set of victories. Their opponents suggest instead that the time has come to revert to representative politics through free and fair elections and the work of the constituent assembly. There seem to be several differentiations developing between the once united activists. Now that the main enemy has been defeated, differences have space to flourish. Ideological, political, identity, class, etc. are developing at times in tension with each other and while many consider this a wealth of creativity to be fostered others consider such fragmentation a challenge to the same survival of the revolution as it exposes it to the return of powerful counter-revolutionaries.

Visions and paradigms of transformation

“This event, I believe, will change the world like WWII, it will lead to
all sorts of institutional changes that will change the world.”
(Women’s rights and trade union activist)

 What do recursive dynamics between demands, political practices, actors, resources and challenges suggest about the visions and the emerging paradigms of development towards a better world emerging in Tunisia? This question sparked engaging conversations among the members of the solidarity caravan and between us and the Tunisian activists we met or travelled with. This question raises issues of global solidarity, development and political models and sets the ground for the cooperation between activists from the four corners of the planet. The joint Secretary General of the UGTT, told us in Tunis about the vision and values of the UGTT: “UGTT’s cultural tradition is European and socialist which we influence with new blood.” He further said that to achieve the international goals of Tunisian workers it is important to establish stronger ties with the international union movement and with unions in South America, South Africa and elsewhere in the global South.

Just as coherent is the vision of human rights activists of a global democracy governed by human rights and the rule of law. Development for both strands of activist revolves around some version of sustainable growth. Values of cooperation and autonomy underpin the relationship between international partners. Cultural and religious specificities need to be inbuilt in the local instantiations of development aspirations and institutional configurations and all need to be tied to the broader fabric of economic globalisation and global governance. Some of these debates resonate with wider global debates and contribute to their deepening and broadening while linking them to local practices and to the demands and practices of the revolutionary youth. How this broadening and deepening will be influenced by the Tunisian contribution and will influence in turn the vision of the Tunisian transition is too early to see.

At the same time younger activists than the seasoned unionists and human rights activists are developing visions of better futures and are learning politics the hard way after decades of silencing, terror, repression, fear and hopelessness. They submit their demands to mistrusted government institutions, they understand their failure in generating economic development and political accountability, they scale up, down, sideways their demands and their strategies, they win and lose and they go back to the drawing board. They discuss, deliberate and try again. Messy as such trial and error is, complex as the shifting allegiances and alliances, chaotic as the multiplication of strategies, ideologies, ideas, visions, desires, aspirations, this is what democracy looks like and this process promises the most inspiring outcomes.

While listening to the praises many articulate of Bourguiba’s policies on education, one had the impression that Tunisian learning achievements are now entering a new phase outside of the classrooms of indoctrination and pedantic learning of useless “knowledge”, as doubtlessly illustrated by the high unemployment rate of graduates, and into the streets of relations and struggles, negotiations, differences, mediations. Knowledge, politics, culture, religion, dignity and aspirations, eventually met in the streets, emancipated by schools like jail, freed of the hopelessness of trust in something that is handed by a gracious government and empowered by success and failure, by action and thought, by deliberation and struggle, by trial and error by knowledge as it is, messy, dirty and bloody at times, rather than the sanitized and delusional knowledge imparted by any (more or less) tyrannical regime.

In these diverse and complex senses, the revolutions in the MENA region may inspire new articulations between culture and religion, society, economy and politics. Such articulations are context specific and neither necessary nor inherent. Unique contributions to the global recipe are given by the Arab Spring as they are given by India, Indonesia, Brazil and the other democracies whose understanding and experience of the relationship between religion, economy and politics is unique rather than dictated by the ideological equation between secularism, liberal economy and democracy, outcome of a unique history that has not been, is not and will not be reproduced anywhere else in the world (pace stagist ideologists).

Enter the World Social Forum?

Such an understanding of collaborative learning and building of shared visions across national boundaries, calls for solidarity on the basis of a multiplicity of articulations of democracy rather that a support to an uncritical reproduction of a reified (though eminently colonial) model of democracy which is not based on true recognition, does not support autonomy and self-determination (of individuals and communities) and eventually creates dependence and breeds resentment.

This solidarity caravan and the meeting of the Maghreb Social Forum taking place in Tunisia from the 19^th to the 23^rd of April contributed to building the political argument for a regional social forum in Tunisia towards the end of the year to commemorate the first anniversary of the revolution and perhaps a World Social Forum in Tunisia or somewhere in the region. Our group expressed to the people we met our interest in linking their struggles with our work around the world and in particular through the work in and of the WSF. We might have used more time to discuss with the activists we met what they thought about the idea of a Forum in Tunisia, about the idea of forum, and about transnational activism. Those and so many other topics are left for the next visit to Tunisia.

Post Scriptum: Political Tourism and Ethical Issues, on the cultural politics of representation.

Whereas above I mentioned some of the limitations of international media’s representation of the struggle for recognition, dignity, freedom, jobs, democracy and development by the people of the MENA region, the notes that follow sketchily record the “being there” of the political traveller and its influence on the representation of encounters and contexts in reports such as this one.

The objective of the caravan as I mentioned above was twofold. On the one hand it aimed at representing and conveying the solidarity of the activists of the International Council of the World Social Forum and, on the other, to look, listen, record and report images and stories of the revolution and the transition that Tunisian people were undergoing. Both goals were fulfilled in haste; hugs and handshakes exchanged briefly; stories told quickly. The non-said, the non-communicated was the greatest part. Allusions and projections constituted the deepest content of the exchanges.

Urgency travelled with the caravan and at each stop defined the spaces it settled in. Avid picture taking and video shooting, anxious interview recording of witnesses’ accounts, and all around the pain of victims and parents, relatives and friends that surpassed by many orders of magnitude what many of us thought they could express or hope to capture in our pictures, videos and audio recordings. The inevitable superficiality of much of the communication with the dozens of people we met and heard from came with a related limitation, reduced reciprocity. Both partners had to explain a lot to each other and spoke fast. We had to say who we were, what the WSF was, what our individual organisations did and stood for and why we were there. They had to tell us about the revolution, the hopes, the frustrations, the pain, the anguish, the rage, the visions, the dreams, the practices. There were moments nonetheless of deep engagements, but were inevitably exceptions. During the long drives across the country members of the caravans mentioned the deep connections they felt with that particular person, through those quickly exchanged lines, through just a hug or through the touch of the hands of a bereaved mother that cleaned tears from the face of one of us.

