Overall Strategy and Suggested Areas of Activities

The overall strategy of Third World Forum interventions and formulating its research programmes is defined every 3-4 years through the General Assembly of those who have been the coordinators of its major activities.

The current overall programme of Third World Forum has been formulated throughout the international major workshops organised in Dakar and Cairo (April 2001) and the major meetings of the Executive of the World Forum for Alternatives held in 2002 and early 2003.

• The new agrarian question and alternative prospects for peasant societies of the South;

• The new question of labour and prospects of restructuring labour unity;

• International Business Law or Peoples’ Rights;

• Managing resources of the planet, the case of oil, the case of water;

• In favour of a real dialogue between Europe, Africa and the Middle East;

• Towards new concepts of regionalisation in the South;

• Africa in the global system, the economic and the political dimensions;

• The debt issue : towards an international law regulating debts;

• Social, gender and democratic movements in the South;

• International chaos and militarisation of the globalisation processes;

• Reviving the solidarity of the ‘77’ vis a vis global issues.

This integrated programme involves close co-operation between think tanks and social movements. This form of co-operation, which constitutes the central focus of the ambitions of Third World Forum and those of the World Social Forum and the possible Regional Social Forums as well, probably define the specific character of the networks or networks of networks formed by these organisations.

This necessary integration between the critical analysis of systems (globalised neo-liberal dominant system in the dominant position and visions of society imag­ined as a counterpoint) and that of the explicit or implicit strategic objectives of the social movements operating in the real world finds its ultimate and decisive logic in the common concern of TWF, WFA and WSF to assist in formulating con­crete, efficient and credible alternatives to the so-called global neo-liberal project.

This search for ‘convergence in diversity’ must proceed from permanent dia­logue between ‘analysts’ of the reality and representatives of those of the social and political movements working to transform such reality in favour of the popular and national interests they uphold.

At the end of the exercise, it should be possible to define our own agenda, that of social and popular movements involved in current or future struggles, thereby allowing for our positioning beyond the sole ‘response’ to the agenda of the dom­inant system criticised (the agenda being that of G7 and the Institutions placed at its service—The World Bank, WTO and the World Economic Forum, dubbed Davos, in particular).

In this spirit, the Co-ordinators of the TWF and WFA networks recalled that our programmes must be rethought concretely by bearing the following require­ments in mind:

1. Refine the functional analysis of the really existing contemporary capitalism”, taking account of all the dimensions of the new realities through which it is expressed (scientific and technological revolution, transformation of produc­tion systems and social life, a more comprehensive geo-political globalised interdependence of the unilateral hegemonism of an exclusive super power, etc.).

2. Refine the interpretation of the meaning ascribed to the on-going struggles and the movements inducing them by identifying explicit and implicit strate­gies adopted by all civil society actors, in terms of the dominated class and the dominating groups; and in particular, the “democratisation” strategies pro­posed by either parties.

3. Identify, through the interpretation of the meaning of the movements, the more distant perspectives in which they are placed, the fundamental values and principles of the visions of society that they inspire. This identification will be devoted to raising each and everyone’s awareness of the diversity vital to the construction of the future. Such identification will also make it possible to further intensify the permanent criticism of the socio-economic theory, its basic concepts (economic efficiency, classes, peoples, nations and State), to identify those related to linkages between the authorities that are given promi­nence and those whose existence is veiled.

4. Have the ambition to inspire effective actions in the short, middle and long terms at all levels, from national to global levels.