A FORUM OF CONTRADICTIONS JÜRGEN STETTEN/ JOCHEN STEINHILBER The World Social Forum in Mumbai The curtain has come down on this huge glob­alization-wary spectacle. Up to 130,000 people had come from 150 countries to attend the fourth World Social Forum in Mumbai, to take part in its over 1000 podium discussions and seminars, to exchange views and addresses, or simply to join in its never-ending street protests. After three years in Brazil's more tranquil Porto Alegre, the WSF International Committee decided to move the anti-globalization colony from its cozy nest in Southern Brazil to the contra dictory and raw reality of the 18-million metropolis on India's west coast. The choice of venue was a good one. There is hardly another city where modernity and tradi­tion, bitter poverty and glaring wealth, economic ups and social downs, glamour and tristesse can be experienced in such proximity.„Bollywood“, South Asia's dream factory, with its output of over a thousand movies a year, and Asian largest slum, home to some 1.5 million people – these are the palpable signs of these enormous contradictions. While India itself, just recently having joined the globalization bandwagon, has recorded high rates of economic growth in re cent years, the subcontinent is and remains one of the world's main poverty regions. And finally, the – in formal terms –„world's largest democracy“ is marked by stringent social hierarchies and reli­gious frictions which continue to be fo­mented right by ex­treme rightist parties like Shiv Sena, the party of Mumbai's present mayor. There can be no doubt that these problems and the social actors of the subcontinent have shaped this fourth World Social Forum. But this year the Forum's change of venue, but also the four years of development it has now gone through, have contributed to placing its strengths and ambivalences in sharper focus. In the fourth year of its biography the World Social Forum has thus become a reliable seismograph of the changes and contradictions of the anti-globalization movements. The actors: seeing and being seen In keeping with the interest of the Forum's initia­tors in creating the broadest possible platform for all those who view the process of globalization with a critical eye, the Mumbai event attracted a highly diverse, and visible, troop of political and social actors. The participants from the host country, who, this time as well, dominated the WSF both optically and acoustically, were joined by a growing number of international actors. Apart from the multifarious new social move­ments from North and South, this group now includes numerous established social forces, such as parliamentarians and representatives of church organizations and labor unions. Indeed, even representatives of national governments were – albeit sporadically – invited to participate in the dialogue. Representatives of the business world, on the other hand, were, as in the past, not wel­come as guests; in Mumbai they were neither seen nor missed.