In Kasserine and Sidi Bouzid we listened to a mother crying, to a mutilated young man, to a beaten up boy, to the sister of a heroic brother, she cried, she could not stop. We heard the story of the father of a killed teenager, and of the father of a 16 year old victim, a martyr. The voice of a guy with a broken foot resonated long after we left the room: “We gave everything, our blood, our life”. We discussed at length among ourselves our feelings, the impact of those stories and of the pictures of the dead bodies, of the portraits, of the unaware smiles that could not foretell the future. A member of our group, an Italian woman, told me “at least we women know how to express what we feel, we cry. Poor you.” I made a note to self on my diary. Later I asked another woman that I saw crying in that room in Kasserine what she felt, how she found in herself the answer to what she saw, what was she telling herself while she looked at the rolling landscape outside the window. She told me “I hate what I saw and I hate how we behaved with our picture taking and all the rest.” Later, we thought of a zoo and the recursive relationship between anxious display and ravenous voyeurism. I engaged in several such conversations in the following days and I confirmed that many of us tried to make sense of their feelings and their impressions while asking themselves and to each other how to tell the stories they heard and the images they saw without blinding them with their own feelings but without denying a healthy amount of reflexivity.

There exist troubling implications regarding the ethics of such encounters that are perhaps too numerous and an incomplete list might be all there is space here. Political tourism raises contentious issues about the relationship between the visitors and the hosts and the representation of those relationships. There are also wider issues of context that escape the fleeting relationship to which political tourists are exposed. While heartfelt feelings about the issues addressed are here out of the question, the knowledge of the conflicts at stake might be both limited and oversimplified in symbolic codes that are not more than projections of the foreign observer which are then reproduced in a solipsistic space that while pretending dialogue, indeed reproduces a monologue of images that are selected on the basis of specific interests and emotional sensibilities fully rooted in the eyes of the beholder. Intense communications as many of us described those they established with Tunisian activists might not be a full replacement of long and engaged relationships that might engage and transform be transformative of the simplified symbolic codes and those projections that too often inform short activists’ encounters as the solidarity caravan in Tunisia. Consider also that many of us regularly repeated how little they knew about Tunisia, how ignorant they were of Islam and of the cultural and social dynamics of the region we were visiting, how limited their knowledge was of the pre-colonial, colonial, independence and post colonial histories of Tunisia.

The performative set in which the panels of testimonies took place, in large meeting halls (two of them had stages and in one case the panel took place “on stage”), as in the headquarters of the UGTT where activists, generated further ambiguities and potential misunderstandings (the extent of which we might all be ignorant as we did not have the chance to exchange each others’ perception of “the other”). Indeed, wherever we travelled, victims, family members and friends gathered to provide the visitors with a narrative of the revolution and such performances involved multiple projections, not only those by the visitors’ about who the hosts were but also those of the hosts about who the visitors were and what their expectations were.

I asked a woman, part of our group “why are we doing this if it challenges so many of our basic understandings of the ethics of mutually transformative human relationships and activism?” She replied that “this [the activists’, victims’ and parents’ performance in the UGTT headquarters in Kasserine] responds to our own projections and desires about changing the world”. She later added “there is too much projection and very little listening” in the way we interacted with our hosts.  In this sense, then, the representations of what we saw and heard (such as this one) might be selective of those aspects that illustrate our ideas on what is necessary to change the world. We may indeed, have even contributed to reinforce the codification of a discourse and its ossification in performances that trap performers away from transformation. Performance of pain and loss to which we cried and reacted in dismay, performances of claims and demands that we applauded, descriptions of causes and effects that we subscribed to and visions that we embraced may have been responded in less than emancipatory ways. Of course, this might well be one further projection in which the assumption is the imbalance of power between “us” and “them” which I think, though, is illustrated if by nothing else by the fact that after the encounters “they” went back to their lives of unemployed or bereaved family members and friends and “we” moved on to our plush hotel and to our drinks by the poolside.

The speed with which we met people, saw contexts, listened to stories and moved on to the next location to start over, might implicate some attitudes and beliefs that are incongruent with stated and implicit values of our caravan. Speed and connectivity indeed might be squarely positioned within neoliberal social and ideological coordinates. Speed and connectivity were the assumptions on which our caravan was constructed, according to which it is possible to report and represent social struggles through portraits and interviews and those may make the struggles resonate the world over via quick circulation over the Internet.

There is also, one further risk deriving from the relative fleetingness of the relationships established in the few days of our permanence in Tunisia and from the relative ignorance of social, cultural and historical specificities of the region we visited. One is the risk of legitimising political discourses that we do not fully understand, let alone agree with, that we reinforce projections and imaginations that people have about us but we have no ways to negotiate. It was not always easy for us to understand the subtle politics between our direct hosts and their counterparts in the different places we visited. It was not possible to always understand how we were introduced and how we were described. It was never possible to know how we were perceived and how our relationship with our direct host and guide were perceived to be.

One further caveat and recognition of the complexities involved in the representation of the revolutionary struggles and the transition that Tunisians are currently undergoing refers to the relationships that we built among members of the caravan, both Tunisians and visitors, only some of whom knew each other previously, and how the long conversations helped crystallise perceptions and thoughts into forms of more or less collectively built representations of what we saw during those days.

Finally, personal, professional, activist and committed relationships among members of the caravan flowed into each other and challenged the boundaries between the different dimensions. This was undoubtedly one of the most inspiring aspects of the solidarity caravan which allowed us to chat for hours on end during the long transfers on the bus. We did, in fact, spend with each other more time than we spent with the activists we met. We compared notes, we told stories, we exchanged emotions, images, aspirations and visions of individual and global transformation. We talked about ourselves as it is only possible in such moments of shared emotional experience, as only long road journeys can inspire. But we also typed, wrote and shot pictures of the stunning views rolling out of the windows. There was a lot of singing too both on the bus and in a hotel in Gafsa. The performance of Marcel Khalife’s Rita and Fairuz’ Bektob Ismak, among many others, was simply unforgettable.

