Maia Ramnath - Decolonizing Anarchism.pdf - Libcom

Echoes and Intersections I 239
"anarchists, Trotskyists, postmodernists:' and proponents
of the "Seattle tradition."42 It also drew valid critiques of
the fo rum's complicity with corporate funding agencies in
the global North, relative inaccessibility to nonelites, and
general ineffectiveness on account of its refusal to shut
down its treasured multivalence by committing itself to
programmatic action. This indicated a tension between
conflicting ideas of the forum's function: "Open Space or
Organisation? Event or Process ?" Movement or festival ?43
The concept of open space has been the subject of extensive
critical commentary anchored by the Delhi-based
India Institute for Critical Action: Centre in Movement,
which has played an active role in the Wo rld Social
Forum process, and even more so in the evolving critical
assessment of it. 44
Director Jai Sen articulates open space as a complex
term with multiple meanings and implications. For Sen, this
includes a maintenance of possibilities and resisting closure ;
emergence, indeterminacy, and ambiguity; a condition of
"networking, the apparent horizontality of social relations,"
which not only social movement activists but also corporate,
military, and civil society entities have embraced as a "natural
and normal way ... to behave and organise things"; "the
idea and practice of ... a generalised, widespread, non-centralised
and autonomous political-cultural phenomenon";
networking "in the material means ofinformation exchange
and communication and also of international travel"; an
unstructured zone of "freedom, liberty, safety, a place where
we can ... exchange and learn more freely, the possibility
of unexpectedness and therefore of unboundedness,