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The paper assesses the Spanish housing activists Plataforma de Afectados por La Hipoteca (PAH, Platform for the Mortgage-Affected) as an example of left-wing convergence. From the perspective of the horizontal democratic practices and civil disobedience tactics they adopt, the paper acknowledges the anarchist, Marxist and reformist influences in PAH and reveals how the creative tension between activists of different persuasions has aided the movement's relative success. In harnessing and transforming the revolutionary subjectivity of the movement of the squares in 2011, PAH has in turn led to a broader urban radical politics. This new revolutionary subjectivity captures PAH's legacy and positioning within broader anti-austerity politics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper argues that the 'open space' idea remains the key source of strength for the World Social Forum as a tool for transformative, liberatory politics. We suggest that this space can be seen as inhabited by two political identities formed on the basis of what we call the conventional left narrative on the one hand and the civilizational narrative on the other. We propose that WSF can continue to fulfil its mission well by serving as a forum where political and social activists and intellectuals can meet and learn from each other to overcome their current weaknesses. Key to such overcoming, we suggest, is that technology and complexity are politicized – a task which may be difficult but the avoidance of which may be irresponsible. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The World Social Forum (WSF) is the world’s largest activist network to date. Its global, regional, national, and thematic events have gathered since 2001 millions of participants and thousands of civil society and social movement organisations. Its cosmopolitan vision is built on resistance to the planetary domination by neo-liberal globalisation. This paper unpacks WSF’s cosmopolitan project and reflects on its vision of emancipated individuals, convivial communities, and a just planetary society in harmony with the environment. In its open organisational space, WSF’s cosmopolitan project develops while in the process of political action rather than prior to that. At the same time, power dynamics, ideological cleavages, and pragmatic concerns about organisation and strategy challenge WSF’s ability to pursue its goals. However, it is these internal tensions that make WSF’s cosmopolitan project both more difficult to achieve and more realistic than claims of universal unity among all its participants. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Using Foucault's theory of governmentality, we trace the development of activist consultancy firms (ACFs), providing an in-depth description of two ACFs: Boutique Activist Consultancy and the Solutions Institute. We explore how these ACFs enact neoliberal governmentality. The ACFs' ambivalent engagement with professionalization is the most notable finding of our research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines the impact of the latest wave of the social acceleration of time on the capacity for long-term strategic planning within contemporary global justice movements. Drawing upon the interdisciplinary body of literature on time and temporality, the article begins by delineating the changes to the future time perspective wrought by the shift from the modern ‘age of progress’ ruled by ‘clock time', to a global ‘network society’ characterized by speed, risk, and uncertainty. In the second, substantive part, the article draws upon several dozen semi-structured interviews with social activists in order to shed light upon the challenges to contemporary social justice movements posed by the pervasive sense of precarity and futurelessness associated with life in high-speed, global risk society. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]