After a year of networked events taking place in the four corners of the planet during 2010, activists convened once more in a unique venue to reconnect, meet and organise, discuss, share experiences and imaginations of another possible world. The recent events in Tunisia and Egypt and to different extents in Algeria, Morocco, Jordan and Yemen gave an added relevance to this forum. Roaming in the lush avenues of the Cheick Anta Diop University campus activists exchanged comments on the development in the Maghreb-Mashreq and those from the region were courted for news, explanations, analysis, inspiration. Some just wanted to know how they could do the same, bring about democracy, justice, equality, rights in their oppressed countries. And soon the forum became the backdrop of opportunity against which activists come together to project into the future plans and activities of change imbued with a new sense of hope. The WSF was and is, after all, the space where activists meet and share experiences, knowledge, imaginations and practical plans for action. The full mandate, the full vision, of the WSF seemed to have been given a renewed, compelling, illustration.

The Maghreb-Mashreq Social Forum has developed into a key dynamic of the World Social Forum process. Developed in the past few years it has gained momentum and it is now enjoying unexpected successes in the struggle along human rights and democracy activists in the whole region and in particular in Tunisia and Egypt where MMSF activists have been involved in the successful revolts. The African Council acknowledged its growing relevance and its momentum by choosing to hold the next Maghreb social forum in Tunisia and activists are considering that soon Egypt will become a welcoming place for a World Social Forum event after having hosted last year a thematic Forum on Health, Environment and Land Towards a Collective Action.

In the meantime a delegation of the African Council will soon visit both Tunisia and Egypt to express solidarity and offer assistance to the activists of both countries during the period of transition from authoritarian to democratic rule. Activists are concerned that while the revolts have succeeded in freeing the countries from their dictators the democratic path is neither necessary nor granted. Opening the second day of the IC meeting, after a touching song performed by a Tunisian trade union activist to a standing, clapping, moved crowd, another Tunisian activist warned of the possible corporatist drift that might affect the democratization process in both Egypt and Tunisia. Real risk exists, he said, that radical activists might be displaced by liberal forces with a passion for neoliberal policies and a shrewd ability in formulating superficial discourses revolving around demagogies of democracy and human rights.

Against the backdrop of such renewed confidence and the glare of possibility opened to committed progressive activism the World Social Forum 2011 was a space of experimentation and reflection on the overall WSF movement, its challenges and potentialities, its regional rootedness, its organisational capacity, its ambition and limitations. It was not an easy forum for its organisers and for many participants. It was a WSF that stretched imaginations but also frustrated expectations, that addressed past challenges and exposed new ones, that hesitated on problems that afflict WSF activists since its inception and that ten years of experience have not yet fully resolved.

A thorough assessment of the Dakar forum can hardly be conducted here, for that the Methodology Commission of the International Council has set up a dedicated working group that will exercise itself in the next months to present a pondered evaluation at the next IC meeting in May in Paris. In what follow I will mention some of the most debated issues that might be addressed in the overall assessment exercise.

The expectations of organisers, partners and participants, spoken and unspoken, varied enormously but some recurred. The Brazilian events and in particular the last one, in Belem in January 2009, the WSF that preceded this one in Dakar, were in many people’s mind the comparison inevitable. So it was the previous, controversial, African WSF held in Kenya in 2007. The key success of the Belem event for many was represented by the ability of the organisers to include a wide range of indigenous movements and that a close connection was established between the forum and those activists who worked in the region (the Brazilian Amazon). In this sense the Dakar success was just as resounding. A great participation of activists from Senegal, West Africa and the whole continent witnessed a thorough and inclusive mobilisation process.

The most painful memory of Nairobi was, for many, its relative closeness, the difficulties and costs in accessing the venue and the controversies on the role of some Christian organisations and large NGOs. Dakar was completely open and accessible and at the same time militant and unashamedly political as it was noted during the IC meeting. Whereas the expansion of the WSF in Africa is part of a process that has started in 2001 and has already produced two WSF in Bamako and Dakar (and a wealth of regional, sub-regional and national forums), renewed efforts have been put by the Senegalese conveners to make of the Dakar forum a welcoming, inclusive and sizeable event despite the small size of the overall host country. In this sense, Dakar was a confident step along the journey of the African chapter of the WSF.

The mobilisation of activists and resources compared to the size of the host country was nos less than impressive. It was of course not exclusive merit of the Senegalese organisers. In fact, a great contribution was given to the local hosts by the African Council and its ability to conduct thorough outreach in all regions of Africa. Partners from outside Africa joined in both in raising resources and in participating in big numbers to the event. Moreover, a key contribution to the accessibility of the venue and to the mobilisation of regional activists the caravans, twelve of them, that criss-crossed West Africa and brought thousands of activists to Dakar while, at the same time, engaged those who they met along the way on issues of justice, development, poverty, equality dignity and by telling them about this place, the WSF, where those ideas were not only not considered wishful thinking but in which activists join together to achieve them.

Inclusiveness and difference of participants made of the Cheikh Anta Diop university campus a truly open, diverse, accessible space. For the organisers and for the IC this was a crucial success and a sort of magic that removed the spell that the Nairobi event had, for some, put on the African chapter of the WSF. And this was evident from the first day, the day of the opening march. Tens of thousands of people marched through Dakar, local minorities and unions, Senegalese peasants and their regional partners. And the outreach continued in the following days with virtual experiments of decentralisation via the Internet (the Dakar Extended project which allowed remote participation) or by organising events in the banlieue as the conveners of the World Assembly of Inhabitants did in the neighbourhood of Guediawaye or by organising a delegation that visited the slum of Baraka.

And what the organisers and their international partners of the IC could not do, Dakar did. With its welcoming people, warm weather and the soft blow of the Harmattan over the sparkling ocean, it was the friendliest city in which a WSF had ever took place, as an enthusiastic IC member stated during the WSF evaluation session on the 12^th of February expressing the feelings of all. Even more important was a comment that followed soon made by a women activist who acknowledged that this had been the safest forum for women. This alone would be enough to celebrate Dakar and the 2011 WSF. And the impressive cultural programme of the WSF complemented the endless options for inspiration, and dance, that the city offers.

