Marble Falls The World Social Forum originated in Porto Allegre, Brazil in 2001, twenty-five years ago. Claiming that “another world is possible”, the WSF attracted great interest in its early years with thousands of participants and addresses from Brazil’s Lula de Silva, Naom Chomsky, and Venezuela’s Hugo Chavez back in the day. Initially, the forums were scheduled as a people’s counterpoint to the meeting held every winter in Davos, Switzerland by business, governmental, corporate, and other elites.
ACORN sent people to several of the meetings in Brazil, India, and Kenya. Vinod Shetty, ACORN’s director in Mumbai, was on the planning committee for the 2024 edition in Katmandu, Nepal, and the annual ACORN directors’ meeting attended to coincide with the events in February of that year. We heard regularly from Vinod about the planning for the 2026 meeting in Benin, Africa, scheduled to begin now.
All reports indicate that the Benin government, on its own or under pressure from other countries including allegedly the US, Israel, and Morrocco, took aggressive action to prevent the meetings from even happening in a first for the WSF. The traditional opening march to being the meetings was forcibly cancelled by the government. According to International Viewpoint,
…the university where most of the debates are scheduled to take place is reportedly closed, and people are said to have been expelled this morning. These reports are difficult to verify, but the government has explicitly told the organizing committee that no meetings may be held at the university and that publicly stating that one is attending the WSF is grounds for expulsion.
Vinod had heard that ten buses carrying delegates to the meetings in Cotonou, Benin were turned back at the border and refused entry into the country. Other activists on the scene report five busses stopped at the border and another set of busses having crossed in Benin were later turned back by the military.
A statement from some participants calling themselves the August 5th collective offered the following:
Thousands of delegates from 108 countries have arrived in Cotonou to attend the 17th World Social Forum. This global gathering reflects a desire to engage with social movements in all their diversity – young people, women, workers and farmers… from Benin, Africa and all other continents – to build together alternatives for another possible world. We wish to express our determination to hold this Forum in Cotonou despite the difficulties we are facing in organising it; however, given the unforeseen circumstances relating to the organisational arrangements and the return of the caravan participants to Lomé, we find ourselves obliged to cancel the WSF opening march on 4 August and to wait until tomorrow before taking any further decisions. We are grateful to all those who are helping to fight to ensure this Forum takes place….the WSF remains a forum for dialogue, advocacy and citizen mobilisation, for international solidarity, and for convergence linking sovereign peoples across continental borders, and it is in this spirit that it should take place in Benin. We remain committed to ensuring that all the necessary conditions are in place to welcome, in a spirit of solidarity, all those from around the world who are joining this World Social Forum.
These meetings are not everyone’s cup of tea as sort of global activists’ lollapalooza, but neither is the ability to assemble, discuss, share information, a threat to any host government, as 16 previous meetings have proven. Let’s hope those that came to Benin can still figure out a way to move forward, even if Benin tries to maintain that another world is impossible.