Globalization from Below and New Political Identities: The Case of the World Social Forum

Abstract. The World Social Forum is a global public arena of very heterogeneous social movements that despite their very different goals, agendas and languages, come together every year in a way that can be explained with Laclau and Mouffe’s notion of articulatory practice. The paper argues that with conflict and contestation, these movements construct an articulatory practice that is organized around the legitimacy crisis of neoliberal globalization. Because if, during the last decades of the twentieth century, neoliberalism, as a set of globalized polices, institutions and conceptualizations of the state, the market and democracy, appeared as an epochal common sense, today, this is no longer the case. Word Social Forum contributes to create a global political identity that speaks loud about the legitimacy crisis of neoliberal globalization. While discussing the struggle against the Free Trade Area of the Americas, the paper argues that the construction of regional and global public spheres is at stake in this emerging political identity