An important trend in global activism perhaps highlighted by the Dakar forum and which contributed to its success, was that activists arrived already well prepared and networked among them and with local partners and with a key concern about further strengthening regional and global alliances on shared issues. Those convergences, at the heart of WSF’s mission, proved exceedingly successful, beyond activists’ expectations even, and for some seem to indicate a clear trend towards consolidation of struggles at the global level. If it is premature to state it confidently, it is nonetheless something to be closely observed in the months and years to come to capture the spirit of both converging and networked alliances, encounters, interactions and practices that could influence both the awareness of and the underlying values of a truly emancipatory global cosmopolitan society.

Some of these convergences took place before the WSF itself, others in its last days. The world charter of migrants, for instance was launched on Goree Island after two days of meetings that saw activists from all corners of the planet converge on one of the most daunting symbols of the abominable slave trade to claim rights to free mobility for all individuals on the planet against boundaries that create segregation, exploitation and new forms of human trafficking. During the forum a solidarity convergence on Palestine, the first to be ever organised at the forum, proved to be one of the most resounding successes of WSF’s facilitated solidarities. And media activists converged on a communication assembly to take stock of communication activism in the era of wikileaks and the influence of social media on street protests as in the Maghreb and Mashreq region.

The World Assembly of Inhabitants, whose final declaration was signed by over 200 organisations and movements and which organised a wealth of events, seminars and workshops both at the university and in the banlieue, constitutes one of the most inspiring alliances of activists at a global level. A new paradigm, a new way of conceptualising the struggle for a better world, is being developed as outcome of this alliance and as outcome of the practical engagements to join forces in concerted campaigns and actions. A paradigm that both opposes the neoliberal model of urban development and replaces it with a social, human, centred one and one that, further, debunks the so called urban bias of decades of international development and rethinks the dualist and reductive separation between the urban and the rural. This is no mean achievement by such a composite set of partners which bring to such process enormous cultural, intellectual, ideological, strategic differences but share a common aspiration of justice and equality for all world inhabitants, and an unfaltering resistance against those processes of land-grab (so painfully current in the African continent) and market lead dynamics of slum upgrade that deny to the weakest sections of society the right to a livelihood and a habitat in which to thrive. Among the conveners and participants to this initiatives are Habitat International Coalition, the International Alliance of Inhabitants, No-Vox. Their first common objective is to organise a day of mobilisation coinciding with the World Habitat Day: an international alternative Habitat Day on the 3^rd of October.

One more impressive event was the convergence of the Assembly of Social Movements, a regular event at the forums since the first edition, that gathered in the biggest auditorium of the university and saw the participation of thousands of activists that gave life to moments of true shared elation to celebrate being together and in such numbers and from so many different places. The success of the assemblies moved in the direction of addressing some of the long standing concerns of some WSF organisers and critics, namely the fragmentation of the programme and the atomisation of the different strands of global activism with the perceived outcome of weakening the resistance against neoliberalism and reducing the impact of imaginations and practices aimed at building a new world.

However, as some noted, among the processes that did not work as expected in the organisation of the Dakar forum was the process of agglutination of self-organised activities. Part of the event methodology since 2005 this process would facilitate the convergence of different workshops and seminars organisers towards shared activities. Whereas the practice does not oblige anyone to work with undesired partners, it does convey information around converging or similar topics to activists and organisations who might be interested in networking and finding potential new partners. If the agglutination had been more successful, it was argued, a considerably small number of events would have to compete for the fewer spaces available at the university and perhaps no competition for those spaces would have happened (as a Indian activist put it, the open space this year had become a grab-a-space space).

And this was the hardest reality that confronted participants, organisers and IC members who tried to assess what happened. Yes, what happened in the first few days of the forum? Why people were welcomed by a mayhem of moved rooms of lacking definitive schedule and new impromptu locations? Simple, the new university rector did not fulfil the commitments taken by the previous who had promised both the suspension of classes during the forum to allow students to be exposed to the WSF events and the allocation to the organisers of the forum of the entire campus for their activity. When such opportunity was denied, at the very last moment, a wave of panic spread among the organisers and soon enough that became confusion and even frustration among some participants. New tents were pitched to host the events and a lot of creative scheduling had to be performed by all but it took a while for all to become familiar enough with spaces and schedules (posted daily in notice boards around the campus). In the end some suggest that only 80% of the planned could take place as originally planned.

Whereas both creativity, expediency, ingenuity and, most important of all, genuine solidarity marked the trajectory of many lost souls in the avenues of the campus, fiddling with their phones and escorted by the most welcoming volunteers, a darker side to the initial confusion was highlighted by many. Competition for spaces and the differential ability to convene audiences by activists generated a phenomenon profoundly at odds with the values of the forum. It generated conditions of privilege among those activists and organisations with tighter networks and larger resources and it excluded and alienated those who joined the forum for the first time or those not closely connected with other activists and with those “in the know”. As someone said during the IC meeting, the culture and the aspiration of the Forum’s activists do not deserve such contradictory organisational processes.

As it has been noted above, there are great differences in relations and expectations in the world events of the WSF and also imbalances of connections and social capital. Some network on the basis of their relations extend their reach and feel and are more included, others feel they depend more on structured programmes and feel lost when they fail to take place as scheduled. Many thought, for instance, that it was lost opportunity that of having been unable to involve to a greater extent students and teachers of the university and of wider Dakar. But university students were often directed with tact and smiles, just as we all were, by enthusiastic volunteers who explained “the rules of the game” as one told me: this is not a normal conference, everything happens everywhere all the time, so you may as well stop running around looking for other things (not that I was anyway) and enjoy what’s around you (which I was thoroughly doing, included talking to him and hearing what he had to say about the North African Intifadas: he said there should be one in each country in Africa).

Impact Assessment and Responsibility

The logistical issues were not the only ones. Great attention and cries of outrage were raised by the confrontations between Moroccan activists and supporters of the Saharawi people. Repeated intimidation and violence involved the two groups that extended from the opening march to the university halls (where an event hosting two European parliamentarians was violently shut down by outraged Moroccans who would not allow space to discuss the demands of independence of the Saharawi people) to the women tent where Moroccan women attacked Saharawi women.

But a member of the Moroccan delegation of the Maghreb Social Forum warned activists that some of the activists who oppose the claims to independence of the Saharawis are not agents of the government as many have accused them to be (and the organisers that allowed that such a delegation was welcomed) but they were allies who held different political views on an issue whose history and roots make it a most complex one and on which assuming rigid political postures can only be divisive and counter-productive for activists in the delicate Moroccan polity. Alienating the support of those allies would cost strength to the movement in Morocco and beyond and would void years of patient negotiations and alliance building.

