World Social Forum

*“Be the change you want to see in the world.”* (Mahatma Gandhi, activist and philosopher from India, 1869-1948, internationally respected for his doctrine of non-violence) Our world is today at a time of enormous change. On the one hand, there is tremendous scientific and technological change taking place, which in turn is contributing powerfully to widespread social and cultural change of many kinds; there are enormous changes in the world economy leading both to a massively growing concentration of wealth and also to a deepening and widening of precarity across the world; and we are in an accelerating and deepening ecological crisis as a consequence of massive overconsumption and the rape of Mother Earth. On the other hand, there is intensifying social and political resistance, now across the world and across many sections of societies, both to the negative impacts of all these changes and also to continuing structural injustice in all societies and to continuing colonialism – and also assertion, towards building a more just world. In many ways, the past two decades – the last of the 1900s and the first of the 2000s – have been an extraordinary period in all these terms. The mov