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WSF2008 - Global Day of Action


WSFThe mobilization week and the global day of mobilisation and action – January 26 2008 planned for the next World Social Forum in January 2008 started to take shape during the International Council meeting that took place in Belem (state of Pará, Brazil) during the last week of October. More than 100 representatives from four continents developed strategies and discussed local and global articulations for the next WSF.

Instead of the centralized events of past editions, WSF 2008 will have thousands of activities organized by social movements, unions, groups, networks and other organisations in their own regions. This will cover a one-week period, culminating in a Global Day of Action on January 26th. The global mobilization will be directly linked to the local agendas of social actors, making the week full of debates, cultural and artistic activities, demonstrations, protests, direct actions, meetings and many other ways of showing that another world is possible.


The Belem meeting established some strategies for integrating local actions into a powerful global journey, giving visibility to the network of resistance, and putting forward alternative proposals to those of the Davos Economic Forum – the capitalist summit that always takes place in this Swiss resort on the same date as the WSF.

Communication will play a central role in making the Global Day of Action happen. The website wsf2008.net, which already includes the international call for action, will soon be the main tool for publicizing and articulating actions. The website will allow any group, movement or organisation to include whatever actions they plan wherever they are in the world.

The strategy is not only to provide information on activities, but essentially to empower the process of global intervention for another possible world. This tool will enable to create global links between local actions and proposals generated by groups in different regions that share the same interests. Local groups will also be able to establish points of convergence between their different fields of activity.

During the week of January 26th, wsf2008.net will also provide multimedia coverage of actions around the world. Live video broadcasts and open-air screenings are being planned to show what's happening in different parts of the globe during the Global Day of Action.

A call to artists, musicians, film-makers, media activists and other audio-visual producers was issued in Belem. They are invited to produce 1-minute videos related to the WSF Charter of Principles.

During the Belem meeting, the first initiatives planned for the Global Day of Action were presented by the organisations that were present. The meeting was also important as it gave visibility to the process of mobilization for the 2009 World Social Forum, due to take place in Belem, the capital of Para.

The city was chosen to host the 2009 edition of the global forum in order to highlight the importance of the Amazon region for the entire world, and because its local cultural, political and economic reality is strongly linked to many WSF issues, such as bio-diversity, climate change, ethnic and cultural diversity, colonialism, militarism and the various connections between labour and production (from subsistence mineral extraction to hi-tech industry).