There were also problems with the ambitious Dakar Extended project that did not manage to go ahead with the entire programme as planned due to lack of resources and spaces. And there were some recurring issues raised by those who found unacceptable that Coca-Cola and Danone products were sold at the food stalls or that water, that had to to be freely distributed, eventually was sold at three times its main street price. Others, on the same vein, questioned the extent to which it is coherent with the WSF vision that activists house themselves in expensive hotels and whether it would have been more appropriate to stress the organisational commitment on solidarity accommodation with local activists or provide other local accommodation for rent as many indeed did. Provocatively someone suggested, then, that the forum could take place in a field where everyone would just pitch their own tent to sleep in or to organise events (and I saw visions of Burning Man events and Glastonbury festival which I am not sure I find entirely distressing – perhaps with farmer’s cooperatives from the region providing organic food…).

On the other hand, though, still on the front of resistance against multinational corporations’ monopolies, all computers in the press centre, donated by Oxfam, were running on GNU/Linux to stress the research and practices that many in the WSF are conducting on common creation and ownership of intellectual rights. In this sense focusing on the commons, in ways that were stressed at the Science and Democracy forum organised at the Top of Form

Bottom of FormÉcole Polytechnique of the University before the beginning of the WSF, has not only a limited import with reference to the world of technology (however, given the increased relevance of technology not only in the wider world but in the life of activists, it might deserve increasing attention), but is a practical engagement with a crucial trend on common resource (material and symbolic) management from neoliberal institutions (World Bank as often ahead of the rest) who may use such approach to deepen the reach of privatization and disciplinary practices of production, exchange and consumption of knowledge.

Other complaints were discussed during the IC meeting, but there were also alternative views about them. For instance, the reduced coordination and agglutination of events, the lack of spaces and of programme, and the technical failures affecting, for instance, the translation system or the registration computers did also produce remarkable solidarity and showed a huge ability to self-organise and to take advantage of the Egyptian tested practice of mobilisation via text messages and cell phone calls. A Palestinian activist stressed at the IC meeting that, while he fully enjoyed the forum and considered it the best of all those he had attended, of all things it was solidarity among strangers that he most appreciated. He continued, “if we do not help each other when we are in crisis” (and we do not find the room where our event was supposed to take place) “when are we supposed to show the richness of our solidarity? And,” he added “apportioning responsibility and culpability is something that needs to be done with care to avoid divisive dynamics.”

Many reflected on these words and the considerations on the failures of the forums became sophisticated reflections on causes and responsibility and on criteria to assess outcome and impact in way that were coherent with WSF’s values.

Trust and Transparency

But what were the criticisms raised and towards whom were they directed? There were growing concerns among international activists about issues that went beyond the logistic failures. Many IC members, with whom I spoke, for instance, were concerned about decision-making practices, transparency, collegiality, collaboration among different structures of the WSF organisational architecture. Others reflected that the workings of spaces of the WSF like the IC, its commissions, its Liaison Group and the local (Senegalese) organising committee and the regional African Council, are not always easy to gauge.

Many were unhappy that Evo Morales was invited to open the WSF, this is patently against the principles stated in the Charter because the compañero Presidente Evo is nonetheless a head of state. But those concerns were even more focused, beyond the specific issue, on the process by which this decision was taken. It was impossible for many to understand who and when had taken this decision, not to mention the choice to invite former Brazilian president Lula to speak at the same time as other forum activities were taking place (fact that contradicts previously agreed guidelines) or the local president who was keen, as someone reminded during the IC meeting, to clarify that he had nothing to do with the WSF and proceeded to give a fully neoliberal speech.

Criticisms escalated during the first morning of the IC meeting and many members protested energetically that the IC was not aware of any of the organisational decisions made by the local steering committee and that no commission of the IC was allowed to contribute to the actual design and implementation of the final programme. Members claimed that the methodology commission had met in Dakar before the forum but no African members had joined, the same was told of the strategy commission and one of the members of the Senegalese steering committee confirmed that the separation between local and IC communication commission was due to not better identified power struggles that prevented them to work together (a member of the Communication Commission of the IC lamented that after over four weeks of work in Senegal she had no contact with local journalists because they were prevented from meeting them).

Whereas contingent frustration might exaggerate the extent of the separation between local organisers and international partners and whereas certain comments used rhetoric hyperboles and paradoxes to make a strong impact on the audience over issues of commonly recognised great importance, it became soon clear, and the cry of the Palestinian member reported above might have contributed to certain extent to sober the mood and relax the atmosphere, that an alternative path  to assessing the Dakar forum might have proved more fruitful for all involved. It was, after all, a shared conviction that collective spaces of decision-making were necessary to help activists to address issues that would overwhelm them individually. In this sense, what needed to be considered where how to facilitate the work of such spaces and, even more importantly, accept that whatever at the Dakar forum did not met the expectations of different activists (each, it has to be stressed again, for different reasons related to their desires and their political culture) was due to a collective responsibility. I lost count of how many times the expression “collective responsibility” was voiced in the first morning of the IC meeting. It seemed to me, after a certain number of times, it had become a mantra, an exorcism of the confrontational and potentially divisive considerations that had been articulated that pointed at the local steering committee as the sole responsible of all that did not match the activists’ expectations.

And later on, a prominent member of the local organising committee, who had previously tried to explain, and with him several others of his colleagues, the complexities of the Senegalese polity and the idiosyncrasies of the governmental and university organisational culture which ultimately caused most of the confusion and logistical mishaps, closed the meeting by apologising for all those that they could not offer to match the expectations of their guests and acknowledged that several mistakes had been done. It did not take much for all to remember of the many mistakes that were made in the previous forums and some, later told me that while heartened by the quality and depth of the conversation (that was supposed to be not more than a preliminary assessment of the Dakar forum) suggested that perhaps the WSF methodology could reformulate its use of the term failure as a different form of learning success.

