Cosmopolitan or Colonial? The World Social Forum as ‘contact zone’

Although the impressive diversity of the World Social Forum (WSF) is regularly noted, there has been little analytical work done on the degree to which the praxis of the WSF is enabling communicability across previously unbridged difference and how relations of power, particularly the coloniality of power, shape these interactions. Based on extensive participant observation at the WSF, this article analyses the ‘open space’ of the WSF as a ‘contact zone’ that, in different facets of this complex praxis, is both cosmopolitan and colonial. The author employs the differing conceptions of the contact zone, drawing on the work of Boaventura de Sousa Santos and Mary Louise Pratt, in dialogue with notions of coloniality and colonial difference arising from Latin American studies to illumine the analysis.