But perhaps it was not so simple, as if good will and years of shared activism in the WSF had so easily washed away days of complaints and frustration with some wholeheartedly felt apologies and considerate calls for shared responsibility. There are other conflicts and perhaps deeper and not fully conscious that underpinned some of the difficulties experienced by the global organisational architecture of the WSF. Guidelines for organising events have been agreed and consensually approved, resources constraints are too familiar to all, cultural, ideological and political differences are widely acknowledged. It all seems in order, so what is missing? Why there was so strong the feeling that a crack was opened between local organisers and international partners? Why did I feel strong deja-vues from previous WSF events that reminded me of the difficulties in negotiating local cultural and political contexts and the political interests of those convening the event and both of these with the aspirations of the international partners?

It seems as though those who organise the local events have to face reality against the encouragements of the partners not directly involved who remind them that the sky is the limit of their dreams and they would not settle so easily on the grinding path towards the fulfilment of the WSF vision. It may not be necessarily any Us v. Them divide, it may be another incarnation of the Reality v. Aspiration tension. Whereas spur and encouragement by international partners may be very useful it may also be crucial to evoke trust towards the local partners especially when things do not look easy to decipher, and in Dakar there were many of those things, but not more than anywhere else the WSF has been organised before. At a rather more abstract level, the apparent contradictions between calls for transparency on the one hand and trust on the other, so crucial in the neoliberal discourse, might indeed embodied in the activism of the WSF as well.

What next for the WSF process?

Few hours of the IC meeting were dedicated to the beginning of a conversation on the next location of the global meeting and to some of the next commitments for the years to come. There were three candidates to host the world event with official invitations, Montreal, Porto Alegre and Santiago de Compostela but a wider debate has just started on whether to allow the forum to move from a location in the global south to the north of the planet.

Some suggested that the WSF should unmoor itself geographically and reclaim a fully global scope. Moreover, it was suggested that the WSF should move to where neoliberalism has its institutional and social cores. Another IC member reflects that indeed it would be crucial to take the WSF to the place where the current civilisation, the civilisation that has brought crisis and destruction to the world and risks to annihilate it, has been generated. I saw some older comrades sneer at the memory of painful debates on the primacy of the struggle in the capitalist world over that in areas where capitalism was still following the pioneering steps of imperialism and I saw some feminists shiver at the thought of the debates between the strategic feminist of the north v. the tactical feminism of southern women. I’m sure it was not this that the activists suggesting a move of the forum to the North had in mind but a genuine intent to globalise a solidarity beyond geographical boundaries.

In fact, a compelling argument was articulated by an Indian activist that summarised the sentiments of many. A forum in Europe or in Canada could be very useful to establish new forms of solidarity between northern and southern activists grounded on new foundations. Such solidarity would not be constructed between dependent actors tied by social relations of domination and exploitation in which activists are not involved but in fact struggle against from both south and north but between fully autonomous individuals stressing the shared desire to struggle together for collective emancipation.

A forum in Europe, someone mentioned could help a shattered WSF process and movements that struggle to resist austerity measure that affect the most vulnerable sections of the populations imposed because of the crisis generated by a greedy and irresponsible minority. In North America and especially in the US, instead, the WSF seems to be experiencing an inspiring moment following the successful Detroit USSF. A forum in Montreal, a region that has produced two very successful local social forums and impressive mobilisation against Free Trade Agreement Treaties (among others), would contribute to the momentum and to consolidate both organisational dynamics and activists’ confidence.

There are of course stringent conditions that need to be met for a forum which is truly global could take place in the North: visas. Several southern activists reminded everyone of the frustrating experience that is associated to their repressed mobility. If these issues are not addressed and resolved it won’t be possible to even imagine a forum in Montreal (or Santiago de Compostela for that matter, or anywhere else in the north). And visas are not the only ones, as several Europeans suggested that Europe is not prepared to host a WSF and such an event cannot be imposed on unwilling organisers, it goes without saying.

But before 2013 there is 2012 and what is left of 2011. In the consolidating tradition of the alternating world events and years of decentralised actions, thematic, regional and local forums will take place, some of which have been announced in Dakar. There seems to be a double trend in the WSF process with two complementary currents that reach new geographical areas of the world and deepen the debate through thematic forums.

The mission of the WSF is not to lead the movements but to anticipate their moods, to read the trends of global activism and to provide a space where organisations and movements can meet and build on shared moods and common priorities. The next months seem to suggest a converging trend towards Rio + 20, which will discuss current and alternative development models, and a mounting wave of regime changes in the Maghreb and Mashreq the consequences of which will have global impact and could greatly inspire and transform global activism.

Among the activities of the forum process that will take place in the next months there will be a World Food Sovereignty Forum that will take place in Haiti, a Palestinian Solidarity Forum in Brazil and a South Asia Social Forum in Dhaka, Bangladesh, in November 2011.

One of the innovations of WSF 2011 is the Dakar Expanded format, which saw events being linked to different parts of the world through Skype and the internet. On the campus itself, things were a little different, with the battle for space reaching a new high. As different groups often found themselves allotted the same room, the Forum moved from ‘open space’ to ‘where’s that space’ to ‘grab that space’. (There are rumours of rooms with enough space for discussions, air conditioning and simultaneous translations. We haven’t seen them yet.)

Being innovators and warriors, however, it wasn’t long before the Forum-walas found ways to leap over the obstacles and connect to their ‘audience’. The first and perhaps most spontaneous instance of these connections came from a group that did the rounds holding a banner of Egypt and Tunisia, before coming to a stand in front of the Palestine tent. There were songs of solidarity (the one that goes ‘So So So-SOLIDARITY’), rousing cheers and group hugs before the group moved on across the campus, beating their drums and celebrating the moment.

In another corner of the grounds, we found a group of students from the south of France had dealt with the chaos and lack of space at the Forum in a different way. The group, called Passe Passe le Megaphone, decided to take the Forum to the students of the University by the simple expedient of hanging out in a verandah with a large white cloth and plenty of coloured markers, and asking passers by to write their thought on a certain question for the day.

According to one of the group members, they had got incredible responses from students, since the activity was short enough to be done in the gap between classes, and was –well, out in the open space. “We found that students didn’t know what was going on, which seemed crazy, so we felt this was the best way to get them to engage with the Forum,” said Louise Place of the group. And in one of the evening sessions on political uprisings and social movements (not to be found in the schedule), Vinod Raina raised the question of connecting to absent movements, by talking of the movements that are making a mark in the local arenas of their engagement, but are missing from the space of the Forum.

“These are movements that are bypassing the traditional form of mediation from a middle class leadership, and have an organic leadership and ways of functioning,” he pointed out. These include peoples movements like Posco and Niyamgiri in India, which have forced changes in the ministry of environment, but are not represented in the Forum. While the Forum has direct links with the events that have unfolded in Egypt and Tunisia, Raina said, “what we need is a new way of collaborating with these other movements, and trying to be part of the direction they may take.”

Meanwhile, even as the World Social Forum faced a crisis of space, the World Social Bazaar expanded over the days, moving effortlessly from sidewalks to the middle of groups to (by the end of the day) the middle of tents where discussions were punctuated by greetings and a raised eyebrow from hawkers. Indeed, by the afternoon, the distinctions between Forum and Bazaar had become mere niceties, as hawkers tried to sell delegates badges and bags, and many even wore participant badges themselves while selling beads and earrings.

A random selection of the goods available for the pleasure of delegates were: Wooden aeroplanes, leather shoes, boxes and wallets, carved wooden monkeys, herds of elephants, crouching cheetahs, hippos with oversized heads, leather belts, many masks, miniature buses, scooters and motorcycles, figures of Tintin and fat men wearing sola topis, wall hangings, paintings in assorted sizes and my personal favourite- small framed drawings showing different occupations, including a dentist pulling out a tooth. Starting price for most items is 10$, but as the delegates walking away with oddly shaped packages under their arms will tell you, another (bargain) price is possible.

Headline: Has anyone seen Afghanistan at the Forum? I haven’t, at least not yet, and I’ve looked. Granted, I may have been looking in the wrong places, or perhaps its been addressed in broader based anti-war/anti occupation events. But I cant escape the niggling feeling of discomfort at this relative invisibility, even if it is incidental, and an outcome of the location and thematic preoccupations of this Forum.

Taoufik ben Abdallah and Buuba Diop responded to the questions of concerned activists and explained the measures taken to keep the forum a safe and non-violent space. They also clarified the reasons for some of the chaos that is sweeping the university campus and causing some frustration in those activists who were committed to particular events and seminars that were hard to locate given to last minute allocation of rooms and time slots.

Who has been to a forum before is not particularly discouraged by the logistical confusion and fully enjoy the jamboree in the alleys and avenues of the solidarity village in which colourful performance of impromptu theatre and dances, music and organic agriculture demonstrations are provided by enthusiastic artists and activists. It seems at time that the table games organised by the hosts of this huge party have been left unattended by the guests who cannot stop mingling, chatting and dancing. Among activists from the four corners of the planet, students touchingly blasé about the chaos around the rooms in which they are taking, would you believe it, term exams in these very days. And when the day is over they join in the dances or roam the campus invaded by thousands of smiling faces.

And these days activists are well versed in the new tactics of flash communication whose irresistible power has been shown in the streets of Egypt. When a meeting place is decided light-fast rounds of sms messages are fired and people converge where the activities are held. This practice might indeed be a practical training for fast and effective communication, horizontal communication at that, for organising events, activities, protests. And the quality and nature of communication in this day and age is what I seem to hear the most not only in the buzzing alternative communication centre on the second floor of the central university library where media activists file their pieces and discuss communication strategy for the new millennium, but in the streets of the campus as well where.

Young activist Salma el Naqqash from Egypt told us how the longest and more powerful protests, the world revolution starts seeming less inappropriate by the day, for decades (and not only in Egypt or in the region) has been coordinated with cellphones and text messages. Watch her interview

and the second part on our youtube channel www.youtube.com/WSF2011.

And whereas some in the press room points accusing fingers at supposedly unbridgeable generational gaps between the TV generation and the Internet generation, the smart team, and young indeed, of the WSF International Secretariat is wildly using cellphones to reach out. This is how I heard of the extemporaneous press conference by Ben Abdallah and Diop yesterday, thanks to a message sent by Thais Chita and Helio Menezes. Among the many things the WSF is learning along the way, this might one of the most in line with the experiences of XXI century activism as developed by activists, on the ground.

Away from the campus, activities are not less vibrant. Yesterday morning I left the comfortable centre of Dakar and I joined a group of right to the city and right to housing activists. Members of Habitat International Coalition, guided by the cheerful and most efficient Secretary General, Ana Sugranyes and her team of valiant co-organisers, converged to the Hamo salle des fetes by the municipal library of Guédiawaye to join activists of the International Alliance of Inhabitants, Cerpac (the host organisation in a sense as it is based in the neighbourhood), ENDA, AITEC and No-Vox.

The opportunity was provided by the desire voiced by the organisers of the event to give a strong symbolic message to the WSF by showing at least some of its unaware activists that solidarity spaces can and indeed should be constructed where people most suffer the inhumanity of urban alienation and precariousness and that the people living in those distant neighbourhoods where they are pushed by the force of serial evictions and unaffordable decent housing are indeed among the most valuable cultural, political and human partners in the WSF fight for another, better, more just and equal world.

On the bus there and back Ana Sugranyes told me about the World Assembly of Inhabitants and the double tension it wanted to represent within the WSF space: an opportunity to symbolically link the centre and the periphery of the city through a set of decentralised initiatives. Activists from dozens of countries visited the banlieue of Dakar and dozens of citizens from the Banlieue were and will be in the next few days welcomed in the Village of Inhabitants in the core of the University. Back to the campus in the afternoon I joined a workshop on resisting forced evictions. Activists from a dozen countries, US, UK, Zimbabwe, Ghana, the Dominican Republic, Kenya and Russia to mention just a few, shared their experience and knowledge on how to deal with the traumatic experience of forceful eviction and of living under its constant threat.

Among the hard stories a note of excitement for the success of a demonstration organised on the 7^th afternoon in front of the Ghaneian embassy to protest against the forced eviction of 25,000 people from railway owned land. The coordintor of the inhabitants of the Old Fadama neighborhood finished its speech with a note of hope that if all people at risk of forced eviction on the planet (and their number is growing daily as municipalities all over the world compete ruthlessly to achieve neoliberal urban ideals of “world class cities”) join forces they could indeed contribute to reformulate a development model that is no conducive to humane, just and sustainable communities.

Old colleagues and friends, partners and strangers meet and bounce soon to meet again later perhaps or to meet someone else. We walk into the growing crowd shortly after one in the afternoon, music welcomes us running loud through the flags. Placards are rested to the shoulder, banners are exhibited proudly to the keen eyes of cameras of all side. Today also I am carrying a video camera which rolls quietly in my end never pausing. It moves from Moroccan union members, to Senegalese women farmers to street children looking up to the strange assembly of characters from all the world. There are also dozens of children in candid T-shirts marching to stop abuse, to claim the right to grow in a safe environment, to be educated, to be nurtured until the moment arrives to find a job. There are Italian trade unions, French Attac, Belgian CADTM, Brazilian CUT and la Via Campesina, a green blotch in the streaming flow of women, men and children along the streets of Dakar. Direction: the monumental library in the heart of the campus of the Cheikh Anta Diop University.

Music and dances accompany us under the blaring sun. Sensitive skins start to gain lobsterish nuances. I meet Indian activists along the way and I eat and orange with a Belgian academic, I move along the snaking human river with Finnish journalists, Finnish Academics, German trade experts and Indian film-makers. Along the way I can, from the top of the high curb that separates the two lanes of the wide avenue, spot a group of Egyptian women I met before by the national TV, where the demonstration started. Further down and approaching, the HIC (Habitat International Coalition) contingent and old friends. They tell me about days of general assembly and future events in the neighborhoods of Dakar where habitats are challenged, livelihoods denied, struggle mount and struggles can usher better futures. With the HIC contingent are friend from Witness, video and human rights activists committed to urban and housing rights. Further down the International Association of Inhabitants, followed soon by the world March of Women, and by the women organisation for peace in Casamance.

When we enter the campus from the dorms that introduce faculty buildings, auditoriums and sport facilities, dozens of cheering balconies greet us and music from all sides. At the liibrary roundabout we turn right to face the sea, the sun and the stage at the end of the avenue. Someone is on stage, I can see it a hundred or so meters ago, an old Indian friends laughs to the soundless show. We convene that it were important there would be speakers along the way to allow everyone to participate. On stage, we finally find out, is taking place a rather long performance by Bolivian president Evo Morales to whom hardly anyone along the avenue could or would pay any attention, caught as everyone is in dances to the sound of batucada groups and children songs, to raggamuffin soundsystems and soul twisting djembes, the music starts from the stage as well. Samba from Salvador da Bahia, courtesy of Petrobras, Brazil. This is the beginning.

Today the forum’s activities will revolve around the African and Diaspora day. 196 activities will fill halls, auditoriums and tents distributed in the large campus not always that easy to find. But this is the forum, may the treasure hunt starts: it might bring us to the right place where the evet we wished to attend is held or not, and if it doesn’t a wealth of new encounters might blossom.

On the railings by the pavement, a row of people have opened their laptops and are diligently typing away, oblivious to the rising levels of noise around them. One young boy reads a book, refusing to look up at the shifting throng of people from almost every corner of the world surrounding him in its glittering orbit.  Women pass by in magnificent rustles of fabric-saris, sarongs, dresses, and gravity defying turbans of every variety.  There is copious application of sunblock, and enthusiastic kissing-on-both-cheeks greetings, and then suddenly the march is on the move, slow and pulsing, dancing and waving, magnificent and seemingly never ending.

Smart businessmen appear at every few steps, hawking coconut pieces, T-shirts and prayer mats. A few not so smart ones try to palm off bootlegged perfumes to immaculately dressed ladies. Now the flags are manifold and rainbow coloured, patch-worked, held high, tied to backs or stretched between friends like handclasps. The music is everywhere, varying in rhythm at every few steps with each group. Drums and whistles, handclaps and wooden cymbals, voices raised in hoarse slogans, all of these are the soundtrack to the Forum declaring itself open.

Now the march has reached a crossroad, and enters the living city, down a road lined with kids watching and jumping along, women with babies on their hips who take a minute from fetching water to watch the world pass by, young people on rooftops swaying to the beat of the bands, others just watching in amazement at this long, incredible parade that has taken over their city. A man wearing the robes of a monk wanders up and down the parade a few times, drawing curious glances even in a crowd inured to surprises.

The mystery is finally revealed when a group walks into view, carrying a banner that says ‘Franciscan Family for Justice and Peace’, being filmed by a young boy with dreadlocks and wearing a Rastafarian hat. There are men in headdresses of feathers, and face paint, and women wearing dazzling scarves, and clowns juggling and pretending to let their props fall, and men on stilts striding past the crowd really fast.

Now the sun has beaten down on us for over an hour, and the road seems to be long, and our feet hurt and we sit for a while, and watch the march overtake us, let it wash over us , wave after wave of banners and demands, agendas and hope, a tsunami of colour and beating, tapping feet. Fatigued, some of the crowd seems to have lost its initial pep, and there is a drag in their stride, a tendency to seek out the shaded path to walk on. The only thing that cheers them up is the presence of policemen on the side of the road. A group of girls quickly pose next to them and get their pictures taken, giggling, while the cops watch, poker faced but bewildered.

Finally the road turns into the university, and the thought that we are almost there is a tonic to our tired bodies, and the music picks up again, and there are serenades for the students hanging out from their balconies in the hostels, who cheer right back, and wont stop until we move on, reluctantly. And then we are there, in the wide spaces of the university, with plenty of shade for women to collapse under, groaning, taking off their high heeled shoes and massaging their feet vigorously. Sandwiches appear, and coffee, there are photographs under flags with friends-old and newly met. We talk to a few people, who say how happy they are to have been there, that all of Africa was at this march. Young Senegalese activists talk of how this could help create awareness about each other’s issues. Children make a circle, and sing, and a van circles the grounds playing reggae music, with boys bopping their heads in time to the beat. We move towards the stage, where there is music from Brazil, and Evo Morales has just spoken to a crowd that remained largely oblivious to his presence.

On the edge of the venue, there are people holding hands and dancing in the park, making circles with their bare feet on the grass. We leave the venue, and walk out across the road, to the ocean side, where young boys are working out in a beach-gym. I stand looking at the ocean, lit up by the setting sun. A man appears next to me, a passer-by, maybe on his way to run some errands, and stops, and asks, “Are you here for the Forum?” in French. I nod yes, and he smiles. “Welcome to Senegal”, he says, and walks off, lost almost immediately
in the dispersing crowd.